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."

Comments

Power concerns

[bigwavejas]

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.

Re:Power concerns

[Epistax]

I agree however I believe at least 50% of our battery life extension will come from developing ways to use less stored energy instead of storing more.

Re:Good

[GamblerZG]

Is Intel Good(tm) now?
No, they just reached the limits of silicon technology. Increasing performance any further would require eather designing "smarter" (rather than faster) processor or using multiple cores.

Anyway, the trend is good indeed. Finally, people will start thinking about performance on the level of software.

So much for Moore's Law

[SiliconEntity]

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.

Re:So much for Moore's Law

[Aadain2001]

Intel engineers came out years ago and stated that they will be hitting the physical wall by 2010, if not sooner. And this isn't the 'we don't know how to get light any smaller' wall, it's the 'the gate is an atom thick' wall. Once you get that small, that's it, you can't get smaller using atoms. You'd have to goto subatomic particles to get smaller, which is a completely different ballgame.

And if anything, the battle between AMD and Intel should have taught everyone here on Slashdot that faster speed does not mean faster performance. There are MANY factors in architecture design that will improve or decrease overall performance. Sure, you can have a 4GHz CPU, but if it's cycles per instruction (CPI) is 100 while a 2GHz CPU has a CPI of 20, the 2GHz CPU will actually be FASTER than the 4GHz chip! Intel knows this, AMD knows this, and everyone who does serious computer design work knows this. Intel chose the wrong path with Netburst and they have known it for years. But you can't turn around one day, snap your fingers, and switch to another architecture company wide. It takes time, hard work, and a lot of people, which is why we are only seeing this change now and not back in 2002 like they would have wanted.

I'm happy with this change and I think playing with the architecture to get better CPI and instructions per cycle (IPC) is a better way to go than just cranking up the clock speed.