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

Re:Power concerns

[RAMMS EIN]

Batteries have been around for a long time, and people have been working on increasing their capacity since long before laptops became popular. While breakthroughs can basically come at any time, it's far more realistic to look at advances in electronics to get longer battery lives.

Moore's law is of particular interest here. Every 18 months, the size of the electronics we can manufacture halves. This results in better power efficiency (possibly due to shorter links, thus less resistance).

Up until recently, Intel and AMD had mainly used this to ramp up the performance of their CPUs. This has lead to ridiculously fast CPUs, much faster than what is actually needed (I run a VIA Eden at 266 MHz, and it does everything I want just fine). The price is vast power consumption and heat production.

However, if we keep CPU performance constant, we can use the advances in manufacturing process to get less power-hungry CPUs. If you also actually try to cut down on power consumption, you can get a long way. Freescale (formerly Motorola) has been doing this for a while, and last time I checked, their G4s would use between a 5th and a 10th of the power of an Intel Pentium 4 of comparable performance. My iBook gets 6 hours of use out of its battery; try finding that in a PC laptop.

It's good that Intel has jumped on the bandwagon and started caring about performance within reasonable power consumption levels, rather than raw MHz. It's a bit of a pity that they killed Transmeta in the process, but I can't really blame them; they are not a charity, after all. Maybe we will be seeing affordable PC laptops that run on battery power long enough for a day of following classes in the near future.

And BSD

[ProfessionalCookie]

Don't forget that BSD is always dying, but never dead (netcraft confirms it). Ok, this really is a troll -1 (see above).