Intel IDF Day 1 - Quad Core, Santa Rosa And More

MojoKid writes "From demos of the new Alan Wake game engine on a 3.73GHz overclocked Quad-Core QX6700 to design showcases with a wafer of 80-core teraflop capable chips, Intel's IDF opening day was brimming with tech-wonder from the company affectionately known as Chipzilla. Paul Otellini also showed pics of upcoming fab facilities in Arizona (Fab 32) and Israel (Fab 28). In total, Intel will have three 45nm fabs by the end of next year at an investment of about $9B, all targeted 45nm manufacturing processes. Finally, a bevy of Quad-Core Kentsfield-based systems are shown here, with Dell and Voodoo's offering looking especially swank."

Comments

They're not quad-core though

[tomstdenis]

they're dual-die. There is a difference. First, the dual-die process takes more power. Second, it costs more. Boo.

Core2Duo is neato, you can overclock them like mad and the ALU/FPU is very efficient. But let's not kid ourselves. dual-die is not the same thing as quad-core.

Tom

Re:They're not quad-core though

[diegocgteleline.es]

they're dual-die

As Intel Ceo said in the press sesion: "The initial (four-core chips) are multi-chip, but so what?" he said. "I think you guys are misreading the market (if you think customers care about that)."

First, the dual-die process takes more power

I will wait for their quad-core before judguing it. The first dual core Intel CPU was hot and slow because it was based in the presscot platform, not because it was dual-die. This "dual-die" quad core is based on the Core 2, which is a great platform, IMNSHO.

In other words: I don't really care if it's dual-die or quad-core. If it's fast and eats few power and it's not expensive, then my money is for Intel. The Core 2 platform looks good enought to make possible a dual-die quead core processor that beats the alternative from AMD - not because the dual-die design is better, but because the Core 2 is better. Additionally, this is just their first quad-core CPU - the rest of quad-core CPus will be real quad-core beasts.

Moving fast now, eh?

[tygerstripes]

It seems the beast has awoken. They were so far behind in the chip-war with AMD for so damn long, it seemed their market share was getting nibbled to death.

Now they finally seem to have woken up and, by god, they are really moving now, aren't they. $9bn in 45nm fabs? A wafer of 80-core chips already? Speaking as a one-time AMD Fanboi, I have to say - the daddy is back.

(Let the flaming commence)

Re:Seems 80 cores isn't enough to resist the /. ef

[TheRaven64]

Sure, if you pick up Process Explorer, you'd think there's hundreds of threads running, but the truth is, most of those are idling.

Pretty much all desktop apps can be split into two categories:

1. The ones that contribute to the 5-20% load that your CPU generally sits under. (Web browsers, mail clients, music players, etc).
2. The ones that cause the load to spike at 100% for extended periods. (Audio/Video encoders, compilers, typesetting engines, etc).

Applications in category 1 will not see any benefit from a CPU that's twice as fast. That 5-20% load may drop to 2.5-10%, but no one cares. Those on category 2 will complete in half the time (assuming that they are CPU-limited and linearly scalable). As CPUs get faster, more and more things fall into category 1. Once you run out of things in category 2, stop upgrading. This happened for a lot of people about five years ago.

I recently found out about an interesting experiment Intel did a few years back. They have a full-system simulator that allows them to test various things easily. They modified it so that all CPU operations took zero (simulated) time to complete. This gave about a 2.5x speed improvement for most tasks, i.e. an infinitely fast CPU only gave a 2.5x speed boost to most tasks. It doesn't take a huge speed increase before you run out of CPU-limited things and start hitting memory, disk, and network bottlenecks.

I Was Just Starting To Like Intel Again!

[chromozone]

From the article:

"Paul Otellini, Intel's president and CEO, kicked off this season's IDF by coining the phrase "It's what's inside that counts", and spoke about why processing power matters again"

But then this in another article covering the same event:

"Otellini briefly responded to concerns that Intel's first quad-core packages are simply "glued-together" dual-core processors while AMD is working on a native, single-die quad-core chip. "So what?," said Otellini, adding, "The public doesn't care what's inside a processor."

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/09/26/intel_core_2_qua d_announcement/

In yet another article in Ars Technica we read that Intel is look to an 80 core chip. I like the Core 2 Duo a lot but I hope the Intel megahertz fixation isn't just going to become a "core" fixation .

  http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060926-7840 .html

Robert Moses built a lot of bridges and roads around New york hoping to relieve congestion but it had the counter-intuitive effect of creating more traffic. I hope all the increases in size and power of computers doesnt just bring more garbage. With all the legacy code bloat, and things like video cards that get hot as toasters and power supplies that waste energy (the Google thing) I think computing could use a few reductions instead of increases. In that regard it's nice to see the Core 2 Duo bring down the wattage.

"Core" fixation

[benhocking]

In yet another article in Ars Technica we read that Intel is look to an 80 core chip. I like the Core 2 Duo a lot but I hope the Intel megahertz fixation isn't just going to become a "core" fixation .

Speaking as someone who uses code that is very parallelizable - I hope it does! (Well, assuming that they also address memory bottlenecks and what not.)

Fat, dumb, and happy.

[Shivetya]

I was thinking the same thing. Very much like America before Japan forced official entry into the war. Very content with themselves and position in the world.

Just as it took America years to spin up properly, leveraging her resources, Intel now has come back to fight more prepared and ready for the long haul. The question that remains is, can AMD keep up with an Intel obviously aware of what the mission is?

I would hope that with AMDs recent acquisitions that they not only keep up but open some new areas as well. As mentioned on other threads, 80 core CPUs won't replace dedicated graphic cards but if all the cores are not the same then you can do about anything. Essentially bringing the "cell idea" to the x86 market.

Hey, if my PC can get down the size of a cell phone with my only needing to buy stand alone devices I am all for it. I would love to have nothing more than machines the size of Apple's Mac Mini with all the bells and whistles expected out of top end machines.

Re:Catchup again's Sun's 8 core UltraSparc T1

[Programmer_Errant]

My impression is that Intel's more worried about the applications keeping up with the cores. If today's apps could utilize all the cores you could throw at them, processors like Sun's T1 and T2 could be a problem for Intel. Intel and Sun need a killer app to promote their multi-cores. To do this, you're going to need to get multi-core machines into the hands of a lot more developers. I think Intel has a better chance of this and consequently the killer app will be more suited to Intel's processors than Sun's processors.

Intel is batting for the fences

[chipace]

80 cores on a chip and optical interconnects sounds great...but I wish they would talk more about the end application goals (i.e. a system that does 1080p ray-tracing and has 100% speech recognition). It's great that they are pushing the design limits as they are, but without clear vision of how the technology is to be used, it's likely that it will miss the mark.

I was hoping to hear about a single die with cpu/northbridge/southbridge/gpu all integrated (and for mobile use)... that would certainly turn the computer market on it's head. Nvidia knows this already, and has everything but the cpu integrated. Intel not buying Nvidia is the stupidest thing I have ever seen.