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Intel Readying Dual-Core Desktop Chip
sunisha.shah4eva writes "CoolTechZone is reporting that Intel is planning on introducing a dual-core Dothan chip for desktop computers. According to the article, Intel has plans to turn the performance table around with AMD. From the article: 'Finally, it looks like Intel has learned from its mistake and secretly prepping a surprise for the rest of the industry. According to the information we received, Intel is currently working on a desktop, dual-core Dothan microprocessor with SSE3 instruction set that Intel plans to launch sometime in the future. Whether the launch will take place this year or in 2006 is currently unknown.'"
...just in time for the Apple switch to Intel products?
I'm still kind of miffed about that but if they run new dual-core chips it might not be so bad.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I'll say it again, I LOVE competition. Ever since AMD became a threat to Intel, we've seen outrageous processor wars and benchmarking tribunals. I can buy a P4 3 gig processor for about $150 now.
Most likely, Intel will take that performance throne with their "secret". They have a way of doing that (like HT); but, we'll see something better come from AMD. And so the cycle continues...and we all benefit!
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
but will it run OS X?
---- Take the Space Quiz!
Many dothans died to bring you this information...
I am posting this message in order to pre-empt and prevent any lame beowulf cluster cliches. Thank you, that is all.
...what ever happened to Google? ;)
libertarianswag.com
"that Intel plans to launch sometime in the future"
This just in: AMD has plans to launch their dual core desktop chip sometime in the past, thus beating Intel to the punch yet again.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
I'm currently running a Dothan on my desktop (ASUS CT-479 + P4P800-VM), it makes it very clear that Netburst has been dead for some time now. Intel has been milking a dead but very expensive cow, and will continue to do so for as long as they can.
best 2 out of 3?
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Sounds like a good idea to me since I have already ruled out current Intel dual core designs because of their outrageous power consumption. AMD Athlon 64's are much better in this department except they are awfully expensive right now. A more economical dual core Dothan design would definitely be something I would be interested in.
And if you all thought you had seen the end of the cow fwds, here is a
revelation- another one. The last line rings so true...
INFOSYSism
You have a thousand poor cows. You put them on a nice campus, and send them one at a time to the US for milking.
WIPROism
GE has a cow. You take 49% of the milk.
DELLism
Intel has a Goat. Samsung has a Camel. Buy milk from both and sell it as Cow's milk.
IBMism
You have old stubborn cows. You sell them as pet dogs to unsuspecting small businessmen.
MICROSOFTism
You have a cow. Force the world to buy milk from you. Spend a million dollars to feed poorer cows.
SUNism
You have a bull. It doesn't give milk. You hate Microsoft.
ORACLEism
You have a cow. You don't know which side to milk, so you sell tools to help milk cows.
SAPism
You don't have a cow. You sell milking solutions for cows implimented by milking consultants.
APPLEism
You have a cow. You sell iMilk.
SONYism
You have a cow. You spend 50 million dollars to develop the world's thinnest milk.
HPism
You don't know if what you have is a cow. You sell complete milking solutions through Authorized Resellers only.
GEism
You have a donkey. People think you have a 100-year old cow. If someone finds out, that's his imagination at work.
RELIANCEism
You don't yet have a cow. You sell empty cans to people for Rs. 501, because Dhirubhai wanted everyone to have milk.
CITIBANKism
Welcome to citibank. If you have a cow, press one.
If you have a bull, press two... stay on the line if you would like our customer care officer to milk it for you...
TATAism
You have a very old cow. You re-brand it as TATA Indicow.
Where's my free iPod!? Until then, I'll settle for a kiss...
- Apple switched to Intel for the explicit purpose of benefitting from advances like this
- Apple will most likely be using a slightly different architechture than wintel(mobo, bios, firmware, etc), so not every hot new Intel chip will make it into an Apple system.
- Apple will still be offering a limited selection of systems, so they will have to pick and choose what makes it into thier product line
The first systems are more than a year away (not counting the dev system) so everybody take a deep breath.That's what I want.
:(, various Windows flavors, all running on the same box at the same time. Sweet.
... oh, and a super-sized power supply and liquid-metal cooling system to make it all work.
Multiprocessor too. Gotta have more than one CPU.
MacOS, various Linuxes, various non-Apple BSDs, and because I have to
Hmm, what else do I need, a few dozen GB HD per OS, a GB or two of RAM per OS, a core per OS, 10GHz networking, high-end sound and video,
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I bet Intel's people wish that all software could be recompiled on installation, to target the specific tweaks they put into a certain chip model. Instead of waiting for the OS or app vendor to recompile for an optimized binary distribution, which rarely happens. Of course, that depends on open source...
--
make install -not war
Communication efficiency and information sharing between the two cores.
On AMD Dual Cores, there is a specific bus for communication between cores and with the memory module, while in Intel types they have to use the main bus.
So intel choice for Netburst dual core lowers the total efficiency (since the cores have to share with the rest of the system, situation akin to regular dual processors) while AMD dual cores have a special bus which is even faster than the regular main bus, lowering latency and increasing communication capacities between the cores, on top of making them compatible with regular mobos.
But one has to remember that the choice Intel made for Netburst's dual core was more than likely done in a hurry, to release DC faster than AMD.
They'll probably design a much more specific processor for their Dothan dual cores.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Because intel's cores have to communicate with each other through the FSB, which is slower and also eats into your other bandwidth. AMD's dual cores have a special connector IN the chip that accomplishes this MUCH faster than the FSB. All intel did was take two chip and package them together, they still communicate in the same way that any normal dual chip system does. AMD's don't.
Smithfield is two cores on one die.
The difference is both cores access the system bus directly, there's no on chip core to core communications as there is with AMD's solution. That shouldn't surprise anyone though, SMP by deffinition is done in the same mannor, each chip sharing the system bus. Intel doesn't have the same abstraction between the core and the system AMD has.
Intel has shown plans for two seperate dies on a package (I forget the name, a version of Pressler maybe it was), but that should only help Intel, if one Smithfield core is bad, they throw both away (or more maybe sell them as single core prescotts, but we'll see), independant cores makes it easier to discard only the bad dies.
Crike... it isn't even Monday.
I'll try this again.
More
If Apple gained rights to some technology when Motorola and IBM didn't deliver, perhaps they could bring Altivec to Intel?
The parent poster was right. 'MAC' is an acronym for, among other things, "Media Access Control" or "Message Authentication Code". 'Mac' is an abbreviation for Macintosh, a brand of computers made by Apple Computer Inc.
Well, as an Apple user let me say this Intel dual core thing, it looks, ah, mighty good. Go.... Intel? Yes. Go Intel!
Man this is going to be a rough transition.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
See what I just did? I got around your preemption. Karma, come to me...
You can buy them now: http://www.anandtech.com/news/shownews.aspx?i=2437 3
HJ
stuff that might happen.
"...secretly prepping a surprise for the rest of the industry"
uh, hate to burst your bubble, but I got this nagging suspicion that somebody from AMD reads slashdot.
"What does slashdotting mean?"
"You've never heard of slashdot?"
"I know it makes websites not work."
it does not wisky tulip which bathub you tomato because flour is deaf.
Tom's Hardware has some interesting benchmarks with a Dothan in a desktop system with a halfway decent memory system.
- 21.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050525/pentium4
I'm guessing you didn't even read my post?
I'm gonna say this for one, last, time. The Pentium-M is the Next Logical Evolution in the P6 archetectural line. This iteration brought micro-op fusion (more RISCy behavior), more cache room, smaller chips (reduced size, which in turn reduced the power demands), and a faster bus speed. For all purposes. With better versions and designs of SpeedStep, Intel *designed* it to bring the mobile revoltion to the forefront.
The only problem is, their savior for the Server machine (Itanium), failed to catch on. So they regeared their systems, and we have the hideous P4 we all hate. A few years later, the Pentium M is now perfectly able to take over the role of desktop processor, and all is happy.
Go back and read my post again if you're still confused.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
And if you actually looked at the performance for those chips you'd see that the pricing for the dual cores actually favors AMD on a performance basis. The difference is that Intel released their "dual core" chips for the low end, while AMD only released them for their high end chips.
Also you're not comparing the same type of chip. Opteron is AMD's SERVER chipset, which are always more expensive than desktop chipsets.
A curious fact about Apple's choice of Intel over AMD, as I learned over on the Ars Technica forums -- AMD's CEO, Hector de Ruiz, was formerly the director of semiconductor products at Motorola.
I think this is one big reason why Steve Jobs and Apple could not / did not consider AMD -- they notoriously burned their bridges with Motorola/FreeScale over the G4's lackluster performance and slow development. Thus, Jobs and de Ruiz probably don't have a particularly good relationship.
Actually, for anyone who cared about such things (chip geeks), the popular consensus WAS that PPC's WERE better than anything in the x86 camp. That is, during the G4 era. The instruction set was much saner (even Intel fans will complain about the bass-ackwards quirky x86 instruction set), it pushed more numbers with far less power, AltiVec showed a ton of promise (if you were willing to either wait for a good compiler or use the vector unit by hand).
With the introduction of the G5 and the failure on the promise to break through the 3GHz barrier without incurring much larger power requirements, the situation probably began to change, but us Apple Believers, admittedly, chose to ignore this slowly-dawning information. Just like those stubborn Windoze users who only surf the web and check email, and reinstall Windoze every year and spend 2 hours a week disinfecting and have pieces of apps lying around on their hard drive that failed to successfully "uninstall" (a concept foreign to OS X users), and STILL believe that their choice is cheaper and/or more effective than getting even a used Mac for the job. Their time must not be worth a damn thing. I know, because I tried to convince just such a non-technical person to buy a used Mac (since I put equal time on Macs and PC's and knew what was best for this person), but they insisted on a crappy PC laptop, and then had the nerve to call me over for free tech support... Objectivity is hard to come by all around.
Maybe we liked having a different processor because it was a different TAKE on things. It was outside the box. And certainly, every last one of us understood that it added COMPETITION to the market. Competition is good for everyone. Something else you Wintel fans seem to not care about or understand, as you freely throw your money at an industry with a leader who is a convicted monopolist. You should be kissing AMD's ass that they lit a fire under Intel's butt, because around the year 2000, it certainly did look like PPC was going to hand Intel's ass to it. (And of course, if Microsoft didn't consider open source a "threat", it would have zero incentive to change, either. Why improve when you can market instead and charge as much as the [exorbitant fee just under what would force people to buy elsewhere because it's the only game in town]?
I can't believe I even devoted this much thought to your jerkitude.
Yes, you can buy what are called dual core P4s for a third the price of an actual dual-core Opteron, but that's because you get what you are paying for.
Opterons have their own high-speed dedicated bus for core to core communication. Dual core P4s are really two separate P4s on a single chip and use the regular bus for communications (along with memory, i/o, etc.).
The dual core P4 you mentioned is operationally no better than dual P4s (single core).
The Pentium 3 does not equal the Pentium M. I don't know what it'll take to get that into your head, but I'm going to stop trying after this post.
The Pentium M is actually a whole, different chip, just as the Pentium Pro and the Pentium 2 are whole, different chips (Pentium 2 and Pentium 3, on the other hand, have so much similar that it's almost a bad example). The Pentium 2 introduced to P6 (Pentium Pro) MMX. The Pentium 3 introduced to the Pentium 2 SSE(1/2). The Pentium M introduced to the Pentium 3 Micro-op fusion, Netburst-style bussing, and a bunch of other blessings that it inheirited from the P4.
So your statement "Saying the P3 was green lighted before the P4 is a pretty stupid statement", is in itself a stupid statement. The Pentium 4 project (Williamette) actually started in the mid-90's as a replacement for P6, so I'm sure plenty of cross-pollenation happened as P6 grew older, just as it did with the Pentium M.
I didn't say the Pentium 3 was greenlighted before the Pentium 4. I said the Pentium M was probably in development and minimal production long before they decided to greenlight and produce the P4.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
HT is marketed as something that gives the P4 an advantage over competing chips, and as such it is indeed a joke. Sure, it saves the P4 from it's own performance woes (remember the Willamette? I'm stuck with one on my desk at work), but it's usefulness ends there.
I encode movies, run GIMPS and offer remote (FreeNX) access to friends nearly 24/7 on my Athlon 3200+ and I have no problems with responsiveness. I think perhapse that the impression that HT is useful comes from the fact the the P4 is so terrible at dealing with pipline stalls.
At work I operate a Windows 2003 terminal server on a P4-2.8 machine with 2GB of memory. At home I operate Debian on a K7-2.2 with 1GB of memory. Both provide remote desktop access, usually 3 or 4 concurrent connections. With HT enabled on the Intel machine, the performance is reasonable. With HT disabled, the Intel machine is strangely lagged, to the point that I get support calls about it from folks trying to work from home. The AMD machine, of course, isn't equipped with HT at all and it runs just fine.
If HT was simply a trick to squeeze 20% more work out of a processor, then the difference would not be so pronounced. Truth is the P4 is terrible with branchy code, and the problem is exacerbated when running many simultaneous threads of branchy code.
HT is an excellent way to minimize the damage done by pipeline stalls, though I think it's given much more attention than it deserves. The problem that it was inteded to solve can be avoided entirely (and more gracefuly) by building a shorter pipeline!
Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy
>To this day, a Dual 2.5GHz G5 still pounds a 3+GHz P4/AMD whatev into the ground
See here
Top 20 2-way SPEC systems
Top 20 SPECint_rate2000
2 2600 Opteron 40.5 36.1
6 3200 Pentium 4 Xeon 34.3 32.9
10 2200 PowerPC 970 21.5 20.2
Top 20 SPECfp_rate2000
2600 Opteron 45.8 42.3
3600 Pentium 4 Xeon 28.6 28.2
2200 PowerPC 970 20 19.2
Extrapolating linearly results for a 2.5GHz, x86 is still about 1.5x to 1.75x on ints, and 1.4x to 2x on floats. From this I must conclude that you are as the subject says, or that "pounds into the ground" has aquired the slang usage meaning "is pwnd".
For some reason, IBM PPC processors seem to have aquired Jobs' RDF, from the G5 to Cell.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.