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Intel Pushes Back with Xeon 5100
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece on Intel's newest chip, the Xeon 5100, which many consider might be the chip that will llow them to stop losing ground to AMD. From the article: 'During the presentation, Intel ran the now-standard comparison test against AMD's highest performing chip, handily beating the system in a speed test. And in a jab at AMD execs, who handed kill-o-watt meters to analysts at the outfit's recent technology day, Intel execs used the same device to measure the new Xeon 5100 system's performance — gauged to be 7 watts better than that of the AMD-based system.'"
...the keyword is might :)
Cheap, effective, handy device. Long overdue. I'm very tempted to buy a second one and see what it would take to hack it to broadcast info wirelessly for ongoing monitoring.
Someone had to do it.
I wonder how much of these new advancements from both camps in server chips comes from laptop technology. I know that heat dispersion and power consumption have always been very big deals for laptops, and now it seems that the powers that be have finally applied the same thinking (at least) to larger form factor computers.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
The article is surrounded AMD advertisements! Sublety is clearly not a strong point for BusinessWeek...
We are beginning to see why Apple made the jump to Intel.
It's not that they had anything that was all that much better than IBM or AMD at the time they were making their pitch to Jobs. It was the fact that their immediate future was being prepped with some impressive technology, both in terms of speed and speed-per-watt, which turned the Steve's head.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
In other news, my XBox360 runs way faster than your PS2 =P
Seriously, can we at least attempt to compare apples to apples on /. instead or regurgitating marketing BS.
They may be faster, and they may consume less power, but IT is still about cost. Something tells me, that with this great advancement comes a higher price tag than AMD.
Who cares is Intel is a few mips faster?
From the /. summary above
chip that will llow them to stop losing ground to AMD
How about...
chip that will allow them to stop losing ground to AMD???
I'd say the odds of that are llow.
Now we wait for AMD's next move..
Now I have no preference in the whole AMD vs Intel debate, I just use whatever seems to give me the most value for money / required performance. I am currently using AMD chips in kit 4 years old or younger and Intel chips in some of my older hardware, and haven't yet even looked at AMD64 or IA64 chips). but it is really good to see some serious competition between two industry giants. Long live the competition, its better for the consumer.
Toms Hardware has a review of the New Intel Chips. I know, the page came out a few days ago, but the information is the same, and much of it has been available for many months.
Toms also has the AMD AM2 Socket and the incremental upgrades on the other side of the house.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
Intel has by far the largest fabrication capacity of any chipmaker in the world. Both IBM's and AMD's fab capacities are much lower (AMD has used IBM's fab to help meet demand). IBM's inability to produce high numbers and high yields led to the Intel switch. Remember the delay in introducing the iMac G5? Apple had the design ready, IBM couldn't produce the chips. Result: months go by without any iMacs to sell. More than anything technical reason, IBM was bad for Apple's bottom line.
Captain Obvious!
Thank goodness you were here! Many of us may have missed that one.....
Regards,
The Amazing Sarcasmo
A goal is a dream with a deadline
FTFA
... the results are skewed by the fact that Intel is producing chips using the 65-nanometer process, vs. AMD's 90-nanometer process. Typically, as more chips are packed onto smaller dies, performance improves dramatically. AMD is not scheduled to begin building chips on a 65-nanometer process until later this year.
... when they both have the same size dies?
Wouldn't this be an important thing to note? Perhaps later this year would be a better time to compare
This story does not stand up to scrutiny. The power was not measured at the wall were it matters. Also, no one outside of select reviewers running Intel-selected benchmarks have seen this chip. The Intel chip was supposed to ship on Monday but it was only a "paper launch". Intel is only taking orders at this point. I'll wait for objective analysis when the chip is actually shipped before jumping to conclusions about the performance of this chip compares to AMD offerings.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work people - multiple businesses compete in the same market and when one lags behind it begins to lose market share (and therefore money) - then it comes up with its own new product or service to compete.
That's how you get good products at low prices - comeptition, plan and simple. The thing that is unfortunate with markets like PC and server processors (or even operating systems) is that there are only two major market share holders, and one of them is much larger than the other making it tough for them to be competitive due to lack of volume.
But as Apple and AMD have proven, you don't have to have the largest market share to innovate, and you can make a serious dent in the Microsofts and Intels of the world - even if all it accomplishes is forcing them to put more effort into their products both of their customers win.
Haiku for you!
The advantage AMD has may not be speed (anymore?). Where AMD has the advantage is in their design. They built their chips to be multi-core. They put the memory controller on chip, which again improves multicore performance. And in multiple CPU systems, their chips communicate more efficiently. I want to see how the Intel chip compares against the Intel in a 4, 8, and 16 core system; I bet the AMD will scale better.
I hate to say it, I think Intel is still losing this race in the long run. Hell I'm still reeling from the thought that an Intel competitor delivered the new standard for 64bit computing. I'm used to Intel making these leaps.
Nothing like a little competition! Whatever brings me faster chips...
Does this include the required Intel Northbridge chip (22W), or are we only looking at the CPU itself? And does the NB need a fan?
Or is this the entire system motherboard, in which cases this is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
How well does this new chip work in systems with more then 2 of them? How bad will the FSB bottleneck get when intel start using quad-cores with 2 duel cores linked by a FSB? What will socket F bring to AMD? When will we start to see 64 Bit tests? I think amd will be faster then intel in 64 bit mode When will open HyperTransport bring to the server market? What will intel do to beat HTX co-processors cards?
They may be faster, and they may consume less power, but IT is still about cost. Something tells me, that with this great advancement comes a higher price tag than AMD.
I doubt it. I'd bet that Intel fabs spit out processors at a much lower unit cost than AMD.
But the key question is:
Is this new chip AMD compatible?
Am I the only one guessing it was "slow", then "lower", then "bellow" and finally "allow". Man, we need firefox 2.0.
AnandTech had a preview of the Woodcrest (the new Xeon) processor running 64-bit Linux server type workloads a while back. It compares Woodcrest, Opteron, and the Sun T1. Woodcrest looks quite impressive.
IBM was indeed bad for Apple's bottom line, but Motorola was disastrous.
But the peripheral requirements -- particularly FB-DIMM -- are interesting, too. And maybe a little scary. Anybody got a clue how these FB-DIMM units are gonna be priced per GB? We haven't seen any details on mobo pricing, either.
I like the idea of lower power consumption and greater throughput. But if I can't afford to build the system, it doesn't do me much good.
This announcement does sorta smell like marketing hype; I guess the implementations will tell the tale. Intel finally recognizes in public that they're getting their asses kicked by AMD, though, which is a good thing, IMO. Now if they'd just focus on price/performance competitiveness, they might even get me back as a customer.
Founding member: He-Man Windoze Hater Club
Since Japan has already hit Intel for anti-competetive moves, can AMD prove illegal dumping?
...shut up about Cars?
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
I really hope you've not been looking at IA64-processors since they go by the moniker "Itanium" and isn't very compatible with x86-processors and are incredibly expensive. I thing you are referring to x86-64, EM64T or IA-32e.. ie the 64-bit version of Intel's common processors, Pentium, Celeron, Xeon, Core Duo and so forth.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
As long as Intel maintains this architecture, with a single data bus for RAM, PCI, PCI-e, AGP, BIOS, and other integrated functions, they'll be behind AMD. AMD's current (and future) HyperTransport provides a wider, more efficient data path than the front-side bus. AMD's per-processor memory controller scales past two sockets in a way that Intel just can't match. By pushing fully-buffered DIMM's, each with its own memory controller, Intel is ceding the design point to AMD: a single memory controller is too much of a bottleneck, the load needs to be spread around. This is especially true when you go beyond two processors in a machine, but even dual-socket boxes benefit from distributed memory controllers. Sure, the Bensley FSB goes to 1033Mhz from 800Mhz, but that doesn't sound like a big jump.
Until Intel has a real answer to HyperTransport, they'll be losing the high-performance, 4+ sockets market to AMD. For smaller two-socket servers, Intel will have to pay the RAM and/or server vendors to make FB-DIMM's price competitive with different flavors of DDR.
Competition? In the technology industry? Wow, this really is news!
How to enable garbage collection on a system without protected memory: #define malloc() ((void *) rand())
*shock*. As usual, unreleased product from company A beats released product from company B. Feel tree to either do {A,B} = {Intel,AMD} or {ATI,nvidia}
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
Has anyone in the history of commerce ever got up in a presentation and said "our product is not as good as our competitors". I have put off building a new computer and using AMD processors on the prospect that Intel next generation would be better. So, just maybe, Intel is putting out all this press to undercut AMD sales and slow its market erosion. What do you think? I think the jury will be out till some independent testing can be done.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Jesus Fucking Christ! Who the fuck mods up shit like this?
This comment isn't insightful; it's fucking basic Econ 101 shit. Is the slashdot population really so fundamentally ignorant of economics that its members' minds can be blown time and time again by the tens of "competition is good and leads to better products than a monopoly" comments that are inevitably spewed into every damn Intel vs. AMD story? I realize that capitalism is promoted by the local groupthink, but, come on!
Mod this shit -1 redundant: seen 30 times in every Intel/AMD article (and others) for the past 4+ years.
Just to recap things, the Xeon 5100-series, aka "Woodcrest", is the very first released processor family that is based on the new 8th generation, Intel Core Microarchitecture, technically inspired from the 6th generation (PPro, PII, PIII), instead of the 7th generation (P4). As a side note, Intel has been using the "Core Solo" and "Core Duo" denominations for some processors but this is just a marketing usage of the term "Core", because such processors are NOT based on the Intel Core Microarchitecture. Anyway, Woodcrest is the first to represent this all-new Intel Core Microarchitecture that is supposed to save Intel from the very competitive K8 design (Opteron, Athlon64...).
So, Woodcrest seems indeed to be a very good processor, as shown in this preview (the less-biased, more technically accurate I have been able to find up to this day). Intel claims that Woodcrest is "80% more performant at 35% less power" compared to the original dual-core Xeon processor, and most benchmarks seem to confirm this claim. It may seem technically impressive, but in fact considering the very poor design of the original dual-core Xeon processor, such an improvement HAD to be expected and was almost a prerequisite for Intel to even start thinking about taking back Opteron's market share.
Here is a quick fact list I have assembled from my own research and from the review linked above:
At equal clock frequencies, Woodcrest is about 5-15% more powerful than Opteron on traditional workloads (common x86 and arithmetic instructions), and much more powerful (30% and more) than Opteron on multimedia workloads (mostly SSE, SSE2, maybe FPU I am not sure).
At equal clock frequencies, Opteron is still much more powerful (30% and more) than Woodcrest on memory-intensive workloads due to its integrated memory controller (leading to better latency) and ccHT links in SMP cases (where memory throughput increases with the number of ccHT links).
At equal clock frequencies, Woodcrest consumes less power than Opteron, but Woodcrest's memory (FB-DIMM) requires more power than Opteron's memory (DDR400). So overall, a Woodcrest-based system consumes about as much power as an Opteron-based system (as shown in page 3 of the review).
At equal clock frequencies, Woodcrest is cheaper than Opteron, but Woodcrest motherboards (socket 771) are more expensive than Opteron motherboards (socket 939 and 940) and FB-DIMM memory is twice the price of DDR400. These pricing differences are so large that Opteron is still preferable to Woodcrest in most cases: Opteron is cheaper for any single or dual-cpu server config with 4 GB or more of memory, Opteron is cheaper for any entry-level server config (about $1500 and below) whatever the amount of memory is, Woodcrest seems to only make sense when the high-end processors (Xeon 5140, 5150 and 5160) are used with NO MORE than 4 GB of memory (else Opteron's cheaper memory has a price advantage).
Of course, in the high-end server market (4, 8 or more processors), Opteron is still the clear technical leader because Intel STILL hasn't switched to a CPU interconnect similar to HT and STILL isn't using an integrated memory controller.
In conclusion, I would say that when comparing only the processors, Woodcrest is superior to Opteron in many aspects (such as instruction throughput), and Opteron beats Woodcrest in other aspects (such as memory accesses). But when comparing a whole Woodcrest-based system versus an Opteron-based system, other factors come into play (such as price and scalibility), which make Opteron superior to Woodcrest in a lot of cases.
As of the recent Analyst's Day announcements, AMD is moving to a largely modular design philosophy for the release of K8L and successive chips. The point of this move is to make alterations like the recent adoption of a DDR2 capable memory controller easier to accomplish, especially given the possibility of off-die and off package components like HTX coprocessors. I am not an electrical engineer and don't claim to fully understand how the interconnects work, but what I do understand seems to imply that AMD is moving in the direction of having and end to end implementation of HyperTransport that connects anything that sits before the Northbridge. They also seem to be aiming for agility of design, not stagnation.
Out of curiosity, what's so efficient about an architecture that bounces memory requests out to the off-die memory controller and then back to one of multiple cores every time each of the processors (which are sharing a single bus) needs something that isn't in cache? Similarly, how is the Intel choice more efficient than a cross-barred, shared cache solution that was engineered from the beginning to scale to multiple cores?
Jobs wanted custom CPU's at commodity chip prices. I believe that IBM took one look at what Jobs wanted, what he was willing to pay, and said "no thank you".
SirWired
Thousands of owners agree: You too should own a Kill A Watt meter if you don't already. Just please spell it correctly!
Seriously, I find mine coming in handy for more than just treehugging energy audits. It helped me diagnose a UPS whose charging circuit wasn't slipping into trickle mode, and was damaging batteries as a result. It lets me know whether certain devices will really run from the car's inverter, and once I plug them in, it lets me monitor the inverter's voltage drop.
What startled me when I first started playing with my Kill A Watt was how little of a difference CPU activity really makes, and how big a difference CRT brightness does. Black text on a white background is an energy hog, white text on a black background sips meagerly from the trough. I don't have an LCD to compare with, but I know they run their backlights full-brightness, so it's concievable that with a mostly-black image, the CRT's method of only lighting up the affected pixels might actually be more efficient than the LCD.
The Wikipedia article states: "The successors to 45nm technology will be 32 nm, 22 nm, and then 16 nm technology; it is possible that these numbers are arbitrary, but it is also possible that they reflect fundamental physical limits of some sort." So which is it, arbitrary or fundamental physical limits?
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
Did they measure the heat and power use of the fully buffered DIMMs (which AMD CPUs don't require)?
AMD cheaper, AMD good.
Intel cheaper, Intel bad...
Why is that?
I believe that IBM took one look at what Jobs wanted, what he was willing to pay, and said "no thank you".
Yet Intel looked at those exact same numbers and said, "yes, please!!! Let us fly somebody out to you right away to pitch our entire next two years of plans to you."
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Intel ALREADY made laptop and desktop CPUs. That is the crucial difference. The CPUs in the new Macs are no different from the CPUs in any Wintel unit. For IBM, Apple was the only desktop/laptop customer, and not worth keeping.
SirWired