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Intel Discusses Future Plans
heeeraldo writes "Tom's Hardware (unfortunately known for their one-page-stretched-into-nine articles, and endless ads) attended an Intel presentation about their future processor plans. The unsurprising bit: the endless march of additional cores. The surprising part: they're already focusing on 45nm processes." From the article: "Last week, Intel held a series of presentations at its Ronler Acres campus in Hillsboro, Oregon, whose facilities represent the main pillar of product design and manufacturing. These presentations included a short tour to the top-notch 65 nm production facility Fab D1D whose specifics Intel is currently replicating to other locations. The primary purpose of this show obviously was to convince around 80 analysts and journalists of the substantial health of Intel's 65 nm fabrication leadership, which is outputting new processors in high volume for launching new Pentium 4 6x1, Pentium D 900 and Core branded (known as Yonah) processors in early 2006."
The article is full of problems. Whitefield was canceled a couple of months ago:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27192
There is a lot wrong with the 45nm code names, and in general, it is lacking a lot of info.
If Intel gave him this info, it is blurring the lines for PR purposes, and somewhat flat out wrong. As of Friday, Whitefield was still dead, and the roadmap didn't match up with Intel's internal ones.
There is a bit of right there, but few if anything that can't be found at the usual places.
-Charlie
From what I heard, they are not going to use the Pentium brand any more after they kill off NetBurst.
Intel is also showcasing technology that allows for lower voltage leakages. Lower voltage leakages in their chips mean less power having to be pumped into the core, which means lower heat dissipation requirements. The heat savings are huge on laptop because excess heat requires fans, which need power and create noise. On desktops, Apple can use their water-cooling system, but on laptops, not so much.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
VIA bought Cyrix and is basically just doing low-power stuff with them.
Putting them in micro and nano ATX boards, etc...
If you're using Firefox + AdBlock, those stupid things can be banished by adding *.intellitxt.* to the filter.
AMD has significant leads in both manunfacturing technology and cpu design. The specific AMD technology leads over Intel right now are their dual-stress liner technology, SOI, their use of hypertransport, and their implementation of the on-die memory controller. These are the areas that AMD has a 1-2 year lead in. The newest AMD Fab was built for 65 nm and can later move to 45 nm. AMD leads in other areas have allowed them to place less reliance on clock speed increases and process shrinks to achieve performance goals, in contrast to Intel for which clock speed and process shrink seem to be its primary performance tools. Clock speed topped out for Intel so now they have only process shrinks left. There is a lower limit on process shrinks as well due to physical limits so Intel is probably also scrambling desperately to catch up in the areas where AMD has surpassed them. Unfortunately for Intel, there are likely to be no quick paths to implementing the things that AMD has spent years developing.
I remember from an article a few days back: "While the Yonah is slightly behind the Athlon X2 in performance, it outputs less heat under load than the Athlon X2 does when idling."
That preview from Anandtech failed to mention some key aspects necessary for comparison, such as: was Cool 'n Quiet enabled on the Athlon 64 processor?
But there was also no conjecture that took into account the comparison between a desktop and laptop chip. The Yonah, like Dothan and Turion will be binned based on a lower full-load operating voltage. The X2 desktop dual-core runs at 2.0 GHz with 1.35v, and idles at 1GHz at 1.1v. The Turion MT line, on the other hand, is much more aggressive: 1.2v full-speed, full-load, 1.0v at 800 MHz idle. The difference in power consumption is huge.
The fact that Anandtech didn't elaborate on the reality of the situation just speaks of their sensationalist writing style. When AMD releases their X2 Turion MT next year, it will be competitive.
And yes, while Yonah is a laptop chip, the desktop version of it isn't going to be far above that; the whole platform was designed to tweak for effecienty.
I expect Merom will use significantly more power than Yonah, and be in the same realm as desktop A64 processors. Do expect it to use a higher full-load voltage than Yonah. Do expect it to not turn off the second core when not loaded. Do expect the power-saving cache design to be deactivated as well, so the chips can be competitive in performance.
Yonah turns off the second core when not in use, thus negating one of the really nice features of dual-core (zippy responsiveness, even under load). If you want that benefit, Yonah uses twice as much power at idle. Otherwise, you have to wait for the monitoring software to pick up on the increased load and wake up the second core. No doubt, AMD will do the same thing with their Turion X2 offering...this is just intended to highlight the power consumption perspective between the deaktop and mobile versions.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.