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Intel Plans to Overhaul Chip Architecture
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Intel is planning to announce an entirely new chip architecture later this month at the company's developer forum, the Wall Street Journal reports. The company isn't discussing details yet, but it's expected that Paul Otellini will discuss a 'technology foundation designed from scratch to improve energy efficiency and make it easier to add more than two processors.'"
Who wants to bet that the announcement includes a integrated memory controller? I wouldn't be suprised if they just licenced Opteron technology from AMD; it would be alot cheaper than developing their own. Although, they could always just outright steal it.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
As we all know, the Pentium 4 is a pretty goofy, shlocky design. The Pentium M is good, but it's essentially a Pentium Pro. That's 10 years old.
Intle NEEDS to prove that they can still make a good x86 chip from "scratch".
One has to wonder if Apple had any 'insight' to these plans when they signed the deal.
Actually, it is pretty likely that Apple was given a full roadmap and a few engineers to explain the whole thing while in in discussions and under NDA. The real questions are did this have anything to do with Apple's decision, is this in response to the deal with Apple, or is this just coincidental.
The article seems to pretend that the Israeli design teams low power Pentium M doesn't exist. It says the last major design change was the Pentium 4 (which was prior to the Pentium M), and doesn't mention that current and (already announced) future Pentium M based designs match the description given.
Though they may not want to admit it, Intel knows they've lost the 64-bit format war for desktops at least.
So probably what the are working on is a next gen x86 architecture. Those don't come out too often, usually the design one and just modify it for a number of years. It sounds like they are going to start using modifiations on their Pentium M for desktops, which is cool since it is efficient both thermally and in terms of what it does per clock, but there's a limited life to it and they know it. The Pentium M is something of a throwback to the P3, which itself is really based on the Ppro design.
So my guess is Intel figures it's time to unviel a new design for a core, but on x86 architecture.