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.'"

Comments

Which innovation?

[hyc]

Of course, IBM had multicores years ago, so AMD wasn't really the innovator on that front.

Re:Which innovation?

[cfx666]

>Of course, IBM had multicores years ago,
So did SUN with their UltraSparc platform. But for the consumer market this really was something new.

Cfx

Re:Which innovation?

[vitya404]

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.

Re:Which innovation?

[Sique]

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).

Re:Which innovation?

[dunstan]

No, IBM were first with the dual core Power. Sun have now leapfrogged ahead with Niagara, which not only has 8 cores but has four threads per core, so the OS sees a single processor as a 32 way system.

Re:Which innovation?

[Bert64]

But that's multiple physical processors on a single board, that's no more sophisticated than a dual processor motherboard.

Re:Which innovation?

[samkass]

There was large amounts of photographic evidence of the Wright brothers' accomplishments, some of which was lost in the Ohio floods early in the 1900's, and some of which survives today. Needless to say, NO ONE is documented to have flown out of ground effect, nor make a coordinated turn, until the Wright brothers demonstrated their plane publicly in France. By 1906 when Santos-Dumont made his little hop, the Wright brothers were flying for 20-30 minutes at a time at heights of 100 feet before spectators from the US Army as well as others in his town.

The Wright brothers didn't demonstrate publicly because they were in it for more than a hobby. Not being an independently wealthy tinkerer, they wanted to make their living making airplanes, and realized that they had the only viable design anyone had come up with, so not trusting the patent system, held out until they could secure agreements with various military organizations. They were engineers more than scientists.

Much of the "evidence" of earlier flight, including claims that Ader flew in the late 1800's, was concocted to try to overturn the Wright brothers' patents on their system of differing the angle of attack of the two wings in order to bank the plane. (Almost no one had banked planes before, either... most others were still thinking of planes like ships that would use the rudder to steer, which at those speeds every pilot now knows would lead to a stall.) Newspaper reports from before the patent battle clearly admit the Wright brothers unique invention, while those after the patent battle try to find almost anyone else to assign the invention to. As most know, though, the Wright brothers won every patent battle they faced and the only "evidence" of earlier flight lies in retellings of myths on sites like wikipedia.

Re:Which innovation?

[justthinkit]

And why do you arbitrarily pick the thing that the Wright brothers achieved as the first significant step? The Wright brothers, even if you accept their disputed claim, were merely the first to fly with a self-propelled plane. But surely a far greater achievement was that of by the glider pioneers who preceded them by decades - Otto Lilienthal and the like - who actually proved that a heavier-than-air machine could fly, and built up the basic understanding of wings and aerodynamics without which the Wright brothers would never have had a frame to strap their engine into?

The progression of gliding begins with a child holding a piece of paper above their head, then jumping. After that it is only about flight duration.

Wright innovations like realizing that the propeller was like the wing, and designing both for maximum lift (unlike everyone else), using a wind tunnel (unlike anyone else) to a level of propeller efficiency comparable to propellers made 100 years later IS remarkable.

As is their work with engines. I believe it was about 5 horsepower but about as heavy as a modern automotive engine. And, as mentioned earlier, their work with control services, introducing one that no one else had ever used before.

In short, comparing gliders to airplanes is like comparing the typewriter to the computer.

Re:Which innovation?

[Sique]

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.

Re:Which innovation?

[default luser]

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.

Re:Which innovation?

[owlstead]

Basically, I don't think too many game creators will program the cell vectors directly. They'll just use the correct API's to make use of all that power. Let the 3D, audio and physics engine worry about the cells...

http://news.com.com/PlayStation+3+chip+goes+easy+o n+developers/2100-1043_3-5476933.html

Don't know if the above link says this, but I googled it up, and lets hope it is right.

Intel giving in to the pressure

[grindcorefan]

Does anyone really wonder why Intel's announcement are getting so much press coverage lately?

Well, I don't wonder. It's all looking like good old IBM vs. Amdahl again. Surprising though that Intel seems to think they need to resort to FUD already. Perhaps they really think the heat is on.

Re:Intel giving in to the pressure

[Nuffsaid]

No doubt, the heat is on their processors!

Re:Intel giving in to the pressure

[vhogemann]

Does anyone really wonder why Intel's announcement are getting so much press coverage lately?

Probably because everyone wants to know what Apple will be using on their computers a year from now ;-)

Innovative dick comparison

[Opportunist]

Where's the innovation? And I'm not talking about AMD, Intel is just as guilty for equaling innovation with "make that damn thing run faster". Instead of shifting gear, they just basically upped the engine speed. 100 MHz, 600 MHz, 1 GHz, 4 GHz... now 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...

Where is that innovation?

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[cfx666]

The innovation is that the good old software you are running does not automatically profit from cpu upgrades any more. So you need some new which is a good thing for me, cause Im a software developer.

Cfx

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[10Ghz]

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?

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[smash]

I see your point, but really, who cares?

Up till now, pushing Mhz has likely been the cheapest way of ramping up speed.

At the end of the day, I couldn't give a crap whether or not my CPU that performs X teraflops does it by running a "dumb" core at extreme speed, or runs a really complex core at slow speed.

Now is the time to get into the nitty gritty of making chips more efficient, now we've exploited the cheap and easy ways...

smash

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[gormanly]

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.

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[khellendros1984]

I'm guessing that the gp is referring to picking a single aspect of processor performance, and equating that single aspect directly to performance of the machine, i.e. "1200Mhz will always perform faster than 1000Mhz". No manufacturer says this (that I know of), but so many consumers take it as a given, when the only number quoted to them concerning a processor is clock speed.

That isn't to say that I agree with the grandparent, though. Intel's Pentium-m processors are pretty nifty...lower power usage, high performance (compared to a P4).

So, while it may not be some amazing quantum leap, I'd say that Intel is showing plenty of innovation, at least from the standpoint of the consumer market.

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[big_gibbon]

How about making them run cooler and more efficiently, and hence quieter since they wont need 3 fans pointing at them? The best chip that intel have made in recent times was the Pentium M, in large because they focussed on the needs of a mobile chip, i.e. power consumption and hence efficiency.

Also take a look at Via's new chips and boards, particularly the Epia series of boards. They're ideal for media centre applications, since the chips run very cool but quickly enough to do the necessary work.

P

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[muhgcee]

At the end of the day, I couldn't give a crap whether or not my CPU that performs X teraflops does it by running a "dumb" core at extreme speed, or runs a really complex core at slow speed.

You might not care at the end of the day, but at the end of the month when your power bill comes in you might care at least a little bit.

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[WolfZombie]

enough waste heat is generated to heat a medium sized home

Maybe it's about time someone came up with a method to use this heat for additional productivity. Maybe the element used in heating water for an expresso machine!

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[Splab]

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.

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[Amouth]

heat my house and cook my dinner? i mean why else would i buy a p4 prescott

Energy efficiency

[Lisandro]

"Multicore gives us the ability to get back on traditional performance growth lines," Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner told reporters on Monday. "We have become fanatical about energy efficiency. We have to continue to make progress in terms of energy efficiency."

    Does this means these new multicores will fry eggs even faster? I hate it when my meal isn't done in time!

Re:Energy efficiency

[Anne Thwacks]

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".

Advantages and disadvantages of multicore

[replicant108]

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

Pretty light reading, but...

[porkThreeWays]

It's a fluff piece, but there was nothing mentioned in there to make me believe Intel is really doing anything new. All I saw was mention of 4 cores. Are cores the new mhz race? 2 cores is all 99% of people will see benefit from right now. The 4 core race is moot because it's like a race for automakers to produce the first production 16 cylinder family sedan. It's not going to really benefit anyone. Really only a marketing gimmick. I'd rather see Intel clean up their current 2 core chips.

Here's what most consumers need in a computer...
A low latency desktop that can handle about 2-3 running applications with no slowdown that runs cool and doesn't use a lot of power.

Here's what we are getting...
A high latency desktop with fat pipes that run hot, optimized for running 7-8 cpu intensive applications at once, and idles at 200 watts. Because it should take 10+ seconds to open a basic program on an out of box pc.

Re:Pretty light reading, but...

[Tim C]

Because it should take 10+ seconds to open a basic program on an out of box pc.

Most of that will be down to the disks, which is nothing to do with Intel or AMD.

wanna compare cpu speeds?

[80 85 83 83 89 33]

if you want to do an easy way to compare amd and intel chips, here is 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 **windows XP 64-bit edition is twice as fast as 32-windows** 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.... my next post will have a long list of scores. from slowest to fastest, there is a difference of 66x...

Re:wanna compare cpu speeds?

[80 85 83 83 89 33]

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)

Re:wanna compare cpu speeds?

[80 85 83 83 89 33]

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....

Re:wanna compare cpu speeds?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:wanna compare cpu speeds?

[SamBeckett]

The only thing your "test" is testing is the FPU on the processor. The code for factorial is small, so that and all the intermediaries are able to be stored in cache, regardless of the processor. And how exactly are you timing it? Do you sit there and say "1-one thousand, 2-one thousand, ..." ?

Re:wanna compare cpu speeds?

[Nuffsaid]

Ha! My super-optimized Gentoo x86-64 system, running on a 2 GHz Turion64 CPU, all unnecessary services and processes killed, under optimal condition (downslope, wind from behind, air temp below 10C) uses exactly zero seconds to tell me "Error" in kcalc...

Re:wanna compare cpu speeds?

[Jepler]

I don't know what method you're using to compute factorials, or whether the time includes converting to decimal and displaying on a terminal. My programs do not. (actually, the last one does convert to decimal and write to a file, and it still runs quite a bit faster than yours)

My test system is a Sempron 1800MHz 64-bit processor, and I wrote my programs in Python

A naive program which calculates 1 * 2 * ... * 100000 just as written takes 54s CPU time. Another program which uses a "divide and conquer" approach takes 2.6s CPU time. Once again, it's clear that algorithm can make a much bigger difference than CPU speed.

The "divide and conquer" method creates a list of all the numbers to be multiplied. At each stage, it divides this list into two sublists of equal length, and multiplies the pairs to create a new list. If there's an odd item, it's simply placed on the new list. This means that the intermediate products stay smaller longer.

If you *are* timing the conversion and output stage, then you should use a math package that is designed to create decimal output. I used "DecInt", and added a step which converted Python longs to DecInts when they appeared in the intermediate results. The run time is a bit longer, but the result is still calculated and written to a file in just 5.5s CPU time.

Here's the best I can do at getting my code into this post without hitting the fitlers:

def f(n):
nums = range(2, n+1)
while len(nums) > 1:
. print len(nums)
. hl = len(nums)/2
. if len(nums) % 2:
.. a = nums[:hl]
.. b = nums[hl:2*hl]; b.reverse()
.. odd = nums[2*hl]
.. nums = [odd] + [i*j for i, j in zip(a, b)]
. else:
.. a = nums[:hl]
.. b = nums[hl:2*hl]; b.reverse()
.. nums = [i*j for i, j in zip(a, b)]
return nums[0]

Re:wanna compare cpu speeds?

[Lonewolf666]

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??

Naming Conventions

[Freaky Spook]

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.

Re:Too Little, Too late?

[hyc]

What a sobering thought. "We've invented a space heater that produces computations as an operational byproduct."

Re:Too Little, Too late? My Arse!

[W33B]

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.

IBM Power 6 @ 6Ghz

[CypherOz]

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

Refer here

Re:IBM Power 6 @ 6Ghz

[Somegeek]

Unfortunately your link (or the article that it links to) doesn't say anything about 6 GHz. A little googling found some that did however, but they still talk about this as 'in the Lab'. I bet Intel and AMD can get stuff running at high speed 'in the lab' too. All of the stories that I have seen say that the chip will come out at 4-5 GHz, and not for another year.

It's also important to remember that one of the reasons that Intel is walking away from the clock speed race is that AMD showed that it wasn't necessarily the best way to higher performance. My point is that just because the new IBM chip may have four cores and a high clock speed doesn't mean it will be any faster than a chip with AMD's architecture. No one will really know until it's released and compared against whatever else is available at the time.

Link to an article that does mention the 6Ghz Power 6:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/07/ibm_power6 _show/

Re:Too Little, Too late? My Arse!

[zaguar]

...your head stuck so far up your front side bus...

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.

love that headline...

[smash]

Intel aims to get back on track with new chips

As opposed to "Intel aims to get further behind with new chips"?

What the hell else would they be doing??

smash.

Re:love that headline...

[marcushnk]

perhaps just to perpetuate the status quo, by minimizing effort? (and letting their winged marketing monkeys of doom go for broke)

Re:Too Little, Too late?

[10Ghz]

The dual-cores of this generation have been bought already, and the upgrade cycle won't start again until 2007-2008.

Dude, WTF?!? 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?? What if someone decides to upgrade his computer in the summer (for example) to a dual-core machine? By your logic, he does not exist and/or he should wait until 2007/2008 because "that's when the next upgrade-sycle is in, you can't upgrade before that"?

People are upgrading their computer all the time. People are buying new computers all the time.

Competition good... Sloth bad...

[ursabear]

I think the competition has been good for all of us. AMD's strength in the market has kept Intel on its toes, and advances from IBM's Power processors has kept many architectures running pretty well.

I (this is IMHO) believe that Intel has been doing some laurel-resting for a number of years now. I do believe that they will come to bear with better stuff on a gradual basis. My only fear is that Intel will allow itself to do like GM, Ford, AT&T... allow itself to be way too slow to be quick to adapt. I personally would like to see IBM, AMD, and Intel all have truly great, smokin' processors going way into the future - it seems that it would only be good for us in the long run.

Re:Too Little, Too late?

[kfg]

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

Re:Intel has unrealistic expectations

[Anonymous Coward]

If nobody learns multithreaded programming, and it is as important as you think it is, then every microprocessor company (or, rather, their customers) is screwed. This is the way the industry is moving, so the software industry had better keep up.

However, since I'm usually doing more than one thing on a computer at a time, I don't require programs to be multithreaded in order to see the benefit of multicore processors. For instance, I can transcode video while web browsing or watching HD video and still have a snappy user interface. Perhaps most programs aren't multithreaded, but at least I am.

TRANSPUTER

[poptones]

I'm pretty sure transputer predates IBM's multicore POWER. Furthermore, transputer was inherently multi - up to four cores on a die and they could be interconnected easily via into larger arrays.

General Rant - no need for multi-threaded aps!

[MadCow42]

>> * 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 bolded section continually drives me nuts... NO, you don't have to have multi-threaded applications to get benefits from a multi-CPU system. When was the last time you EVER ran one program on your computer? Take a look at the Task List some day... there are probably 20-30 threads listed there at any one time.

I love my dual-Athlon system because there is NO lag... it never freezes up while starting an application or while one task is doing somethign intensive. I'm free to do surf while burning CD's, or read email while rendering images.

The world of one-program thinking is over, and has been for YEARS. Think SYSTEM when you look at the benefits of multiple CPUs.

MadCow.

multithreaded programming

[marco.antonio.costa]

I know I'd love to see great built-in multithreading/concurrency support in the next C++ standard. Java already does MT pretty well, right?

bottom line, people won't see massive improvements in performance with those new multicores until ppl really get the hang on developing multithreaded soft. I better read up on the subject.

Re:multithreaded programming

[Amouth]

"Java already does MT pretty well, right?"

the only thing java does well is eat memory

Keeping the options afloat

[the eric conspiracy]

Intel has a serious problem in that they are perceived, and rightly so that to be a technical laggard. They are bleeding market share and their stock price has dived.

As a result Intel is trying to revamp their product line to become more competitive - but to keep from losing customers they are trying to darken the sky with marketing. This will work for a while because Intel has some credibility amassed from its earlier successes.

But if they fail to deliver at least parity with the next round of designs they are going to lose market share as fast as AMD can build Fabs. And right now they are running the risk of the 'Osborne Effect' - promising new product so attractive that the company loses large sales volume on current sales.

So Intel is making some really big bets here. If we get into the same time frame in 2007 with AMD still having a clear technical lead we could see AMD and Intel all of a sudden having a 40/60 split in market share, and a duopoly where once there was a monopoly.

Intel Marketing

[Exter-C]

Although Intel is not alone on this front it has been shown many times in the past that Intel will announce a technology or chip or both and yet it takes 6+ months for those to actually hit the market. We really should just wait until we actually HAVE the products from Intel (and other people) before raving about how fantatic they are.

Re:slightly off-topic

[Anonymous Coward]

Um those arent the yonahs(Core duos), these are the yonahs:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2648&p=14

To save you the trouble, "We continue to see that the Core Duo can offer, clock for clock, overall performance identical to that of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 - without the use of an on-die memory controller. The only remaining exception at this point appears to be 3D games, where the Athlon 64 X2 continues to do quite well, most likely due to its on-die memory controller. "

So basically intels laptop chips use less power, and can go head to head against AMD's desktop chips.

In any case Q3 Intel will be releasing the desktop version of the core duo which will up the power envelope slightly, but still be less then the amd,a dn should offer significantly better performance per clock then the core duo.

Pentium M differs quite a bit my friend....

[macavity1977]

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   >_<

Re:slightly off-topic

[Tweekster]

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...

Re:512MB L2 Cache?

[Amouth]

yea i saw that 512mb & 256mb L2's.. can i have one :)

it is 512kb & 256kb L2's.. and for the record the p3 coppermine (which is the one with 256kb L2) is not jsut another p3 "No real changes from the 600 MHz version" is completely wrong..

clock for clock the p3 coppermine is the fastest proccessor ever designed.. sure it can't do everything that the new stuff can do, but that wasn't what it was ment to do.

the coppermine was a wonderfull design and i would love to see intel bring it back from the dead and make some new high clock cpus with that core - i have heard some reports that that is what they did with the new line "core" but i don't know...

No news here

[ChrisA90278]

Title: Intel Unveils New Chips to Battle AMD
Summary: Intel will anounce new chip at upcomming event
Real World: At a future event Intel will talk about a chip that will be available some months after the event
What this means: In the future Intel will talk about the future

No news here. Tell me whan I can buy one.

I Really Wonder

[Nom du Keyboard]

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.

you already got it...

[YesIAmAScript]

What you list "most consumers need", that's already what Intel is providing. Core Duo is their desktop solution.

These new chips mentioned are server/workstation chips.

Also, I find your latency comments incongruous. Yes, P4 has an overly-long pipeline. But it's not user-perceiveable in terms of latency. It's only reflected in how the processor just doesn't perform as well as might be expected from the processor clocking and transistor count or heat production.

The 10+ seconds thing is more attributable to other factors, if it's even true. Most apps launch very quickly for me and besides, it's more related to the OS and how it uses the disk than the pipeline of the processor.

I'd like to see Intel improve their processors further, but they do seem to be on the right track now and away from NetBurst.

Re:slightly off-topic - not 64-bit

[Nom du Keyboard]

How do Intel Core Duos rate against Athlon x 2s?

Well, for starters the current Core Duo is a 32-bit only chip. And while 64-bit processing doesn't double your CPU speed or anything like that, there are other improvements in the AMD64 design (more registers, NX bit, etc.) that make for improvements beyond 64-bit integer processing and >4GB address space.

Comparing these two particular processor lines would be a lot like comparing 80286 processors at 16MHz with 800386 processors at the same clock rate. Both might run DOS at the time at a similar speed (IIRC the 286 was actually slightly faster with 16-bit code), but in the end the old architecture rapidly fell away to the new 32-bit processors.

I, for one, would only take a Core Duo system today (including every Intel-based Apple Mac) if it was given to me. I wouldn't spend my own money on one.

Re:We need a 4 GHZ or faster CPU

[geekoid]

"Imagine how fast a 5 or 10 GHz PC will run."
I would imagine 5 or 10 GHz, respectivly

Re:Heat Sink... literally!

[zlogic]

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.

Re:Too Little, Too late?

[TubeSteak]

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.

Re:Number of apps depends on OS

[TheRaven64]

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.