Intel Roadmap Update: The Art of Naming Processors

THG writes "CoolTechZone.com has compiled a list of Intel processors from its roadmaps, and discusses Intel's naming convention. According to the article, 'Gone are the days when processor names were something as simple as their clock speeds. If you wanted a nice and powerful 3GHz processor, you simply asked for a P4 3.0GHz and that was it. Ever since Intel has decided to revamp its naming conventions, the confusion makes you wonder if the whole idea of renaming was a smart move. Moving on with Intel and it's desktop endeavors, the problem is that if the names were as simple as stated above, we would've somehow managed to figure them all out. But someone at Intel obviously wanted to ensure that we don't remember processor names without having a 100-page manual on product families, so there are modifications to each series, which may or may not be consistent across different series.'"

Comments

ye good olde days of chip numbers

[G4from128k]

In the olden days, we didn't even have words. It was 8086, 8087, 80286, 80287, etc. No Optiums or Penturons back then.

Trademark issues drove Intel to make up processor names -- Intel couldn't stop competitors from selling non-Intel 80486 chips because chip numbering was a generic identification scheme in the electronics industry.

SPEC is not ideal

[vlad_petric]

Two problems with it:

• not really indicative of anything. Some of the workloads in SPEC are what a unix hacker would run (perl,gcc,bzip/gzip), but most other are very obscure pieces of software.
• "good at SPEC" is totally different from "good at server workloads". The former are generally CPU-bound, whereas the latter - memory bound (so for the former you want high clock and high machine width, for the latter, however, you want sh*tloads of caches). Also "good at SPEC" is different from "good at media" (the reasons are more complex)

Re:I thought they used...

[JeremyALogan]

It's worth mentioning (for the uninitiated) that the parent is refering to areas in and around Portland, OR. Intel's main campus is in one of the Portland suburbs. Some of the names they've used so far (off the top of my head):

Willamette - A river in Oregon. Runs north-south through Portland.
Prescott - A city in Oregon. Also a major street in North and North East Portland.
Madison - A street in Portland... not sure it it's much else...
Tualatin - A sothern suburb of Portland. Also a street in Portland.
McKinley - A city in Oregon.

Tillamook is a town in western Oregon known for it's cheese factory. ALSO a street in Portland :)

Re:And, yet, people continue to use P4's...

[Jerry Coffin]

Today I was at a meeting discussing computing issues for numerical simulations of particle physics being done on computers at CERN.
[...]
Nonetheless... on all the machines I've used there, /proc/cpuinfo says they're running P4's or P4-based Xeons. Wouldn't running Athlon 64's or Opterons (in 64-bit mode, since they're all on Linux) give better performance and less heat?

That depends on their code. Numerical simulations are mostly floating point that's often quite vectorizable. In that case, they could be using SSE2 quite a bit, which generally works better on the Intel chips -- but they probably won't get much benefit from this unless they're hand-optimizing at least a few of their inner loops. Most compilers can do some automatic vectorization, but they don't make good enough use of the capability to overcome the Intel chip's shortcomings elsewhere, as a rule.

OTOH, if they're doing a lot of vector math, they'd probably get considerably better performance still by writing the code to execute on the GPU instead. The obvious shortcoming of that would be accuracy problems -- the GPU's floating point is engineered far more to maximize speed than accuracy.

--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.