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Intel Unveils New Chips to Battle AMD
An anonymous reader writes "Reuters is reporting that chip giant Intel hopes to get back on track in their continued market share war with AMD when they unveil a new line of chips at their upcoming twice-annual developers forum. From the article: 'AMD, once content to mimic Intel's advances, has set the technological pace in recent years with innovations such as putting two processing cores in a single chip -- moves that have helped it gobble market share from its much-larger rival.'"
Advantages
* Proximity of multiple CPU cores on the same die have the advantage that the cache coherency circuitry can operate at a much higher clock rate than is possible if the signals have to travel off-chip, so combining equivalent CPUs on a single die significantly improves the performance of cache snoop operations.
* Assuming that the die can fit into the package, physically, the multi-core CPU designs require much less Printed Circuit Board (PCB) space than multi-chip SMP designs.
* A dual-core processor uses slightly less power than two coupled single-core processors, principally because of the increased power required to drive signals external to the chip and because the smaller silicon process geometry allows the cores to operate at lower voltages.
* In terms of competing technologies for the available silicon die area, multi-core design can make use of proven CPU core library designs and produce a product with lower risk of design error than devising a new wider core design. Also, adding more cache suffers from diminishing returns.
Disadvantages
* Multi-core processors require operating system (OS) support to make optimal use of the second computing resource.[1] Also, making optimal use of multiprocessing in a desktop context requires application software support.
* The higher integration of the multi-core chip drives the production yields down and are more difficult to manage thermally than lower density single-chip designs.
* From an architectural point of view, ultimately, single CPU designs may make better use of the silicon surface area than multiprocessing cores, so a development commitment to this architecture may carry the risk of obsolescence.
* Scaling efficiency is largely dependent on the application or problem set. For example, applications that require processing large amounts of data with low computer-overhead algorithms may find this architecture has an I/O bottleneck, underutilizing the device.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-core
They also need to name their chips better to actually differentiate more simply between their lines.
Telling a customer the difference between a Pentium D, Pentium 4, Pentium 4 EE, Celeron D is hard enough without actually having to know what chips are out and what is offering the best performance for price. It feels a lot like market saturation sometimes.
AMD at least is a little bit simpler to follow.
sorry for the bad formatting, but the lamness filter is killing the proper layout.
factorial times for "100,000!"
look at the two athlons running at 2.0GHZ (3200+ and 2400+) and notice how it is frequency dependant
P4 3.2GHz 81 seconds
athlon XP 3200+ (2.2GHz socket A, barton)81 seconds
Pentium 930 dualcore (3.0GHz) 82 seconds
P4 3.0GHz (laptop) 90 seconds
Pentium 920 dualcore (2.8GHz) 90 seconds
athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz socket 939, venice) 91 seconds
athlon XP 2400+ (2.0GHz) 93 seconds
athlon XP 2100+ 106 seconds
athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) 121 seconds
athlon mobile XP 1800+ (1.52GHz) 122 seconds
celeron 2.7 GHz (northwood core) 130 seconds
celeron 1.4GHz (tualatin) 205 seconds
athlon 900 (thunderbird) 228 seconds
(used msconfig to disable everything)
celeron 1.1GHz 253 seconds
celeron 800MHz (win98) 333 seconds (5min 33sec)
celeron 800MHz (XP pro) 373 seconds
PIII 800 (XP pro) 378 seconds (used msconfig to kill all crap running)
474 seconds (lots of junk running)
PIII 450MHz (underclocked coppermine) 490 seconds
PII 333MHz 686 seconds
PII 300MHz 760 SECONDS
P 166MHz 2417 seconds
P 100MHz ~4000 seconds (66 minutes)
P 75MHz 5330 seconds (1:28:50)
i disable sigs
Ironically, the AMD64 series CPU's have no front side bus. This includes the X2 series. They have a hypertransport bus, which is similar but different. This is one of the premier reasons that the X2/Opterons scale so much better than the Intel equivalents, they do not have a saturated FSB as they have direct HTT links CPU-CPU.
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
Well, there's been tons of innovaton at Intel. Even just looking at the CPU side, between the speeds you list:
100 MHz (1994): DX4 (P24C), Pentium (P54 version) - both, AFAICR were 0.6 um processes, and the DX4 had a 33 MHz bus and the P100 had a 50 MHz bus. I can't remember which was released first though. 600 MHz (Summer 1999): Pentium III (Katmai), the first rev of Pentium III, which was a new revision of the P6 core used in the PPro and PII chips. It had a new instruction set, SSE, and 512MB (external) L2 cache and a 100 MHz bus. Like the Pentium II, it also had Intel's MMX instructions for 64-bit SIMD integer operations. 1 GHz (Spring 2000): Still a Pentium III, though now with 133 MHz FSB and smaller (256MB), on-die L2 cache. No real changes from the 600 MHz version, but then it's only 2/3 faster again - and Intel were working on the Netburst architecture for the Pentium 4 and had somewhat taken their eye off the ball at this point. 4 GHz does not exist. Currently P4EE is at 3.73 GHz, but the clock speed race is over.Intel gambled on Netburst, which was designed to get faster rapidly, and scale all the way from the 1.4 GHz at launch to 6 or 7 by now. Yes, they lost, but that doesn't mean that they weren't innovative - it's just that their process teechnology couldn't keep up, and failed to meet predictions. That's not the CPU designers' fault.
The earlier processors did scale fantastically well (486 16->120 MHz; P6 150->1400 MHz) but they hit an unexpected brick wall this time, so they've gone around it with clever scheduling and power management, and doing dual core versions of what is essentially a new rev of the P6. There's plenty of innovation in that chip too...
Also, remember that during the same timeframe, they've invented and developed the PCI, PCI Express and Universal Serial Bus(es). Pretty innovative, really, IMHO.
And yes, I'm typing this on an Athlon 64 and all 3 of my home PCs are AMD-powered.