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Intel Looks Beyond the Microchip
Dr Occult writes "BBC reports about upcoming major changes in Intel in 2006. The current Intel core, the Pentium, is on its way out and is to be replaced by a new chip called 'Core'. These new Core chips come in two flavours. Solo Core is a single core processor, and Duo Core is a dual core processor. Intel has also announced the Viiv standard. Viiv is less technology and more a shopping list of technologies. Aimed at the home entertainment market, it defines the latest generation of media centres that are capable of playing anything from MP3 songs to high-definition films."
In other news, AMD keeps looking at the microchip, because they're winning at it.
Note to mods: I'm probably being sarcastic.
"The current Intel core, the Pentium, is on its way out and is to be replaced by a new chip called 'Core'. These new Core chips come in two flavours. Solo Core is a single core processor, and Duo Core is a dual core processor."
How the hell did this make the front page? "Core Solo|Duo" is just what Intel calls their single, dual core processors now (remember, generic names are not worth anything to them, they must have a brand name). But is it news for nerds? Hardly.
I would assume there are plans for these, would seem to make sense based on their naming convention. :-P).
Goodbye mhz race, hello core race (not that it hasnt been on for a while
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Ironically, all of those things listed under "Intel looks beyond the microchip" are based on microchips.
"All microprocessor chips have a core. The current Intel core, the Pentium, is on its way out, to be replaced by a new core, called "Core".
It all sounds a bit like Intel's hijacking a technical term and trying to turn it into a brand name."
I've never really thought about this, but could it lead to confusion and/or lawsuits with regards to the AMD multi-core chips? I certainly wouldn't put such a hope past Intel.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
I don't think this article is really saying much, except for the fact that Intel is going to try to put their chips in everything (DVD players, appliances, etc). From a technology/research standpoint, this kind of worries me. Does this suggest that Intel is trying to secure their future by broadening their market because they can't produce new technology? As much as I love AMD, I hope that competition continues between the two chip-makers for a long, long time.
the "wonderful" macbook in all its intelness: http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/intelcoreduo.html also for those wanting to see intels take on its chip: http://www.intel.com/products/processor/coreduo/
And thus began the four thousand years long war of Core vs. ARM, depleting the resources of an entire galaxy...
TCP/DRM....
No thanks. Buh-bye Intel. I recently made the switch to AMD but I fear that will be short lived.
As much as I despise any product from China, I fear that some of us freedom rebels will have to resort to underground TCP/DRM-free chips.
I think they were working on a new chip called the Dragon or something like that.
I don't care about watching HD anything on my PC. I don't listen to music on my PC.
But I'll be damned if I'll be forced to replace all my stuff just because Mega-Corp(tm) decides that we all must comply and submit.
Freedom Fries and all that stupidity. It's all for our own good you know.
I think they should rename the new TCP/DRM chips the "INGSOC Chip"..
it's probably the worst story submision in the history of this site.
it is SO clueless - it is obvious that the submitor and (much worse) the submiting editor - are both clueless and have no buisness posting anything on a tech site. the headline "intel looks beyond the microchip" is missleading. I know that it hints about intels foray into platform, rather then componant solutions - but that IS'NT evident in the story submition.
VIIV and core have been ALL OVER the tech sites for two months (at least) - there is simply nothing new in this story.
Especially since the new core is actually just a new variant of the P6 core that's been their standard core since the Pentium Pro.
I agree, any CPU can run word anyway. CELL would be a good, possibly wonderfull general purpose desktop CPU.
Well done Intel - spend millions building up the Pentium brand, then throw it away for something no-one can pronounce.
Also, well done for adding to the general confusion by calling your new chips "Core". You must be so prowd of your marketing deparment.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
BBC reports about upcoming major changes in Intel in 2006
I hope by "upcoming" the article submitter meant "currently happening". It seems that the linked article doesn't actually mention the chips as upcoming and correctly treats them as a shipping product though so really only the submitter looks silly.
I think that the number of cores is going to be the "megahertz" of the 2010s (no prizes for making this observation). It seems that Moore's law continues on, but the limits of electronics prevent higher clock rates so now it is all about adding cores (in its original form, Moore's law refers to a doubling of the number of circuits per linear dimension). What I would really like to see is a chip with about 512 80486 cores on it ... that would be sweet.
Therefore sure it should be impossible to have a valid trademark? Remember the reasoning behind "Pentium" rather than "586"?
So what is the "TM" doing on it?
This "change" is more likely a marketing thing. If the marketing folks don't change everything every few years, they start to look idle.
theyll have a hard time marketing their CPUS in few years, and will end up with a mess on their hands, while AMD "leaps ahead"
Solo Core -current
Duo Core -current
Quadra Core?
Penta Core? or Viiv Core?
Octa Core?
Hexa Core?
as the numbers of cores increase, and they will! the names will get more rediculous, and harder for the average John Doe to pronounce
Sounds like Intel's marketing department handed this to the BBC on a plate - Unfortunately, I think most average people will read this looking forward to viiv and the associated "enhanced" digital media experience. Only after everyone buys one of these new computers will we really know the inconvenience DRM will cause. With any luck PC mod chips may start to surface in a few years otherwise I think I'll just start to listen to radio more and only buy compact discs (if they are still around and don't feature root kits).
Excuses Are Like Assholes - Everybody's Got One
No gamer would touch it- it would make the GPU non-upgradable.
Besides, we have specialized cores- thats why there's a PCI bus. Need a specialty core, drop in a DSP with a PCI interface. Thats also another reason why we don't need specialized CPU cores- today's CPUs have so much idle time its silly to buy specialized hardware.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
They are just changing brand names. They are dropping the Pentium brand name because it is 10+ years old and switching to a brand name that highlights only how many cores each processor has. The underlying tech is the exact same.
Thought slashdot editors were nerds and would know this.
Actually I have a friend that worked at Intel and their project was to start designs on an entirly new pc, new case, board, power supply and cpu. I dont know the ins and outs of it but that was 4 years ago so who knows whats coming.
The "Current Pentium Core"... WTF!?
The "Pentium" now bares NO resemblance to the old 120Mhz thing I have at home! The PPro, PII, PII share some heritage (barely). The original Pentium stands alone (still a good design IMHO). P4 shares no heritage with the earlier chips and has had major changes over the last few years (the pipeline and trace cache have changed a lot).
I didn't realise Intel were still selling the old Pentium core at all... Hmmm... Something smells like BS.
It's time the BBC got some decent, technically competent journos on board. Sheesh. I read more tech crap on there than just about anywhere.
Yours Narked,
Major Frigme Poppleheat Fresharse the Third (Mrs)
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I am throwing away my keyboard and replacing it with a new device called the Keyboard!
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
It's probably just a way to try to regain market that AMD has taken away from them. Intel for the most part dominates the notebook processor business, but over the past couple years has lost a sizeable amout of market in the desktop industry to AMD. Intel is probably trying to start fresh so to speak. The Pentium chip has been around for 10+ years now, and the Pentium 4 chip has also been around for a couple years. Some people, more the "not so computer people" could equate that length of time with obsolete, although that is not entirely true. While I'm sure Intel could use a better naming sense, I'm not suprised that they're trying to reshape their image. I switched to AMD when I built my desktop computer last April and I'm happy I did. In my opinion, AMD is better designed and performs better for my needs. If more people follow suit and see the things the way I do, which seems to be the way things are heading, Intel could be in some trouble. This is probably just Intel's way of fighting back to regain the market for desktop processors again.
What's the matter, James? No glib remark? No pithy comeback?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... that they're looking beyond the microchip in order to focus on marketing.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Given the way Intel seems to be determined to make the thing trade markable by adding a qualifier (as in "Core duo"), someone is going to have to recruit a classicist to tell them what to do after "Core trio". When they get to, say, 160 cores on one chip, that will be one seriously unpronounceable brand name. Perhaps they will go for Roman numerals and we will have to try and work out whether a Core CXXXXVIII outranks a Core CDX.
Or perhaps they could just move all marketing and microprocessor development to Israel. There are plenty of prophets left after Yonah, and the names are likely to be more familiar.
Pining for the fjords
If the marketing folks don't change everything every few years, they start to look idle.
Marketing: The ability to spout nonsense, have management steer the company based on the nonsense, and draw a healthy paycheck for all this.
So you're absolutely right. The marketing people were starting to look idle and unnecessary, so they stepped up the "We need to make a gigantic change for no reason" nonsense until management bit.
In related news, this marketing construct makes it out that if you only buy Itanium 2 servers and Centrino laptops, you only need one person in your IT staff, and that person is idle most of the time. Coincedence? I think not.
It's clear that the marketing people are gunning for the IT people, so I hereby call for a preemptive strike.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Hey, the advertising said Apple were doing great things with the Core.
Don't tell me advertising lied!?!
Blank until
"Viiv"
See? No problem.
-
Intel is merely capitalizing on Apple's move to their chipset. After all, since the CPU is the center of the computer, the new Intel processors will be the "Apple's Core!" Ha! Hah!
Thank you! I'll be here all weekend. Don't forget to tip your waitress.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
It's grow or die in this market...
I've always sortof questioned that whole mantra. Yeah, so it ends up being true, but it seems more like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me than some kind of universal truism. Businesses think that they have to be always increasing, increasing, increasing . . . there's only a limited amount of stuff on this planet, period! You can't just increase everything forever. But alas, if you increase faster than your competitors, then you beat them and buy them out and everyone on that side jumps ship. Thus the ground-rules of "grow or die" are set up. Sustainable? Bah! Just as long as we're doing better than the competition at this moment.
And then . . . you have the entire market bouyed by this constant running-away from the bottom line. So as soon as you stop growing, the reality catches up; it's only that ever-accelerating pace, that continuous inflation, that keeps most companies alive now. You create markets artificially, then demand goes away so you run as fast as you can to the next ad-hoc market . . .
Yeah, the PC market is saturating . . . but don't worry, there'll be something else for you to buy soon! Then again, the PC market has saturated a couple of times. Look at many of the tasks we do, or the programs we run; they could be done a hell of a lot more efficiently, but they sprawl out and take up power and energy, the industry perpetuates itself.
That is in fact the point of Vista, or more topically the random things that Intel is spouting off that it's going to do now. Doing all the things that you could, technically, do already . . . but in a shiner package that you'll have to buy if you want to interoperate with everyone else doing these things with their own shiny packages now.
(random related example: MSN. It's just text messages, you'd think one would be able to do that on Win95, right? But MS won't let those old versions work with the new-stuff now, so awhile back when I was setting up an old computer to just use for e-mail and chat and so forth, I went and installed an old Jabber client. Gee, howabout that, it works. But it's not in Microsoft's interests to be distrubuting a client theirselves that can work . . . the tasks that the older systems could easily perform are re-written to require newer stuff that people have to go out and buy. Versioning alone has probably been the biggest thing behind keeping the PC and PC Software industry afloat).
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
...play HDCP protected content at full resolution? Intel, constructing and overcoming inconsequential technical herdles, one failed DRM implementation at a time.
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
A fixed platform would have advantages for game development, if you could convince framerate and resolution obsessed PC gamers to keep their boxes for 5 years. Instead of the constant upgrade treadmills, force developers to actually write good, efficient code.
Wow... Lots of bitter people in here... The article doesn't help much, as it gives practically no interesting details.
The Core chips are Yonah. Frankly, they're one of the more interesting products to come out of Intel. Lets face it, the P4 core was.... Hot? Heheheh. Yonah is based off the M chips. They're fast, efficient, and low power. Expect multiple cores to be the future. As we all know, it's getting harder to get more computing power from pure speed. Tacking on "cores" is the wave of the future. Both Intel and AMD have already stated they'll be making 4 core chips... This is a Good Thing for us consumers!
Centrino is/was a great success for the company. VIIV is an attempt to repeat this. VIIV is, like Centrino, a whole package (chip+chipset with features). VIIV actually has some interesting bits to it. It's got an instant on/off feature. It's got decent onboard sound with composite out for connection to your stereo. It's low power, especially when compared to a P4 system. Throw wireless in there, all the bells and whistles, and you've got a chipset and chip made for quietly sitting in the living room.
I don't know about you, but i'm a silence freak. This fills me with an enthusiasm I haven't had in a while.
To top that off, Intel went and made deals with Media Folk to get content to send to the VIIV computers. I'm fairly certain they left the DRM up to MS. This also excites me. Not for the content. I don't watch TV, and could care less about it on my computer. However, someone needed to beat the media people over the head. Intel is doing that, and they deserve some props for that. No one else was doing it....
In Summary... I'm excited. You're all bitter. That article sucked.
I read this last night and dismissed it as the usual dumbed-down BBC tech story as soon as I got to the bit where they called them Duo Core and Solo Core, when the branding is very much Core Duo and Core Solo - they even had a picture in the story with the name the right way round!
And then it gets copied into a blurb on the front page of /. - I thought if you just copied from the article you were supposed to say so?
Bah.
Can you tell I ran out of coffee today?
Thats why game consoles exist- to do just that. It won't get popular on PCs- the idea behind PCs is expandability.
Besides which- I *have* a specialized graphics GPU. No need to puyt it on die with my CPU, there's no adbanage to it. In fact, since yiel is exponentially proportional to die area, it would make chips MORE expensive due to lower yield.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The way Viiv is described in the summary sounds like a modded xbox running XBMC. Go figure.
i would love to still be working at CompUSA when the pentium name is finally dropped for good so that when a customer comes in looking for a new computer and says 'I don't care whats in it, I just need a Pentium 4', I can say, 'oh sorry maam, Pentium 4's don't exist anymore, how bout this AMD64'.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
I'm looking beyond the microchip at the nanochip swarm. A thousand chiplets, each containing just a few thousand programmable gates (like unbundled little FPGA clumps). Each signalling its state on an RF radio. With only a local clock, not a lockstep one wasting chiplet cycles. And a universal phased array for multichannel 1Gbps IO, 1TB Flash, 1Kdpi OLED and a holosonic projector.
--
make install -not war
Your skepticism is understandable, but Merom/Conroe really is abandoning the old NetBurst architecture with something new, designed from the beginning with performance-per-watt in mind.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Great quote from wikipedia: DRM features to combat copyright infringement and consumer rights.
No. Forms like IX for 9 are scribe contractions, and I've never seen a form like CIIL (I've spent time in most of the main European cathedrals and I like reading tombstone inscriptions, so this is anecdotal but based on evidence.)
Pining for the fjords
Meh. Intel still offloads all memory accesses to an external chip, so they are severely starved for memory if two memory-intensive processes are running. AMD gets around all of that with their hypertransport. I think that's what everyone on /. is waiting for.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Looking beyond the microchip one has to wonder if it's going to be a macrochip? or a picochip? or what? :)
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
Too true... Intel does have a sucky FSB. I've heard nothing in the plans but to throw more cache at the problem. It works, but... Yeah...
:D
Heh, I think i've officially become an Old Geek. I don't really care about performance anymore. I'm running a 2.4g Northwood P4. I UNDERCLOCK it so I can put quieter fans on it. I've got a quiet heatsink/fan on my video card.
Chips are fast enough. I can extend the life of my computer for a long time yet by throwing RAM and video cards at it.
I want quiet.... I want features.... Performance is good enough for HL2 and WoW. I'm Happy.
Yup. I underclock my Athlon 2400+ to a 2000+ or so in my media center. But I've just found that performance/dollar, and per watt lately as well, AMD by far wins out over Intel. Which means that in my book, AMD still wins even on low-noise systems.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
VIIV, looks like and ASCII diagram of a collar and tie? Sony PC, now with VAIO and VIIV?
Viiv is to multimedia what Centrino was to wireless networking. (An approved parts list and a sticker for the OEM to put on the case.)
You can't trademark a number, which is why Intel switched.
If you couldn't trademark a common word, then it wouldn't be "Microsoft Windows (TM)", "Microsoft Word (TM)", and my favorite "Microsoft Money (TM)".
Besides, nowhere on Intel's website do you see it called "Core". You see it called "Core Duo", or "Core Solo". (And what's with all the press reversing the order? It's an official name, "Core Duo", like "Athlon 64" or "Windows XP". They don't call it "XP Windows", or "64 Athlon".)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
VI = 6
IV = 4
VIIV = 64! Isn't that COOOL!
Hm, I wonder if we're being subjected to the scrapings of Intel's marketing brainpans.
Actually, I wonder if Intel is just tossing up their hands at 64-bit Pentiums and just 'moving on' - but making it a marketing "win!". I'm assuming though, that the "Core" (What a totally unique name! Can't wait till they try to trademark it!) core is 64-bit.