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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.'"

21 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Which innovation? by vitya404 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, I do think Fokker was a great guy, but whatever you say, the Wright brothers (or Whitehead) were the first to fly with a self-propelled plane. I could enumerate many other examples. It is great to have something that anybody can buy, but it is rarely the first step.

  2. Re:Which innovation? by Sique · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They just claim to have been flying first with a self propelled plane. Alberto Santos-Dumont was the first to show the large public himself flying in a self propelled airplane :) (and there is still this odd picture allegedly taken in 1902 showing him in one of the early constructions).

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    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  3. Re:Too Little, Too late? My Arse! by W33B · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Intel needs to accept that they lost this war, and focus on the 07-08 season

    You just made me want to go out and buy a K6 or a PIII with that dumbass comment, WTF are you on about 07-08 season!?

    Upgrading is not a seasonal thing except for the uber geek desperate to get the latest and greatest and I've got news for you...that is deffiantely not thier target audience and they have not yet lost the war!

    Dont get me wrong, I'm not an Intel fanboy but I think you are ill informed and probably have your head stuck so far up your front side bus that you are blind to the reality of the situation.

  4. IBM Power 6 @ 6Ghz by CypherOz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    IBM have Power6 chips running at 6Ghz. IBM have been able to do 4 cores with this new technology.

    Refer here

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  5. Re:wanna compare cpu speeds? by 80+85+83+83+89+33 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    sorry for the formatting, here it is easier to understand:

    a very simple perfomance check i love to run on every computer i come across:

    put windows calculator in scientific mode (yes, mathmatica or maple will do factorials in a fraction of the time, but try to post windows scores for comparison purposes....)

    type in 100,000

    hit the n! button

    ignore the warnings that it will take a long time, don't even bother clicking on "Continue", because the calculation is still going.

    and report how long it takes to complete a factorial of 100,000

    please report what CPU you have

    **64 bit XP is twice as fast

    celeron 800MHz (coppermine): 333 seconds (5min 33sec)

    1.4GHz celeron (tualatin) does it in 205 seconds

    P4 3.2Ghz and Athlon 3200+ both do it in about 80 seconds....

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  6. Re:Energy efficiency by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Does this means these new multicores will fry eggs even faster? I hate it when my meal isn't done in time!

    No - Sun manage to get four multithreading cores in their Niagra, and only run at 72 watts with 32 threads. see this

    However, with Intel's cores, I expect be able to have a hot dinner faster than you can say Microwave".

    --
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  7. Re:Innovative dick comparison by 10Ghz · · Score: 5, Interesting
    And I'm not talking about AMD, Intel is just as guilty for equaling innovation with "make that damn thing run faster".


    If they made their processors slower, then they would be "innovating"? What do you want processors to do, really? EVERYBODY wants their CPU to be as fast as possible. If you could choose between two identical CPU's, but one of them were twice as fast as the other, which one would you choose? the slower one? I doubt it. So why are you then whining as if making CPU's faster is a bad thing, since everybody wants faster CPU's? What benefit would there be in having slow processors?

    And they have been doing pretty interesting things in order to make it faster. Pentium Pro with the on-die cache, SIMD, multithreading etc. etc.. Hell, even Cell with it's SPU's was designed the way it is, so it would be as fast as possible. But according to you, that's not innovcation?

    ow that the ceiling is more or less reached and enough waste heat is generated to heat a medium sized home, they change the measurement. Instead of length, we compare circumference. One core, 2 cores, 4 cores, 8.a


    Uh, they are still comparing performance, the means to get performance has just been changed that's all. They are NOT adding cores for the sake of adding cores. They are adding cores in order to increase performance.

    But since you apparently think that making CPU's faster is not the way to go, why not share ith us what YOU want processors to do?
    --
    Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
  8. Re:wanna compare cpu speeds? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'll add this to the list:
    Opteron 146 (2.0GHz) : 43 seconds

    Now I know what is the purpose of 64bit desktop CPUs - extreme Calculator performance!

  9. Re:Too Little, Too late? by kfg · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Are you saying that everybody who is going to buy a dual-core processor has already bought one, and next such CPU's wont be sold until 2007-2008??

    No, what he is saying is that the early adopters, those who have legitimate imediate need and those who purchase simply because "it's better" have already bought one and that it won't be a conventional purpose for a couple more years.

    The Cycle: A concetration of buying from the early adopters, a slow dribble for awhile, then commodity buying.

    Poster is not suggesting that Intel won't sell any dual core chips, merely that they are entering the market just as the market shifts to slow dribble sales. That they've missed the boat on the early buyers who you rely on to return your capital investment.

    KFG

  10. Re:Advantages and disadvantages of multicore by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

            Multi-core processors require operating system (OS) support to make optimal use of the second computing resource.

    And that support exists in just about all OS'es already


    I've been talking to groups who are hitting scalability problems, i.e. not getting extra throuput with extra processors, even though they are using multi-threading with the correct threading design patterns. The problem is that while the solutions for that problem exist, they're not supported in the OS yet and are not likely to be. Part of this is because certain vendors are patenting the known solutions without bothering to provide any implementations.

  11. Re:Which innovation? by quad4b · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I get pretty tired of the Intel / AMD war. There is no innovation in these chips, just iterative improvement. IBM's Cell processor, although it may not succeed, is the first interesting architecture which has some weight behind it, to appear in years.

    Intel, AMD, who's better? Who cares.
    --
    Intelligence is no guarantee of wisdom
  12. Pentium M differs quite a bit my friend.... by macavity1977 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You *REALLY* need to look at the Pentium M...

    OS: Slackware Linux (Current)
    Application: kcalc (Comes with KDE)

    These are both ASUS laptops with PC3200 RAM:
    2.8 GHz Celeron:     65 secs
    1.6 GHz Celeron M: 18.5 secs

    This kind of makes you wonder now, doesn't it? It appears that the Pentium M achieves *quite* a bit more per MHz then the Pentium 4.

    Aside from that... the calculator in windows is obviously a joke, as the 1.6 GHz machine took 118 secs to do it in WinXP   >_<

  13. Re:Which innovation? by Sique · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The main accomplishment of the Wright Brothers was the steering. The principle of flying 'heavier than air' was shown to be sound before (Lilienthal et.al.), and the idea to have the plane being self propelled was obvious. It was just a matter of time until the gas engines were light and powerful enough.
    But it was the Wright's analysis of the bird flight, and the realisation that you have to have bendable wings and tail/front flaps to get to a controlled flight, that was really new. Ironically it was this idea that was published in the patent application of 1904, which enabled the other flight pioneers to get their planes ready until 1910.

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    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  14. Re:Innovative dick comparison by Splab · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The buzzword you are looking for is Extreme Multiprogramming. (Well ok, two words).

    Not to be mistaken for extreme programming. It's based on CSP (Communicating Sequential processes) - Occam, c++csp, jcsp etc. support this model originally made for transputer.

  15. Re:slightly off-topic by Tweekster · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ahh, but Intel doesnt use less power: Intel chip power usage only counts the power of the chip. AMD includes the on die memory controller. So if you add that factor and usage to the intel specs (for comparable features) then AMD is better...

    --
    The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
  16. Re:wanna compare cpu speeds? by Lonewolf666 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    PIII 800 (XP pro) 378 seconds (used msconfig to kill all crap running)
    474 seconds (lots of junk running)

    That one is interesting. So XP Pro has enough unnecessary stuff running by default to make it 25% slower??

    --
    C - the footgun of programming languages
  17. I Really Wonder by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I really wonder how many i486 cores -- quite a competent chip for the x86 archtecture, all things considered -- Intel could put onto a die if they decided to do so. And with a modern process technology, how fast they could run.

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
  18. Re:Heat Sink... literally! by zlogic · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There was a famous video clip made by Tom's hardware in 2002 (or something like that), where they took off the heatsink off an Athlon XP and Pentium 4 while the CPU processing lots of data:
    http://www4.tomshardware.com/images/THG_CPU_Coolin g.zip
    The AMD melted in 10 seconds, the temperature rising to something like 350 degrees Celcius, while the Pentium 4 lowered its FSB and continued working without any cooling for some time.
    However I think the situation would be the opposite today.

  19. Re:Too Little, Too late? by TubeSteak · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You got modded Funny, but I've closed the central heating vent to my room and I'm only running a 1.33 GHz AMD T-Bird

    My mid-tower puts out a lot of heat. Enough to keep my room warm, even with the door open.

    --
    [Fuck Beta]
    o0t!
  20. Re:Which innovation? by default+luser · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There is nothing "innovative" about Cell. Cell is basically multiple vector processors on a chip, and is a very predictable path for Sony after the release of the Playstation 2.

    Each Cell SPE is simply a highly-optimized vector unit with 128-bit registers. It is capable of operating on 4 32-bit operands per cycle, just like SSE2/3 and Altivec. The difference is, eache SPE runs an independent task, while the Altivec / SSE units execute vector instructions in parellel with normal operations. However, the SPE is cut down: it has no branch prediction hardware or out-of-order execution, and depends on the main processor filling and emptying its Load /Store memory.

    If you think the speed makes it innovative, think again: neither the Cell SPE nor its predecessor, the Emotion Engine, are IEEE754 compliant for 32-bit floating-point operations (for speed reasons). Cell can do IEEE754 compliant 64-bit floating point, but at an estimated speed hit of 10x, which makes it just "competitive" with existing solutions.

    Sony / IBM actually inflate the performance numbers of the SPE, advertising it as 25.6 GFLOPS. But this doesn't take into account that the two pipelines of the SPE are NOT flexible, and can only perform certain types of instructions. The "Even" pipe can do arithmetic, and the "Odd" pipe can do Load / Store / Permute / Branch. Thus, the maximum arithmetic thoroughput per SPE is cut in half, to 12.8 billion arithmetic operations per second, and the double-percision performance is just 1.28 billion arithmetic instructions per second.

    It's a nice idea for a media processor, but the complexity guarantees it will have a hard time finding buyers, and programmers for the Playstation 3 will be slow on optimization.

    I mean, really, can you really break down a game into more than a few concurrent tasks without going crazy trying to synchronize it all? In addition, how many of those independent tasks can be designed with few or no branches? In your average code, branches make up about 20% of instructions. With an 18-cycle penalty per-branch, you'd have to keep those SPE branches under 1% of all instructions to avoid a serious performance loss.

    --

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    And occasionally whores for Karma.

  21. Re:Number of apps depends on OS by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    You can blame most of that on the maximise button. Where Windows (and the awful UIs that imitate it) have a maximise button, MacOS has a zoom button. The zoom button makes the window big enough to see the entire document (or as much as can fit on screen). The maximise button puts the user back in single tasking mode by taking up all of the screen real estate. The zoom button encourages the user to have multiple windows open, which enhances productivity since it's rare to only need a single resource open at once. This is, perhaps, why multiple monitors are so popular with Windows users - you can maximise two windows at once.

    The other thing to blame is the window-is-the-application metaphor on Windows. It is impossible to close all of the windows of an application without it quitting using the Windows metaphor. This made sense back when everyone had 1-4MB of RAM and couldn't manage much more than one app open at once, but it doesn't now. On OS X, you can close all of the windows of an app, but still have it active. This is particularly useful when you want to close one document and open another in the same application. Without this, you need to do things in conceptually the wrong order, or quit and then re-launch the application.

    Finally, Windows has no 'Hide Application' functionality. If you want to stop working with an app for a few hours / days you have no way of easily moving it out of the way. You can minimise all of the windows, but then it takes up task bar space. A hide feature preserves the spacial relationship between windows, but doesn't take up any UI space. I find this a much nicer solution to cluttered desktops than virtual desktops (which introduce unnecessary modes into the system), since I can have any combination of applications visible at once easily.

    Note that this should not be considered a wholehearted endorsement of the OS X UI. It does a lot of things wrong, it just does fewer things wrong than most other systems.

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