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Intel Reveals Next-Gen CPUs
EconolineCrush writes "Intel has revealed its next generation CPU architecture at the Intel Developer Forum. The new architecture will be shared by 'Conroe' desktop, 'Merom' mobile, and 'Woodcrest' server processors, all of which were demoed by Intel CEO Paul Otellini. Rather than chasing clock speeds, Intel is focusing on lowering power consumption with its new architecture. Otellini claimed that Conroe will offer five times the performance per watt of the company's current desktop chips. He also ran the entire keynote presentation on a Merom laptop, and demoed Conroe on a system running Linux."
With Laptop sales "Surging" and technology growing exponentially, isn't it time to look at the batteries? You hear a lot about faster video cards/ CPUs and memory, but almost nothing about Next-Gen batteries. Battery technology hasn't really evolved at the same rate as other computer components, has it? I personally feel the bottleneck resides in the batteries and for the industry to progress (on a whole), they're going to have to take a look at all aspects.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
Rather than chasing clock speeds, Intel is focusing on lowering power consumption with its new architecture.
Exactly what we've all been waiting for. Is Intel Good(tm) now?
The Digital Couture Collection
So this is what Steve was talking about.
Awesome. Now I'll be able to run 4 times as many CPUs with my 1000w PSU.
Ok, Conroe appears to be a lake in Texas, Merom is a bluff near the Wabash river in Indiana...where/what was the inspiration for Woodcrest?
So instead of clock speed how about execution speed of standard benchmarks on a reference machine? Or would that show how much they suck per dollar next to AMD?
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2504X JsX3Jldmlld19JRD0xNTAy. php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD0xNTA0. php?dXJsX3Jldmlld19JRD0xNTAz1 23.html
http://theinquirer.net/?article=25623
http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review.php?d
http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review_print
http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review_print
http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050823_133
They've taken a little cooler and stopped chasing their speed dragon to make a more solid, well-organized, and efficient architecture. Once they've established this 'way point' of stability, then they can get back on the zip zoom bus. I'd like to stand in on the silicon vista, if I were tiny, and see how much less litter they've got hooked up down there. Copper plate thatches, cat scratches, now Intel has the cool down rock and roll.
Although probably not their intention, Intel is paving the way for high-density grids of "neuronal" multi-processors (that's a word, right?).
Might be OT: So neurons are super low power, extremely highly connected, relatively simple logic gates.
What happens when you have low power, highly connected and relatively complex logic processors connected in a grid? Does the processor complexity reduce the effectiveness of the interconnectivity?
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.--Carl Sagan http://yourmindshare.com http://www.quake4cash.net
TR also has additional details on the architecture itself.
5x more power per watt... ;P
will they be half as fast as my 'all your watt are belong to us' prescott??
That is the most important question. I'd hate to buy one of these also rans and find out that it is no where near as powerful as the industry leader.
And I bet you were expecting me to ask if it runs linux.
I don't get it.
We now have batteries powered by urine!
Who hasn't wanted to pee on their new laptop? Marks your territory and provides hours of power!
what else could you want?
Starsucks
Speaking as someone who has only purchased Opteron systems for the last 2 years, I welcome this. When these chips start shipping, I will re-evaluate our policy at that time and if Intel delivers what they're claiming, I suspect we'll be back to Intel chips, depending on how AMD responds to this.
But this is VERY GOOD. It sounds like a return back to real competition.
Does it run Lin--, err, Mac OS X?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Does anybody know what instruction set these three new processors implement? The article states that these are 64-bit CPUs, but doesn't say whether they feature the AMD64 or the Itanium instruction set.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
So its the revamped P3 once again. I'm glad they optimized it for power instead of marketing, but will it scale to higher clockspeeds? Will it be able to reach 3 Ghz in the next 2 years?
Fundamentally, most markets of any age undergo specialization, niches form, and those most fitted to the niches, do best. But having a unified architecture between server / laptop / desktop flies in the face of that; it either claims there is no niche market anywhere, or that there is a "killer chip" which fits all niches better than anything else.
Now, I can guess what Intel would choose of those options, but is there something about the chip industry that makes it immune to this specialization idea? What am I missing?
In Soviet Russia, us are belong to all your base.
The reduction in power will enable a new class of devices to be created at the 0.5W marker - the Handtop.
Also known as the video iPod, perhaps?
Somehow I don't think you RTFA.
Thanks to the death of NetBurst, Conroe will feature a 5x increase in performance per watt. Here's to the death of the power-hungry Intel processor.
and
Woodcrest and Merom will both improve performance per watt by a factor of 3 over their predecessors.
They're improving the processor as opposed to the batteries...
On electrical cost savings alone, PC users will save $1 billion per year for every 100M computers.
Pretty amazing. Although I'd like to see real #s to back up that claim.
I feel good about the choice that Steve made but I don't think he capitalized on the announcement.
Here's hoping that the new architecture is not just a M$, Linux thing.
I'd really like to have a low-power multi-core 64 bit chip blazing away in my next iMac.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The screenshots make it look like Intel isn't including HT with this next gen core. Is that because it's likely the pipeline is shorter? I thought it would be uber-cool to have a dual-core CPU with HT for some awesome synthetic 4-core action. But, I guess the real question is: Should I care about HT anymore?
We've been able to lower the power consumption by 5 times, but really cannot make a "faster" processor?
So now laptops will have a super longer battery life and that's good.
Maybe you'll need less fans and thats good.
But what I really want is double the performance every 18 months like the old days.
NOISY FANS BE DAMNED!
It's been YEARS since Transmeta began preaching performance/watt, and it looks like right now, when Transmeta has some big contracts (with Sony, Microsoft, Fujitsu, etc) beginning to pay off, Intel finally figures it out.
Of course, Transmeta's already GOT the technology to cut leakage by tremendous amounts... Given that they are no longer a direct competitor of Intel's, it would make some sense if Intel simply licensed Transmeta's LongRun2 tech. But what do I know? I'm always foolishly choosing the better technology instead of the better marketing.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Am I the only one not seeing much of what will be inside the new chips and just a load of intel propaganda?
The question is, have the stolen intergrated controllers yet?
You don't suppose the Conroe processor is a slam at the Crusoe's near-has-been status, do you?
So much for Moore's Law. So much for the supposedly inexorable march of technology. So much for that nonsense about increasing CPU performance, you all didn't really want 4 GHz anyway, did you?
People have been predicting the demise of Moore's Law for years. It's funny that it's happened and nobody seems to notice.
I'd really like to have a low-power multi-core 64 bit chip blazing away in my next iMac.
Intel probably can't even talk about it due to Apple NDA's. Rest assured that the Intel-based mac notebooks will use this technology.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
While I admit there's been times I WANTED to get back at my laptop for being so slow, the smell factor stopped me. Okay that and the cost, not to mention that I could get zapped in a very private place!
Urea don't small like roses, just sniff my cat box after the cat's used it. Yurk! (Actually, just be in the room after he goes. Bleah!)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
But if Intel stops going for higher clockspeeds how am I supposed to know how impressive an AMD 3200+ is? I need my completely reliant rating system intact! I guess the FX chips have already destroyed my ability to rate things simply.
Only North Koreans need 850-watt desktop CPUs!
So there!
Oh wait, only North Koreans need 850-milliwatt desktop CPUs. Yeah, that's it.
mod +5 funny -15 stupid
I agree, an associate of mine at the keynote said not a peep about Apple. Hmmm I wonder if it was becuase Steve wouldn't allow it because it might give a hint to when certain machines would be released....I don't know, we will see what the Mac OS X on Intel does....Could be a good thing.
lol what?
I am glad to see that Intel is addressing power consumption with the server chip Woodcrest. After all, desktops and laptops are small potatoes compared to servers when it comes to power usage. For corporations with large server implementations, I could see this saving a lot of power (=$). Good move for Intel; lower power bills are good leverage for new technology purchases -- many of us used that same argument to upgrade from CRTs to LCDs. It is nice to finally have something to be excited about from Intel again.
So much for Moore's Law. So much for the supposedly inexorable march of technology. So much for that nonsense about increasing CPU performance, you all didn't really want 4 GHz anyway, did you?
No, I want faster wireless and hardline cable/DSL speeds like I can get on Internet2, with really fat fast pipes.
Who cares about processor speed? Just stop melting my candy bars if I leave them on the case - cut the power consumption and save a few barrels of oil.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This is something Intel needs to do to stay in the CPU market. Their NetBurst architecture has allowed AMD to capture the hearts of the enthusiests as it is a better processor. (Note: the mass market has many other factors besides which processor is best in determining sales.)
While I currently favor AMD's processors, The Pentium M is a magnificant piece of hardware. With Intel basing their future processors on the Pentium M they are going to give AMD a run for their money. This will force AMD to drop their prices to a more reasonable level.
The one thing Intel is doing that IMHO is wrong is changing the definition of performance from clock speed to performance/watt. This tells us nothing of the performance of the processor or the power required to run it. Instead we should have two basic measurements for all processors: performace and power consumption. Most people are able to do simple calculations such as division on their own or with a calculator. The is no need to hide the actual performance from the end users.
Here is the correct link: FACE Intel.
Instead of Anand's pictures of PowerPoint slides, here's some actual info from TechReport:
"IDF -- On the heels of Intel's announcement of a single, common CPU architecture intended to drive its mobile, desktop, and server platforms, the company has divulged additional details of that microarchitecture. This dual-core CPU design will, as we've reported, support an array of Intel technologies, including 64-bit EM64T compatibility, virtualization, enhanced security, and active management capabilities. Intel says the new chips will deliver big improvements in performance per watt, especially compared to its Netburst-based offerings.
At 14 stages, the main pipeline will be a little bit longer than current Pentium M processors. The cores will be a wider, more parallel design capable of issuing, executing, and retiring four instructions at once. (Current x86 processors are generally three-issue.) The CPU will, of course, feature out-of-order instruction execution and will also have deeper buffers than current Intel processors. These design changes should give the new architecture significantly more performance per clock, and somewhat consequently, higher performance per watt.
Unlike Intel's current dual-core CPU designs, which don't really share resources or communicate with one another except over the front-side bus, this new design looks to be a much more intentionally multicore design. The on-die L2 cache will be shared between the two cores, and Intel says the relative bandwidth per core will be higher than its current chips. L2 cache size is widely scalable to different sizes for different products. The L1 caches will remain separate and tied to a specific core, but the CPU will be able to transfer data directly from one core's L1 cache to another. Naturally, these CPUs will thus have two cores on a single die.
The first implementation of the architecture will not include Hyper-Threading, but Intel (somewhat cryptically) says to expect additional threads over time. I don't believe that means HT capability will be built into silicon but not initially made active, because Intel expressly cited transistor budget as a reason for excluding HT.
On the memory front, the new architecture is slated to have the ever-present "improved pre-fetch" of data into cache, and it will also include what Intel calls "memory disambiguation." That sounds an awful lot like a NUMA arrangement similar to what's found on AMD's Opteron, but I don't believe it is. This feature seems to be related to a speculative load capability instead..
The server version of the new Intel architecture, code-named Woodcrest, will feature two cores. Intel is also talking about Whitefield, which has as much as twice the L2 cache of Woodcrest and four execution cores.
The company has decided against assigning a codename to this new, common processor microarchitecture, curiously enough. As we've noted, the first CPUs based on this design will be available in the second half of 2006 and built using Intel's 65nm fabrication process. "
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
The problem is that the physics for how to increase the number of transistors on a chunk of silicon is very well understood and the physics of how to make better batteries is not.
To double the number of transistors on a processor is primarily a matter of lithography, that is etchich smaller and smaller lines into an existing wafer. Same materials, more or less, and same technique, more or less. With batteries, it's far more hit and miss.
The technology and fabrication process to make a lead-acid battery is vastly different than NiCd. NiMh is somewhat similar to NiCd, but then Lithium Ion is rather different and requires a lot more technology to make it work. Then you've got fuel cells as a possibility, and that's vastly different from anything I just described.
There's a lot of effort being put into battery research because everybody understands what a fundamental limitiation it is to everybody's dreams of pervasive wireless. It's rather ironic to describe these internet coffee shops as having "wireless" when you still have to have A/C power to do anything. The problem is that it does not have the clear and obvious path that CPU's have had.
I expect that fuel cells will eventually be the way to go. Still there's a certain inconvenience in them. If I want to charge my laptop batteries, i just plug in my laptop. If I've got a fuel cell, do I have to buy numerous cells? Do I have to fill them up with methanol, etc? It doesn't seem like there's a panacea for portable power (and other p words) anytime soon.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
why would intel be using apple at IDC?
VPS hosting Guide
'Conroe', 'Merom', and 'Woodcrest'. Hmmfph!
Enough with the name game, where's my Moore's Law mandated doubling of CPU speed every 18 months!
And flying cars, dammit they're due too. I want my flying car running on my 12Ghz "Zoomy" processor.
Probably because Steve doesn't want to be upstaged anybody. He will want to show off any new hardware. It would have been interesting if Steve had a presentation at IDF, but that's not likely to happen.
I'm sure that there a few of these processors running in Apple's labs.
Hz doesn't enter into it. (well not directly except that light speed is constant and as long as they don't increase then die size the component have to get faster if only because the electrons have the approximately same distance to go from one side of the die to the other.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
ARM processors were power friendly before transmeta even appeared....
But yes, they went about it differently.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
With everyone chasing multi-core rather than clock-rate this isn't really a suprise. If you want to run 4 cores on one die you clearly need to reduce the power consumption of each of those cores over what is done today.
It clearly helps with laptops, which of course will be multi-core themselves in a year or so.
What an odd day it will be when I start ordering either a "2-way" or "4-way" laptop.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I have to wonder if Intel basically ditching the last 5 years of CPU development in favor of their Israeli skunkworks ranks at or above the famous Microsoft IE U-turn?
I mean, Intel sold millions and spent billions on Netbu(r|)st, and hit the wall far before the 5+ghz figures bandied about back in the day. This is basically ctrl-alt-del on a large part of their roadmap, though I'm sure they'll still be selling 'traditional' P4s for awhile.
I wonder how they think they're going to get scalability when they go up to 100's of cores. I know how *I* would do it. It's how *they* would do it is the question.
by fay the gaayest names ive ever heard..its right up there with people pronouncing "Pentium" as "Paint-e-um"
Uh, because the next gen apples are going to be using intel chips. Have you been hibernating for the last 2 months?
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
they have realized their mistake with p4 (plain increasing MHz), and now they are going back to old pentium 3, just giving it another name. The latest intel hit, pentium M is based on p3 architecure.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
Here i'm using a pretty optimized Windows XP Pro with a gig of ram and 2.1 GHz and it really dogs sometimes. I don't know if the answer is more GHz or what, but I'm not even doing anything with the damn thing and it takes awhile to do anything. Open Outlook and the system is pretty unusable for 2+ minutes. Maybe it's a software issue but it's an issue that needs to be addressed nonetheless. Decreasing the power usage isn't going to help any here, I have no complaints in that department even though this piece of crap IBM laptop with the extended battery only lasts 2-3 hours at best.
Now the question is how Intel's roadmap compares to AMD's. Will Intel get back on top in terms of proformance or will AMD still be king?
seem to have all the answers in this thread. All right, how many of you are Intel employees?
Hyperthreading is out.
I don't think that the choice of desktop background for this aluminum-looking notebook is coincidental.
May this be a hint of a "5 W Sub-Laptop" in Apple's future?
WRONG. Moore's Law only states the amount of transistors that can fit on a chip will double every 18 months. It says nothing about your CPU speed.
Intel plans to release these in Q2 2006. They will use a 65nm process, support dual cores, and get 5x the per-watt performance of the Prescott EE.
AMD has dual core chips available now, that get 3-5x the per-watt performance of Intel's Prescott EE line (depending on how they define certain things - Idle? Mean power/load? Peak realistic-but-not-theoretical? TDP?).
And AMD only uses 90nm at the moment, and will have two 65nm fabs up by the end of this year - Which will give them another nice boost in terms of per-watt performance.
I love the idea of a truly "new" CPU line entering the arena, but this smells an awfully lot like more of Intel playing catch-up, and in a way they won't win.
Unless the Pentium-M line has, for whatever reason, reached a hard wall for performance, Intel would have done better to expand it to multi core - Perhaps jump right to 4 cores just to bypass the whole "catch up with dual" criticism - And dropped the price to undercut AMD (at least per-core). But this? Well, it has potential, but unless Intel has decided to seriously under hype a major announcement, I won't lose any sleep worrying that I just upgraded three machines to readiness for AMD's X2 line (can't afford the damn things yet, so currently just running Winchester 3000s, but all just a chip-swap away from going to X2).
for the server room cost more that the servers it was, uh, serving to cool. They also used more power to cool the room and blow the chilled air through the racks.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I wonder if the fact that they "demoed Conroe on a system running Linux" means that they'll start providing GOOD Linux on more than just their CPU's. Sofar I haven't been impressed. I have a centrino laptop with an i915 graphics card. Getting wireless and DRI graphics to work reminded me of the early days of ATI's Linux support when you had to surf through 50 sites to find a cvs link and then kill a weekend getting it to even compile. Unless THAT changes, I don't care what their CPU's do, I'm not gonna touch another intel product while I have a choice.
I'm sure the new chips will be decent, but the Anandtech article really reminded me why I hate "conferences" run by a single vendor, or at least non-competing vendors.
...followed by a claim of saving $1 billion/year /100 million machines. Sure.
Let's see. We have:
- A line graph showing an AMAZING upsurge in laptop purchases, until you realize that it's only showing 45%-65%, and that laptops just passed desktops at 50%.
- Intel claiming that SF is covered in WiFi because of Centrino, rather than =$50 access points.
- A slide claiming "10x lower power," and then showing a desktop marked "65 watts." Right. So either P4s use 650 watts on their own, or using one of these new CPUs is going to magically make the rest of the system components use less power.
-
Every presentation I've seen by a single vendor is like this. I remember Apple trumpeting that an iMac would network boot faster from an OS X server than from its own hard drive... provided your server had top-of-the-line ultrawide SCSI, the iMac had the slowest IDE drive possible, and you were running gigabit ethernet between them.
I do like the focus on lower power (despite the ludicrous claims), and that Intel might have something competitive with AMD again.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Did anyone notice that the laptop picture on p.2 of the article has what looks like the blue "swooshes" of Mac OS X on its screen?
I remember using a 12" powerbook, so much heat in such a small box! I prefer using my small transmeta notebook: no fan, no heat...
This was the only point that prevented me from buying a powerbook.
What's the appeal of lowering power consumption for desktop computers? Isn't it more of an issue for laptop users?
It would have been interesting if Steve had a presentation at IDF, but that's not likely to happen.
Oh, I'm sure it'll happen. It will just be next year's IDF.
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
is neural, not neuronal.
They've taken a little cooler and stopped chasing their speed dragon
English, please?
to make a more solid, well-organized, and efficient architecture.
Okay, solid: what was it about their previous chips that wasn't solid? Well organised? Have you seen the organisation of the chip or are you just speculating?
Once they've established this 'way point' of stability, then they can get back on the zip zoom bus.
That makes no sense. Previous chips were just as stable. Optimising for power efficiency doesn't necessarily help them optimise for speed later on.
I'd like to stand in on the silicon vista, if I were tiny, and see how much less litter they've got hooked up down there. Copper plate thatches, cat scratches, now Intel has the cool down rock and roll.
Ahh, now I understand. You're a PHB.
I'm relatively new to all this... What is the difference between a desktop and server processor? I'll be doing a cheap upgrade on mine soon and would like to know if I could maybe put a server processor in my desktop machine. I don't have anything pick out yet, but are the sockets vastly different or what?
Is there a faq somewhere that explains all the different processor types out there? Thanks!
In my opinion, Intel and the rest of the big processor vendors are running out of ideas. They can only come up with so many incremental improvements before they bore the market to death. So what comes next?
I suggest that they start working on the biggest problem facing the computer industry today: unreliable software. It's costing us billions of dollars and even human lives. Consider that the basic architecture of the processor has not change in more than 150 years, ever since a guy named Babbage and his girlfriend Ada built their mechanical computer around the "table of instructions". All processor architectures have benn based on and optimized for the algorithm ever since.
A truly innovative architecture would abandon the algorithm and embrace a non-algorithmic, signal-based synchronous software model. It would not only revolutionize the computer industry, it would solve its nastiest problem: software unreliability.
But can we really expect the big guys (Intel, AMD, IBM, etc...) to be truly innovative at this stage of the game? Their approach is evolutionary, not revolutionary and they are doing just fine as it is. They have no great incentive to change. Hopefully, a bright upstart will get the message and make a killing while the behemoths are busy fighting each other for market share. They won't know what hit them until it's too late. The message is simple: There is a solution to the software reliability crisis. The disadvantage is that it will require a radical change in both processor architecture and software construction methodology. The advantage is too good to ignore: 100% software reliability! Guaranteed!
This is the stuff that revolutions and great companies are made of. After a century and a half, I think it's time for a change. He who has an ear (and the venture capital) let him hear!
Or could it be becuase Intel don't give a shit about Apple?
Ah, but they did. Take a closer look at that laptop in that slide. Doesn't that look an awful lot like the default blue "swoosh" background of OS X?
Prefer data and instructions with a high 0/1-bit ratio!
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand how performance per watt is useful as *the* statistic for comparing processors. Granted, clockspeeds aren't the law of the land, but at least they gave you some idea of how processors stack up against each other. The lines have become fuzzier recently, but I can know with a resonable amount of certaintly that a 3ghz P4 will kick the living daylight out of a 1mhz CPU.
Performance per watt tells a different story. While performance return per unit power consumed may tell how efficient a processor is, it doesn't tell me how good a processor is at doing what I want it to -- crunch numbers, really fast.
Performance per watt is a ratio, so the rating can increase when performance increases or power consumption decreases. Therefore, a solar calculator with a 5mhz processor and (I'm making this up) 0.1 watt power consumption would have a 50 mhz/watt rating, and a 3ghz CPU with a 100 watt consumption would have a rating of 30 mhz/watt. So, now Intel sells both these processors and advertises their performance/watt ratings. When someone goes to buy a new computer, they're surprised to find that the 50 mhz/watt computer is actually slower/worse/crappier than the 30 mhz/watt one.
A rock has infinite performance per power usage. It performs one instruction using no power.
~The log of the limit is equal to the limit of the log.
Silly me... when I read new architecture I said to myself: "Finally! We move on from x86. We have advanced beyond 20 year old technology."
Sadly, I was mistaken.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
Unless the Pentium-M line has, for whatever reason, reached a hard wall for performance, Intel would have done better to expand it to multi core
I suspect that is exactly what they are doing, with a new label slapped on to suggest something really new and exciting.
Considering the per-watt performance of the current Pentium M versus the AMD64 (both at 90nm), the Pentium M seems slightly superior. So Intel may actually take the lead there.
In absolute performance, however, the AMDs are currently superior. Unless this changes, AMD CPUs will remain the choice for maximum performance, while a "sensible" office desktop may be best equipped with the new Intels.
C - the footgun of programming languages
So this most likely this leaves OS X on Intel to be a 64-bit only operating system, something that will put a dent in anyones plans to hack it onto todays x86 off-the-shelf kit, yeah?
Yet it would not be inconsistent with Apple's saying one could put Windows on their machines. It would only have to be a 64-bit version.
The future is in beta
Intel's process size continues to reduce (down to 45nm now), regardless of what they're choosing to do with those transistors or how fast to clock them).
Moore's not done yet.
What's most interesting to me is it isn't so much technological limitations which are killing off Moore's Law, but lack of demand. They could probably make faster chips, but modern processors are really, obscenely fast. There's just not that much demand for anything faster--the money's in energy efficiency right now.
I'm looking at the standard blue background on my PowerBook right now, and the swirls are definitely different. I'm no expert, but the background on that laptop reminds me of something I would see in a Dell ad.
You forgot to mention:
Anyone who says they will be modded as a Troll will be modded +5
'Conroe', 'Merom', 'Woodcrest'?
Alright, where are He-man, She-ra and Skeletor?
Most laptops only use ~30W of power, hopefully less as time goes on... This makes portable solar cells an option.
I'm not really sure about wind power... but an interesting idea would be to make a "3-in-one" alternative laptop powerer.
You could have a 30W solar pack, and two small windmill things (maybe with detachable fins for easy carrying). The fans could double as hydro generators if you stick them in a river.
You know... for all those times you're next to a river with your laptop (and there is no wind).
I suppose another idea might be to incorporate solar cells into the case of laptop.
Alternative energy is no solution to the battery problem, but I still think it's a cool idea. With even just solar cells you could easily work outside all day without needing to change batteries.
I don't know how useful this would be indoors, but I could see even indoor lighting generating some power (hey it works for calculators)...
I'd definitely carry around a solar pack even if it only increased my run time by 2 hours, any less and I don't think it'd be worh it. But I'd be pretty stoked about it if I could sit outside (think BEACH) all day with a laptop. How sweet would that be?
Cue 1000 comments entitled "The real reason Apple switched!!!!"
:)
*sigh*
Neko
Psycho hose beast?
n/t
I'm not sure if you're funny because you're right or just funny silly, like "look at the guy with no pants on, isn't that funny"?
I remember a time when Apple fans had their own web site. I guess it got shut down cause they all hang out here now. Oh well.
AMD is almost always good because they're the only ones to give Intel a kick in the pants compeition wise in the consumer CPU industry.
Intel, well screw Intel.
Apple SUCKS! That's not a troll, but you fella's want proprietary software, don't care about software freedom, etc. well I guess you'll get exactly what you're asking for.
Microsoft IS always evil. Their motiviation is not just profit (normal for a corporation) but nothing short of complete control over every market they compete in. They've proved it over and over again, therefore everything they say is highly suspect. Like, duh!
Steve Jobs can come to my house where I'll beat him with a broken C64.
Bill Gates is only right when he pays to make it that way.
Funny you should mention IBM, because they have had first samples of the upcoming POWER6 line of chips for a few months now. According to reports, the plan is to first produce POWER5+ CPU's and then to move on to the POWER6 eventually combining "blocks" of 8 cores that can fit in the palm of your hand, running at up to 6ghz all on a 65nm process. Yeah, these are not laptop chips, but honestly since Apple represents a tiny niche market for high speed CPU's, who can blame IBM for basically ignoring their requirements when coming up with the next generation CPU's?
Don't look so shocked, many people have underestimated IBM's technical ability in the past.
Nope but IDC is to hype up Intel products to developers having apple there just serves to hype apple not intel
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Look at what's not there - no hyperthreading, no integrated memory controller, no interprocessor hypertransport comms, no vector processing - in short no real innovation.
Now I want lower energy requirements the same as the next man, but this isn't a solid basis for the future or an answer to a world of cell processors and intelligent devices. Its still a stop gap until they can find something that can be their winning edge for the future.
So don't get too excited yet. 200fps Doom may not be around the corner.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Just because its not x86 compatible isn't a bad thing..
However, 'performance per watt' is a hard to quantify when you are talking different architectures, i agree..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For everyone who keeps restating the mistake that Moore's law deals with PERFORMANCE, please educate yourselves:
"Moore's law is the empirical observation that at our rate of technological development, the complexity of an integrated circuit, with respect to minimum component cost will double in about 18 months."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_Law
How bout that, NOTHING about performance.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Maybe you don't hear it, but I do.
Two next-gen battery technologies discussed here on /.:
1: Fuel cell. Fully recharges in the amount of time it takes to refill the methnol reservoir.
2: Atomic battery running on tritium beta decay emission. Sure you can't turn it off, but it can be charging a normal battery in the background, extending the life and the ability to recharge where no outlet is available.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Do you really want an 80W server chip? Certainly not in a blade!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Mythbusters covered this already... your pee isn't coming out in a solid stream. if you slow it down with a high speed camera, you can see the liquid "breaking up" instead of forming a solid stream, so electricity wouldn't be conducted up to your junk.
If manufacturers start to take this stance... making machines more efficient and power-friendly as opposed to faster and hotter, perhaps we'll see it happen with coders again. If you look at apps and games developed on earlier hardware, the developers were doing *everything* they could to squeeze as much as they could from your machine. Nowadays with MHZ to spare, you end up with bloated, nasty code that requires machine power many magitudes beyond what it should.
I'd like to see the manufacturers focus on battery life and efficient use of power. We'll see better laptops, and maybe if game companies see that 5Ghz machines aren't going to be just around the corner they'll learn to code efficiently for the current-gen CPUs. In a wonderful world I could see graphics and sound not being the antithesis to battery life and heat...
Yeah! Go AMD! Surely the, as a member of the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) won't implement hardware DRM. It's just Intel who, as a member of the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance implemented the TCPA specification. And Apple clearly moved to Intel just to get access to this, because we know that IBM, as a member of the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, would never have implemented it in their chips.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
But will it run Linu... oh... nevermind.
Something interesting - from three chip lines (server/desktop/mobile), the operating system shown on DESKTOP line was Fedora Core 4 (Linux).
:wq
I think it's worth pointing out the original Game Boy used something like 0.7W.
1: Megahertz is all that matters.
2: Gigahertz is all that matters.
3: Model numbers are all that matter.
4: Performance per watt is all that matters.
5: Profit!
But really folks, RTFP (RTF Powerpoint) I see nothing directly comparing the performance of the new processors to the old -- just the performance per watt consumed. Is the new stuff faster than the old, and if so then by how much? THAT'S WHAT WE WANT TO KNOW!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
One thing I did notice was that Intel intend to scale this architecture right down to the PDA level. Does this mean an end of the XScale line, one of the last RISC lines in large-scale production?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Given finite R&D resources, improving performance of the power consumer (rather than the power producer) seems to be a more direct way of paving the way for longer-lasting portables. That nips the problem in the bud. It's like the three R's: reduce, reuse, recycle. Before trying to increase (power) supply, one should try to reduce (power) demand.
Batteries do seem to be slowly but surely advancing. In my personal experience, I fly some RC helicopters. I have the standard NiCad, NiMH, and now, Lithium Polymer(LiPo) batteries.
I've never liked or had much luck with any type of rechargeable battery, regardless of type, or what it was used in. Laptops, PDAs, 2-way radios, R/C, they all just sucked. Long charge times, and bad run times that get worse with every charge until finally, they may as well be a paperweight.
That was before I decided to shell out for a LiPo battery for my heli. I opened the package and was amazed. (And it wasn't even charged yet!) The battery was a higher amperage (mAh) than any of the other more common types of rechargeables, and it weighed less than half of any of the others. The case is softer and more flexible, not like a metal "can".
I excitedly threw it on the charger, but wasn't looking forward to the always long wait of the first charge. Imagine my surprise when less than an hour later the battery was fully charged.
Plugged it up to the helicopter and couldn't believe it when I got over double the flight time of any of the other batteries. I know I've discharged and recharged at least 30 times and it still flies the same duration every time.
I've read that they are trying to introduce these batteries into PDAs and laptops. Maybe they, or an even better technology that's under tight R&D wraps somewhere can hold us over until we get those much vaunted fuel cells.
A bit more info can be found on LiPo cells at http://www.answers.com/topic/lithium-polymer/
(I am not affiliated in any way with any battery company/technology or the website I linked, just a user of the best battery technology I've seen come out in a while.)
I am Homer of Borg. Resistance is Fut.. Mmmmmmmm, Donuts!
AMD does not have 5x as good performance per watt as Prescott.
Prescott EE is 103 Watts max.
Athlon X2 4800+ is 110W max.
So unless you think the AMD chip is 5.4 times faster than the Prescott EE (hint, it isn't), you're off base.
And I don't know what your comments are about Intel should have gone multi-core with P-M. Both Conroe and Merom (the chips they announced) are dual core and they are derivatives of P-M.
As the article said, you'll know more about the chips later this week. My guess is they didn't under hype the announcement, they just stretched the announcement out.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I love the idea of a truly "new" CPU line entering the arena
There is nothing that new about a microprocessor that has been hacked since the 70's. Other computer systems have evolved and changed chip designs, but not in the PeeCee land.
Err, not exactly. If only it were that simple. A 4GHz processor would be able to start approximately twice as many instructions through its 100-stage pipeline compared to a 2GHz processor. Good branch prediction, speculative execution, and long stretches of compiler optimized code without branches might well run faster. Also, knowing just where in the long pipeline it realizes it has mis-predicted that branch is important.
Remember that a modern processor doesn't wait for one instruction to complete before starting on the next one, so clock cycles/instruction may not be as important a mesaure as say pipeline length in these modern RISC-like CPU's.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Conroe is an anagram for "no core" so maybe it doesn't exist. OTOH, it would be really cool if the CPU could keep my stuff from coring.
I'm sure they'd rather let The Register name it for them.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Intel's original idea was to find a way to more aggressively pipeline their CPU design, allowing for higher clock rates. Increasing the number of pipeline stages allows you to reduce the number of transistors between stages, reducing propagation delay and increasing maximum clock rate.
In a vaccuum, this makes sense. If the instruction reorderer and/or compiler are smart enough, you can keep that pipeline full and take advantage of that higher clock rate. Indeed, there have been examples of carefully-crafted code that ran very well on this architecture.
Unfortunately, real software is quite different from the ideal sort of thing that runs well on the P4. Too many hazzards (branches and instruction dependencies) limited how full you could keep the pipeline. The CPU would execute instructions out of order, but there's only so smart you can make it. And not all branch hazzards can be fixed by a branch predictor.
Intel's hyperpipelined design was a relative failure. Sure, they could clock it 50% faster than an AMD, but that's what it took to make up for the increased pipeline stalls. Performance-wise, it was a wash. In other respects, it was a loss, because the processors required more power, more expensive cooling, and more expensive fabrication.
After a while, Intel came up with a way to make use of that wasted bandwidth. Why not fill those pipeline bubbles with another, independent execution stream? HyperThreading was born. Not altogether a bad idea. In many cases, it allowed up to 30% better over-all performance for multi-threaded apps, and giving you another CPU core (virtual or not) is always a good way to reduce latency.
In a last-ditch attempt to try to break the MHz barrier, Intel came out with the Northwood core. They lengthened the pipeline from an excessive 20 stages to an absurd 31 stages (not including the x86-to-RISC translator before the trace cache). To make up for the additional hazzards, Intel had to develop even more aggressive branch prediction and use larger reorder buffers. Unfortunately, this too turned out to be a performance wash, with an associated increase in power requirements.
At the same time, notebook computers started to overtake desktops in popularity. Low-power became MUCH more important than high-performance. The P4 really could not compete in this space, so Intel hired an Israeli team to develop a whole new architecture. To make a long story short, they basically reverted back to the P3 architecture (a relatively short pipeline), but added on all of the P4's advancements in reordering an branch prediction.
Think about that. Intel had made some mistakes, but they were GOOD mistakes. In order to work around the deficiencies in their P4 design, they had to develop some very impressive and advanced ways of keeping that pipeline full. Of course, any pipeline is going to have hazzards, so imagine applying that technology to a much shorter pipeline. The result was impressive. While the slower clock speed of Banias/Centrino was noticable under SOME circumstances (as it is with AMD processors), the majority of the time, the performance was excellent, even at a lower clock rate and lower power requirement.
The development of the P4 was a technical failure, but it was also a valuable phase in Intel's life. These lessons learned are going to be the basis for Intel's future success in efficient CPUs. Finally, I think Intel will be able to compete with AMD, even WITHOUT dubious deals with resellers designed to lock AMD out of the market.
It is also possible to transmit power wirelessly, maybe that's part of the answer. You could power the tables at the coffee shop, and all you'd have to do to "plug in" your laptop is set it on the table.
I don't see the Pentium M's as hitting any performance wall at all. In fact, if anything, I see them hitting a Watt wall, and being told by the senior execs that they won't release a Pentium M chip that puts out more than 30 Watts, period. Something tells me this is even the reason we haven't seen them in desktops.
As for performance per watt, the Pentium M is more superior than you want to claim. 27 Watts is hard for anything in the desktop world to compare to; the AMD64's are all up in the 50W range (max-out though, average out might be comparable to the Pentium M's max out), Intel's Prescotts max output's over the hundreds.
AMD put a shot across the bow for a dual-core race, and Intel declined it. It'd be funny to see Intel shoot a clock/watt race across AMD's bow, and wait for their decline. We know who's best in what realm, now we're waiting for a head to head race, Pentium 3 verses Athlon style.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
P/W * Watts = how we will compare different processors.
So has Microsoft patented this yet?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Perhaps intel plans to leave the server/imbedded market to IBM, and focus of personal computers (which will pretty-much all be laptops).
So this is not a whole new Instruction set right? It's just some hardware changes? If so, then someone needs shoot everyone (especially the "journalists") who call this a new "architecture" and confuse us.
Intel is seeking to differentiate the generations of their own product from each other, rather than the same generation processors from their competitors. After all, when you have a monopoly, there is little real point in differentiating yourself from competition that only weakly exists. (And that happens automatically, anyway, since all the competition has to be monopoly-compatible.)
Due to Gates' Corollary to Amdahl's Law, growth in performance won't matter for consumer PCs in the forseeable future. Windows Next Year runs Word about as fast as Windows Five Years Ago did. Shrinkage in power consumption, however, might just induce people to trade up.
This does jive with what Steve Jobs said during his keynote with regards to performance per watt. If the specs are truly as the CEO of Intel says they are, then I can finally see why Apple was swayed.
And that, my friends, is why Apple went with Intel rather than AMD. Low power consumption. Apple's market is largely in the small and portable.
Isn't this what we've known for a long time? Come on, everyone was talking about Pentium M being the new technology, despite the fact that it's based on the (relatively) ancient Pentium Pro.
All your base are belong to Wii.
These new processors are the reason Apple is switching to x86. They're coming out in the 2nd half of 2006, just when Apple said its first x86 machines would be released and they offer improved "performance per watt", i.e. the exact same terms Jobs used when he announced the switch. My guess is that Apple will also be wanting the .5W handtop cpus for its Video iPod and that there will be some video enabled version of Airport Express to go along with it.
the APwC - accumulated performance-per-watt cost.
(performance/watt) / cost
I think that's more relevant.
The best processor would be one that offers the highest performance-per-watt at the lowest price. I have a feeling that the AMD-64s currently hold that crown.
Since dual cores are the quite common these days, we need a measure that can scale even based on the number of processors used to achieve the performance numbers.
So whether it takes 50 transmeta processors or 2 AMD 64s or x Intel processors, at the end of the day, what matters is how much was spent to achieve the same performance. Therefore, we need to take this into account as well.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
There is nothing that new about a microprocessor that has been hacked since the 70's. Other computer systems have evolved and changed chip designs, but not in the PeeCee land.
I'd take issue with that claim. Often, other computer systems had revolutions, meaning that they've made fundemental shifts in architecture, see VAX-> Extended VAX (Alpha), Apple did M68k->PPC->x86, PA-RISC (and several other RISCs)->Itanic, among others.
Intel can't or won't perform such radical shifts, so they do need to evolve, and have. x86 isn't really CISC anymore, and hasn't been since the Pentium days, and AMD's Athlon64 even has shades of VLIW as a mid-layer engine.
But does it run linu...D'oh!
For example it has been long known that you can have very long lasting nuclear batteries using betavoltaics (couple of a source of beta radiation and a p-n junction and you have your battery), but would you put it on your lap that is the question.
Considering that plutonium beta cell batteries were used in pacemakers, I wouldn't be too worried about that. I think the shielding could be lightweight enough.
But getting rid of used batteries could be a real problem.
I've quit reading hexus & tomshardware because of the inline commercial stuff. I would stay with the Inq and anandtech instead. Be warned.
For desktop use, peak performance/watt is not terribly important. Everything, including cooling systems, can scale up to handle peak output.
I'd argue that average performance/watt is more important.
In order to figure this, you'd need to work out a good estimate of an average desktops load over an average day. Yes, I know this would be a terribly difficult statistic to generate.
Servers are different. Servers can be expected to run at high levels of load for a prolonged periods of time.
But I have no problem with the way my Athlon 64 revs up when I'm playing a game, and no problem with the way my zalman cooler goes from silent (i.e. not moving at all) to a slight amount of noise. If Athlon 64s continue to outperform Intel processors at similar price ranges, I'll be happy to deal with a significantly higher peak power usage as well as a wider range of power usage. Idle, my processor puts out the same amount of heat as a similarly performing Pentium-M chip.
Most of the time, when I'm working on my system, or playing a movie, or my system is idling, its silent. That's good enough for me.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Prescott EE isn't dual-core as far as I know.
But even wth dual cores, against Prescott EE's one (I used the 3.4GHz model as my power reference I believe), AMD X2 4800+ isn't 5X as powerful. Even 3X is a long stretch. In general, I'd say each AMD core perhaps clocks in at 25% faster than a Prescott EE 3.4GHz. That's 2.5X faster, at 10% more power.
I'll say this, Intel made their numbers look good by using their worst performance/Watt chip in recent memory.
Beyond that, the main thrust here is the misunderstanding of the parent (like saying Intel's chips should have gone multi core, when they did).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
No hyperthreading? AMD doesn't have it either. Intel's reason for not having it (outside of Netburst) is surely the same as AMD's. That is, it doesn't make as much sense when you don't have the huge pipeline of Netburst that you must keep fed.
Integrated Memory Controller? Not a good thing. AMD locks you into DDR, while DDR2 drops in price below DDR. I don't like my processor manufacturer dictating what memory I can use. And besides, I need a north bridge (the traditional home of the memory controller) anyway because the north bridge is the new home of the GPU on all but the highest end machines. Integrated north bridge doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I'd like low-latency RAM access, but if it takes an integrated memory controller to get it, I'm not quite as certain it makes sense.
Interprocessor HT comms? Processors don't talk to each other. Think of the instruction on the processor that accesses the other processor? Can't think of one? There isn't one. Processors only interact through memory. Memory is accessed through the FSB, not HT, even on AMD chips. Thus I don't need interprocessor HT. The chips can snoop each others memory busses just fine.
No vector processing (SIMD)? What happened to SSE? These chips have MMX & SSE1-3, which are all vector processing. AMD has them too.
I don't see cell processors as the future for PCs, for the same reason Apple doesn't use the PPC Cell processor. They're not good performers on machines that have to run legacy code. And PCs run a lot of legacy code.
I do agree these processors are a simple evolution. But I don't see that as a bad thing. Processor work is almost always evolutionary. And the 386 architecture/instruction set has evolved a lot, from 20 MIPS to perhaps thousands.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The trouble is, right now, the sunnier it is the harder it is to see my display. Solar-powered laptops will probably come along about 2 weeks after laptops with reflective displays that get easier instead of harder to read in bright light.
Exactly what we've all been waiting for. Is Intel Good(tm) now?
Apple is using them now, so yes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The company has decided against assigning a codename to this new, common processor microarchitecture, curiously enough.
Wow, could it be that the engineers are back in charge at Intel? Palace coup? You know if the marketing people were still in charge, they'd have blue freaks miming the new codename all over the place. Dare I hope that it might become cool again for geeks to like Intel...
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Or could it be becuase Intel don't give a shit about Apple?
Ding ding! I think we have a winner!
Liposuction clinics will do secondary business as fat suppliers for next generation battery company.
Say hello to Water Street Batteries...
Quite. Getting Apple on board might be big news in the Apple world, but the rest of the universe doesn't even know what 'Intel Inside' means or why they should care. Now Apple too has been assimilated, all we need is for AMD to go bankrupt and chip development will grind to a halt completely. You can't beat a good, old fashioned, American monopoly!
That was classic intercourse!
Score:5, Arse Kicking Delivered
That was classic intercourse!
The problem is that, while batteries really have been improving a lot, most laptop makers think that customers want the fastest and most powerful laptops they can get, with the biggest and brightest possible screens on them, as lightweight and thin as they can get, so the power demands of laptop computers have been sucking down every bit of power the batteries can deliver, and since power demand is always going to exceed supply, your batteries are going to feel wimpy because the manufacturers are going to aim for a 1-2 hour battery life because that's the shortest that customers will accept (and of course, a year later your battery life will probably have degraded to half of that unless you're strictly using it as a desktop most of the time. Batteries are the bottleneck because *something* has to be, and that's what the market seems to care about least.
If you wanted to build a Transmeta or Via low-power slow-but-adequate machine with a smaller less bright screen, and were willing to run lower-horsepower applications (Linux/BSD/olderWindows) and not play Gamez on the machine, you'd be surprised what kind of battery life you could get with modern batteries, especially if you start using flash for your main drives instead of rotating platters. Apple seems to be the only manufacturer out there who's emphasizing battery life on anything except niche machines, and they've done a few that claim to support the "airplane across North America or the Atlantic" market.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The problem is that Steve Jobs was already using a processor line which matches
:)
the performance-per-watt that Intel said they were having in 2 or 3 years; the
PowerPC G4 7447A.
The Freescale roadmap and their current 7448 samples show they're making good
progress.
IBM's lower power G5's are pretty darn exactly what Steve was whining for.
There is nothing in Intel's little presentation, bleating on about how performance
per watt is more important than GHz, that Apple - and the company I work for, Genesi (narf!), hasn't been saying all through this century.
If you want performance per watt excellence now, PPC is where it is at. G4 if you
need 32bit and extreme low-power (handtops, laptops), and G5 if you are willing to
go a little higher up (servers, workstations). Apple ALREADY HAD THESE PRODUCTS and
are TWO YEARS AHEAD OF THE GAME
Neko
They've got some common design elements, and different tradeoffs of number of processor cells vs. power control, etc., but the big advantage of commonality is better chipset support. It costs a lot of money and design-cycle time to have to crank out too many different chipset designs, and simplifying them makes it easier for motherboard manufacturers to support their chips over a longer period of time at lower costs.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'd really like to have a low-power multi-core 64 bit chip blazing away in my next iMac.
Isn't "chip blazing away" and "Intel" kind of redundant?
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
A 12-month version of the statement was somebody at Sun saying that the speed of a Sun computer in MIPS = 2**(year-1985), which was pretty much true for a couple of years. MacNealy or somebody described their early architecture as "3M - 1 Megapixel display, 1 MIPS CPU, 1 Megabyte of memory" (probably Sun-1.) The Sun 2/50 in my attic has an 1152x900 screen. The medium-range IBM laptop I'm typing this on has about 1000 times faster CPU, 512x as much memory, 60GB more disk (2/50 was diskless :-), and the screen may be 32-bit color and radically accelerated instead of black&white, but it's still only 1024x768 :-(....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Really? "The Trusted Computer Alliance" doesn't exist anymore. They disbanded.
... or sticking foot in mouth? ... or .. Apple fanboys sucking each other's toes?
Ass kicking?
No, on Apple's wallpapers the colors are more muted. Although I can't find the specific wallpaper, I'm willing to bet that's a KDE swoosh.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Uhm, it says architecture, so I was worried there was another case of the Itanium coming out, only Intel trying to target the desktop world and cause a world of trouble for us all when they said "cpu architecture" but, they just meant newer cores designed to run more efficiently, right? It's still the same x86 architecture, right? If not, it will screw things up for a lot of people that intel wishes to pursue this.
Incorrect. The instruction set has remained (relatively) unchanged. The physical processors have changed immensely.
Your Winchester 3000 cannot be cooled by a passive heatsink. Try running a CPU burn in the thing for a while. Winchester is a great core, and Prescott is a power hog, but your Winchester will not withstand hard use on a passive heatsink without a LOT of airflow.
When you said Prescott EE, I figured you meant Extreme Edition, not dual core. You should be more specific.
Yonah is dual-core, and two of these new chips are also dual-core. I know you can't get either yet, but the tone of the post was that with this announcement, Intel announced a bunch of stuff, but "Intel should have gone multi-core". They did. The complaints about them not doing so were far off base.
Measuring on the wall is a VERY poor way to measure power usage. If you subtract a little bit too much for overhead (and that's easy to do) you end up making the difference seem larger than it is.
As to "normal" numbers, not only don't I believe Winchester uses 1/3rd the power of Prescott in normal useage, but I think it's a LONG stretch to condemn Intel's new processors on "normal" power usage when you don't even have any info on it.
Finally, if your Winchester is 3X better per Watt than Prescott and the new Intel is 5X, then the new Intel is merely 66% better than your Winchester. That seems pretty significant to me.
My next machine was going to be an AMD. Because I like Winchester. But I'd rather not be stuck with DDR, and I'd like a cost-effective dual-core machine, and AMD doesn't seem interested in producing it. Plus just on total power usage, AMD's power consumption for dual core (110W) is too high for me, Intel's new chips will use half as much (50W).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Batteries involve a trade off between stable/safe and easy to extract energy. It is almost necessary for batteries (in general) to be easy to extract energy from and therefore somewhat unsafe as long as the energy density is low, which decreases the unstability. For example:
While it may be true that fat is both less dangerous (though some might argue) and denser than Li-Ion, it is a lot easier to convert the energy in a Li-Ion battery into electricity so that it is in a form usable by a computer. The only way to safely extract energy from fat is to oxidize (burn) it.
If you want to straight up burn the fat, you're never going to market it as a laptop battery. So in order to control the oxidation one needs oxidation enzymes at a controlled level and to do this you need some sort of feedback system so that the number of enzymes will change in order to produce the correct output voltage, requiring either a biological system or yet another eletrical system in order to control the enzyme production. Enzyme production is tricky too, because you need to recycle the old enzymes that fall apart since there is no where to dispose of them. It might be easier if you had a fat tank and then oxidized the fat elsewhere, but you still need to take care of having a decent level of enzymes since they naturally break down.
Oh, and you somehow need to use these enzymes to get eletrical energy, so I recommend something like eletron transport, requiring a membrane with pumps and carrier molecules and so on. Maybe this isn't the easiest way, because it sure isn't easy, or someone would have done it by now. But it actually might be worth it for huge batteries, like cars or something.
Let's see: If Apple used the Merom in a future Mac Mini, that should make it possible to shrink it to about 1/4 of its current volume.
Hmm.. Could make a nice little bookshelf build farm there.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
An FSB exists in all processors. On an AMD64, the FSB is the DDR memory bus directly, not an intermediate bus from processor to memory controller.
i ndex.x?pg=2
LOCK is an outdated instruction. It is used for indivisible memory accesses. This idea went out in 1990. Processors use MESI (or MERSI or MOESI) protocol now, because bus locking is not efficient (nor always even possible) in multi-processor systems.
See link:
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/opteron-x75/
MERSI works by having the two processors watch each other's memory accesses so they can keep their caches coherent, instead of locking.
Also note that the only CPU dedicated memory (outside of the register file) in a multi-processor system is the caches for each processor. So each AMD processor does have a dedicated link to its own caches, the bandwidth to that cache is reserved for that processor. But caches are relatively small, and switching tasks on a single core will flush out the cache about as much as moving to the other core anyway.
So I said processors don't talk to each other. I did oversimplify, but here's the gist of my comments. What good is 20GB/sec between processors? You don't need it to send a MERSI flag to other processors for each 32 bytes line accessed. You would need it to copy vast amounts of data between the processors, if you did that. Like I said, there is no instruction to copy data between processors, you must use memory to get between them.
Intel's effeciency is lower when accessing some areas that are highly contested between processors. But most areas of memory are "Shared", not Modified or Reserved by one processor.
AMD's system is better, but it's really easy to overstate the value of it.
We'll see if Intel goes to a system that allows cache line state signalling faster than the FSB. I would imagine their new chips (which can even use the L1 and L2 caches for one processor when the other is shut down) do this, at least when on the same die.
Putting the GPU on the HT bus would be interesting. It would have the negative side effect of causing the GPU to go through the CPU when it needs to access memory. That is because the memory controller is in the CPU on AMD systems. But it would seem that when accessing VRAM, the HT bus speed could be useful.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The development of the P4 was a technical failure, but it was also a valuable phase in Intel's life.
The drop in AMD marketshare from 20% to 11% demonstrates that the design succeeded in the marketplace. Intel won the MHz war.
Although they tried to extend it one generation too far with Prescott and are scrambling to redesign and remarket.
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> The development of the P4 was a technical failure,
Keep in mind that the P4 beat the Athlon K7 by almost every metric -- it was nearly always faster, it sold much better than the PIII, and it was much more cheaper to build and therefore more profitable. It wasn't until the K8 came out that P4 started looking bad.
Sure it wasn't a run-away success like the P6 design, but considering P4/Netburst had to fill the gap caused by Itanium's nearly total failure, it did well enough.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Fine. Replace "TCPA" ("Trusted Computing Platform Alliance", not "Trusted Computer Alliance") with "TCG", for "Trusted Computing Group".
Then go look at the TCG's member list. Note the appearance of "AMD" and "IBM" on the list. Then please explain to the audience how saying ""The Trusted Computer Alliance" doesn't exist anymore. They disbanded." somehow renders the replies to Mr. "go AMD!" invalid. (Perhaps AMD won't have any chips that support DRM, and perhaps IBM wouldn't have added DRM to chips for Apple, but it's not as if AMD and IBM are brave members of the Rebel Alliance against Trusted Computing.)
Make that "Mr. 'Go Advanced Micro'"; "Go AMD!" was what the deliverer of the aforementioned foot up the ass said when he pointed out that AMD and IBM are, just like Intel, members of the Trusted Computing(TM)(R)(LSMFT) group (whether it's the TCPA or the TCG).
MS's objection was to there being two different 64 bit *extensions* to x86, which is why Intel now produce AMD0-compatible processors (gotta love that one). Otherwise Intel would have made a completely different instruction set for x86, leaving you with potentially three sets: IA-64, AMD x86-64, Intel x86-64 (I say potentially, because the Itanium is dead).
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Given Intel's anticompetitive, predatory behavior against AMD, it's hard to tell how much of Intel's market share is due to having a competitive product and how much is due to them shutting AMD out of the market.
It's HAZARD. It is not hazzard -- you've been watching too many bad movies about redneck grey caps.
First of all, you don't need LOCK to make an OS. It turns out you don't even need MESI/MERSI! The OS I work on day to day works on hardware with no atomic operations at all and dual processors. There's some cool stuff in there, a lot of computer science I never knew.
But beyond that, if you can't figure out how to do the stuff with MESI/MERSI that you did with atomic operations before, then you need to go back to school. MESI has replaced atomic operations, you don't need bus locking, and you'll do a lot better if you don't use it. Power PC doesn't support bus locking at all.
I said that processors don't talk to each other. They don't. You're right, they do intersignal for cache coherency (MESI/MERSI). I mentioned this in my post. But most cache lines are Shared, they don't cause stop and wait hazards. [Multiple lines saying how NUMA is nice and Intel will adopt it deleted, just read the post you replied to for the info.]
I do not agree with your statements that crossing HT to the CPU won't affect the GPU. If you accept that bringing the memory controller onto the CPU was responsible for reducing memory latencies for the CPU, then you must also accept that moving the memory controller out of the north bridge will increase memory latencies for devices in the north bridge (GPU in this case).
Honestly, I don't accept either. But regardless, you can't have it both ways. Either there's no reason to move the memory controller to the CPU because it doesn't reduce latency, or else there is, but it will cause a slow down for the GPU on the north bridge.
Dual-ported VRAM is a no-go. VRAM isn't cost-effective. It would destroy the entire reason to move the GPU into the north bridge by making the overall system too costly.
The diagrams of the AMD workstations are misleading. Yes, they add more memory channels, but the problem is that the memory all occupies a single memory space. OSes don't know to keep data apart (partly because the programmer of even applications would have to hint it to do so). So one processor has to cross to the other to get its data at often.
Honestly, I don't see a future in splitting memory like that. It'd be better to just quad-interleave a single bank of memory and share it. Then, when only one processor is hitting memory (the other is stopped or in cache), you can use all the bandwidth for that single processor, instead of wasting it. And when both processors do both hit the memory, it's still no slower. This is all especially true when the cores are all in one package.
The marketing slide is funny. It says how you need fewer chips for a basic workstation (reduces cost). Except you've removed a few $1 Super I/O cores and $2 PCI-X bridges that could have been on a single chip for under $5. And in return? All you have to do is put in twice as much RAM at $50/stick. A steal.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Don't forget that BSD is always dying, but never dead (netcraft confirms it). Ok, this really is a troll -1 (see above).