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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."
All these years we all thought whats outside the processor that matters?
Wincopy
Unless they are running two challenges, it is to design a Mac Mini-like box to be marketed under the ViiV brand. The prize money is (as I recall) $600,000 for product development, and $400,000 for marketing. I don't know what this will do for the Apple-Intel relationship; paying people to compete harder with your customers isn't exactly the kind of thing that makes suppliers popular.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Those dual die dual-core chips are fabbed at 65nm. The upcoming 45nm facilities should be able to manufacture quad-core chips on a single die.
Apples to oranges. The T1 is a superb chip for some workloads, and an appalling one for others. The T2, which has an FPU for each core (unlike the shared one in the T1) should do a bit better, but there are still a lot of workloads where the T1 does very badly. This is why Sun still sell UltraSPARC IV+ chips as well, and these are only dual-core.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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)
Meta will eat itself
Pretty much all desktop apps can be split into two categories:
- The ones that contribute to the 5-20% load that your CPU generally sits under. (Web browsers, mail clients, music players, etc).
- 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 am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
I don't really feel like dual-core has really even reached any kind of saturation point in terms of how many people own a dual-core processor. I can't believe (but I do thank) Intel for pushing ahead and making good tech affordable to everyone. I spent a small fortune building the box I'm typing this on (with an AMD x2 socket AM2 4600+). And I know I got a little burned by the am2, but I think the upgrade path will stay clear for a while. I wish I could have waited, but I needed a computer for college and this was top-end about 4 months ago. I loved AMD when they had the better stuff, and now I love Intel, cause the core2's kick butt. When AMD catches up, that's when I'll upgrade my 4600+. ;)
prog
From the article:
a d_announcement/
0 .html
"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_qu
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/20060926-784
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.
I wonder if Apple/Steve Jobs could just walk in to Paul Otellini's office and ask for the $1M check?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
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.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
There's more to it than just the core. There's all the rest of the CPU which includes cache(usually shared for dual core while separate on dual CPUs) and the rest of the interconnects for connecting to the motherboard and whatnot.
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.
I live in Santa Rosa, and trust me, the *only* reasons they would name something after this city would be because it's:
1) Going to cost WAY too much
2) Going to drive an SUV 2 miles to work, and slow down to 2mph on right-turns
3) Going to drink wine and believe that it's "high-class"
4) Going to pay >$1M for a house that's about 2 inches away from the next >$1M house
5) Going to hide from its own shadow because of the terrorists downtown (people with spiked hair)
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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.