Speculations Intel's Next Generation

An anonymous reader writes "The Inquirer speculates about the next generation Intel chip. It's low power, 64 bit, multi core (up to 16?) and the real reason for the Apple switch."

Comments

A lot like Sun's Niagara

[ajiva]

To me that sounds a lot like Sun's Niagara box. Huge CMT box (8 cores, 4 threads each, 32 way box). With power consumption around 65watts, but faster than 4way Xeon processors and probably more like an 8way depending on application. Intel probably is moving to something similar, maybe not quite that many cores and threads.

Same fool, same laughs

[swissmonkey]

This article was written by Nicholas Blachford, the same fool who tried to analyze the Cell processor of the PS3 and described it as a supercomputer on a desk while not understanding a single thing about it.

Seriously, it's worth a read for the laugh, but there's nothing worth believing in it, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

Re:Speculations

[cbreaker]

AGP, by it's design, can only have one per machine.

It was an add-on specifically designed for the pattern of usage that video cards perform - lots of data out, and short requests in.

It was a patch to get us by until the "next PCI" came along - but AGP's great performance was also the reason it's taken so long to get PCI Express going; not a lot of demand for something we don't really need. Old PCI slots still provide ample bandwidth for most other types of expansion cards and on the server side you had 64-bit PCI/PCI-X.

Of course, we still needed PCIe, but it hasn't been a big push. Now, with the dual-video board thing happening, it's definitely helped push the bus into the mainstream.

As far as the changes in CPU slots, well, I agree to a point. While I believe that both Intel and AMD could have done more to keep slot changes to a minimum, a lot of times the chip-set changes along with the CPU requiring a new board anyways. So, why not upgrade the CPU slot to accommodate the new data patterns of the new architecture?

I do feel like I own hardware. Software, on the other hand..

Re:Apple didn't switch over for a chip

[bnenning]

Tell us in what way Mac OS {10-n } was a) buggy b) unstable and c) single-threaded?

(a) is a matter of opinion. (b) isn't; an OS where a single application failure can easily bring down the whole system is unstable by definition. (c) is technically false, but effectively true. The Thread Manager only supported cooperative threads, which doesn't really count. You could create preemptive threads with the multiprocessing API, but they were very limited as to what they could do (no memory allocation IIRC).

I'm a Mac fan too, but there's no denying that the internals of Mac OS pre-X sucked. I still preferred it to Windows because of the UI, but I'm very pleased that with OS X I no longer have to make that tradeoff.

Re:But will it arrive in time

[LarsG]

why migrate their developers over to writing x86 code as an interum step, instead of waiting until after the VLIW architecture is available, and migrate directly to that?

VLIW is basically to move a lot of the 'smarts' like instruction reordering and branch prediction from the CPU to the compiler. Thus freeing up a lot of transistors that can be used for cache or additional ALUs.

The compiler has to be very good, though. And you also run into problems like having to recompile when the next generation of the CPU adds more ALUs or has pipeline changes that requires different instruction ordering. So VLIW is not at all a nice type of architecture if you want binary compatibility between several generations of the CPU. Which is why the article mentioned Transmeta - which had a software layer that translated between x86 and the native VLIW languages used on the different Transmeta CPUs.

If the article is correct, the next generation Intel core will be VLIW internally, but will execute IA-32/EMT-64 through a software layer like Transmeta.