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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."
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
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?
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)
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 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?
Yes, but you with the size of games today, you won't have enough time to actually load Level 3 before your battery runs out.
I bet hard disks and Cd-roms are sucking down a lot of power today compared to teh CPU. The new solid-state storage ideas look cool in helping with that.
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.
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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.
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.
So much for that nonsense about increasing CPU performance
:)
First the OB-peeve: Moore's Law has nothing to do with clock speed or relative performance, only that the number of transistors per unit of area will double every X months (where X lies between 12 and 18, depending on which "version" of his law you use).
Okay, that taken care of...
AMD and Intel hit a barrier "harder" than the mere doubling of transistors... They reached a point where running a PC noticeably increases the electric bill (a typical single-core P4 costs around $1.50 per month to run 24/7 in the Northeastern US, just for the CPU, not counting the graphics card, monitor, hair dryer, or whatever other power-sucking toys you might have attached); and relatedly, that high density of power consumption requires getting rid of a proportional amount of heat.
By dropping the energy requirements by a fifth, you can consequently have five times as many cores for the same heat-dissipating capacity. If each of those pushes a mere half the numerical performance of the single power-hungry core, you still get a net gain of 1.5 units of processing per unit of area.
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.