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.'"

Comments

What does this mean?

[AKAImBatman]

One thing the article didn't make clear is what exactly Intel means by "A New Chip Architecture". i.e. Do they mean a new architecture as in the Itanic (but low power!), or a new chip architecture as in, "We're ditching the 20 stage pipeline in exchange for a more reasonable 6 stage pipeline, swapping out most of the control circuts for those from our StrongARM line, and rewriting the microcode to execute all of the Pentium instructions on a simple, low power RISC core."

While they could go either way, I hope they've learned from the Itanium and EM64T debacles that they should stick with a compatible microcode. Leave the super-instruction sets to the MIPS and SPARCs of the world.

AMD's dual core offering better than Intel's

[Anonymous Coward]

According to various preliminary benchmarks from The Tech Report, Tom's Hardware and AnandTech, AMD's desktop dual-core chips are significantly better than Intel's dual-core desktop offerings in terms of performance and power consumption. This is partly due to the fact that the AMD solution has a better inter-core communication architecture and lower memory latency.

Meanwhile, Intel's desktop dual core chips seem to offer much more aggressive pricing at this time. AMD's lowest price dual core chip, the X2 4200 is almost twice as expensive as Intel's lowest cost dual core processor. However, an interview with three AMD execs on PCPerspective.com claims that "AMD would eventually have lower priced Athlon X2 processors via the waterfall effect in the future".

Re:Not a user-perceptable change.

[ArsonSmith]

When Apple said they would switch to intel what they didn't say was that Intel was switching to PPC.