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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."
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This is the same thing Intel did to HP who walked away from PA/RISC, and to SGI who walked away from MIPS, and to Compaq/DEC who walked away from Alpha --- so they turned from the leaders in 64-bit computing to resellers of wintel.
Hey, if it worked last time, let's try it again; and maybe the rest of the 64-bit competitors'll give up.
We'll know more when IDF arrives. Until then its just stuff written to try and hit a bullseye in the dark. Which seems to be everywhere nowadays, Dvorak, The Inq, even my fateful Ars is getting bit by the bug that says every action by anyone in the tech industry must be expounded on in a multipage article worth of /. and the ad revenue it brings..
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
You just need to throw in enough buzzwords, like "cell-based turtles" and "multicore Transmeta overlords", and you'd definitely have a good shot at the front page.
I suspect Apple's switch wasn't because of any cool chip (it'd be ridiculous to think they are getting intel chips that no PC maker will have access to) but simply because it's one less defensive front - they don't have to worry about getting chips that are competitive anymore, which was getting a problem with PPC as well as the all important Notebook chips - IBM simply wasn't offering anymore competitive PPC solutions.
It's one less thing to defend.
Back when Apple first introduced PPC (1994?), they were hyping it throughout because that was one of the few real tangible differences they could tout - pre-OSX Mac was buggy and unstable single-threaded OS while Microsoft had at least NT technology.
Now OS X pretty much rocks and they still have their excellent hardware integration - they don't need a different chip to differentiate them - OSX is their added value.
At one point, Transmeta was promising to be able to change the CPU on-the-fly from an x86 to other things (eg. ARM, MIPS), which is no problem, since it was doing the x86=>native translation anyway, all it has to do is change to a different translation.
So, all Intel needs to do is make the CPU be able to be switched from x86 to PPC at runtime. That's why Apple claims they can run old apps so quickly.
Apple is not that spectacular in terms of choosing chips for performance, from their past history. M68k: good chip, but it was suffering from old age when they moved to PowerPC. (They could have moved to x86, arm, or other processor at that time.) Now, they announce they are moving to Intel, and suddenly Intel has some super-duper chip up their sleeve? I don't think so.
The article starts from that basis and works up to Intel has some super-killer CPU.
Despite the amount of hype surrounding dual-core, unless you massively change software (likely to happen eventually) to support SMP, things go slower on dual-cores than single core processors, if the dual-cores are clocked lower (Intel's current chips). What the article proposes is to duplicate the mistakes Intel has made with Itanium. (It was announced a decade ago. (If not, near enough to count.))
Itanium 1 stripped out all the branch prediction, and similar things, relying on the compilers to do it. The result was that it got soundly thrashed by other 64-bit archs.
So why does Itanium 2 not suck nearly as bad? HP's engineers mostly went back and put all that stuff back IN, because compilers, and code translators are still (with a very very few exceptions, I can think of 2 (one, FX!32, mentioned in the article)) very slow. Even FX!32's speed wasn't due to the speed of translation, it was due to the huge (at the time) performance of the underlying alphas. Sure, it may have been faster than the fastest x86 hardware implementation, but it was still quite slow compared to the native speed of the chip it was on.
So the article speculates that Intel is indeed going to repeat the mistakes of the past, mistakes that *only* came to market because a) Intel has money b)Intel has pride (oh and c)got others to wipe themselves out... except IBM.) I would think Intel would learn from it's mistakes. Right now they should notice that a)processors can't be fabbed right now to work at ~4GB reliably and they are really hot. b)Going the opposite route of improving IPC almost entirely (IA-64s are not low-powered, nor cheap). Instead they should work on the in-between, which they (again due to Intel having tons of money) have in the form of the Pentium M.
If Apple is interested in the server market, severing ties with IBM is not the smartest move.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I'd say slim to none, leaning heavily towards none. But I think that's a lot less important than your next question ...
Or is Apple going to sell a lesser version first, in which case why haven't they already switched over to selling it to early adopters already. Yes there really are people who buy systems and wait for the applications to arrive later.Apple hasn't switched over because consumers won't buy any box that doesn't run OS X apps, Macintel or not. Developers need the head start.
However, Apple and Mac developers don't have backward compatibility issues; whatever processor Intel serves up can't break code that doesn't exist. All Apple needs to do is make sure that the Xcode compilers are ready for the neXt86 processor such that what developers are compiling now will run on the new processor.
It's highly unlikely that the neXt86 will be that different, but the fact that the Mac is a clean slate means it's impossible to rule out. This is wild speculation, but Apple may be able to use this advantage to exploit the new processor's features in a way that Windows developer can't. Think of the marketing coup for Apple and Intel.
Intel may even use Apple to compel Windows developers to adopt new processor features much the way Apple spurred the USB device market.
On the other hand, the neXt86 may only sport fins and a racing stripe. :-j
"Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
The few Xeon and Pentium 4 processors that do use EM64T have not been around for very long. The vast majority of Intel's processors are still 32-bit. They don't have anything that Apple could offer in a reasonably-priced desktop. Compare with AMD, which is almost entirely focused on AMD64 now, from the cheaper Athlon64s to the gamer-oriented FX series to the dual-core X2s.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
The Apple move to Intel processors is supposed to be in two waves: the first will be the laptops and Mac Mini, which are currently 32-bit G4s, so there's no need to make something 32-bit that is currently 64. The second wave, perhaps a year later or so, will be the PowerMacs. Plenty of time for the 64-bit Yonah or whatever between those two waves.
Lame Megafuana died out....they couldn't compete Turtles are still here...the superior solution!
Blar.
Well, OS X comes up real short in most server benchmarks, so I hope it's not that. Anyway, half of what Apple sells is 'coolness', and server farms don't go for that, too much.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
The interconnect for intells xeon servers is really poor and at high loads all the processors compete for access to the shared bus and memory. This means it doesnt scale worth a darn. You have diminishing returns for each processor something along the lines of:
1 xeon = 100%
2 xeon = 140%
3 xeon = 160%
4 xeon = 170%
Wheres with the amd opteron with hyperTransport interconnect the processors dont have to fight for resources. And performance scales much better along the lines of:
1 opteron = 100%
2 opteron = 180%
3 opteron = 250%
4 opteron = 310%
We have the best government that money can buy.