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Intel Next-Gen CPU Has Memory Controller and GPU
Many readers wrote in with news of Intel's revelations yesterday about its upcoming Penryn and Nehalem cores. Information has been trickling out about Penryn, but the big news concerns Nehalem — the "tock" to Penryn's "tick." Nehalem will be a scalable architecture with some products having on-board memory controller, "on-package" GPU, and up to 16 threads per chip. From Ars Technica's coverage: "...Intel's Pat Gelsinger also made a number of high-level disclosures about the successor to Penryn, the 45nm Nehalem core. Unlike Penryn, which is a shrink/derivative of Core 2 Duo (Merom), Nehalem is architected from the ground up for 45nm. This is a major new design, and Gelsinger revealed some truly tantalizing details about it. Nehalem has its roots in the four-issue Core 2 Duo architecture, but the direction that it will take Intel is apparent in Gelsinger's insistence that, 'we view Nehalem as the first true dynamically scalable microarchitecture.' What Gelsinger means by this is that Nehalem is not only designed to take Intel up to eight cores on a single die, but those cores are meant to be mixed and matched with varied amounts of cache and different features in order to produce processors that are tailored to specific market segments." More details, including Intel's slideware, appear at PC Perspectives and HotHardware.
"Anybody have an opposing viewpoint?"
I think "AMD fan" or "Intel fan" is a bad attitude. When technology does its thing (progress), it's a good thing, regardless of who spearheaded it.
That said, if AMD becomes so obviously a bad choice, Intel who is in the lead will continue to push the envelope just not as fast since they don't have anything to catch up to. That will give AMD the opportunity to blow ahead as it did time and time again in the past.
The pendulum swings both ways. The only constant is that competition brings out the best and it's definitely good for us, the consumer.
I'm a "Competition fan."
More Twoson than Cupertino
It seems that AMD has lost, and I'm not trying to troll. It just seems that fortunes have truly reversed and that AMD is being beaten by 5 steps everywhere by AMD. Anybody have an opposing viewpoint? (Being an AMD fan, I am depressed.)
Look at the title of this thread: Intel Next-Gen CPU Has Memory Controller and GPU.
The on-board memory controller was pretty much the defining architectural feature of the Opteron family of CPUs, especially as Opteron interacted with the HyperTransport bus. The Opteron architecture was introduced in April of 2003, and the HyperTransport architecture was introduced way back in April of 2001!!! As for the GPU, AMD purchased ATI in July of 2006 precisely so that they could integrate a GPU into their Opteron/Hypertransport package.
So from an intellectual property point of view, it's Intel that's furiously trying to claw their way back into the game.
But ultimately all of this will be decided by implementation - if AMD releases a first-rate implementation of their intellectual property, at a competitive price, then they'll be fine.
1. Putting a GPU on the processor immediately divides the market for it. Unless this is only going to be a laptop processor it probably won't sell well on desktops.
2. Hyperthreading only works well in an idle pipeline. The core 2 duo (like the AMD64) have fairly high IPC counts, and hence, low amount of bubbles (as compared to say the P4). And even on the P4 the benefit is marginal at best and in some cases it hurts performance.
The memory controller makes sense as it lowers the latency to memory.
if Intel wants to spend gates, why not put in more accelerators for things like the variants of the DCT used by MPEG, JPEG and MPEG audio? or how about crypto accelerators for things like AES and bignum math?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Meh.
#define Competition > 2
What you have here is a duopoly, which is apparently what we in the US prefer as all our major industries eventually devolve into 2-3 huge companies controlling an entire market. That ain't competition, and it ain't good for all of us.
Captcha = hourly. Why, yes, yes I am.