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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.
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.)
...they're taking AMD's on-die memory controller, AMD/ATi's on-die GPU and Sun's multi-thread handling and putting them on one chip?
Have Intel come up with anything genuinely new recently?
Goten Xiao
Intel has a lot of cash, and the ability to invest in expensive processes earlier than most. Certainly, earlier than AMD.
However, it's worth noting, that these are clearly AMD ideas.
* On die memory controller - AMD's idea - and it's been in use for quite a while now
* Embedded GPU - a rip off of the AMD fusion idea, announced shortly after the aquisition of AMD.
Intel is no longer leading as they have in yeas past - they are copying and looting their competition shamelessly. It appears that they are "leading" when point in fact it's simply not the case - had AMD not realeased the Athlon64 we would all still be using single processor NetBurst processors.
In the meantime, you can get an AMD X2 3600 (65nm Brisbane core) for around $85 now, and probably in the $60 range well before these new products hit. The high end is one thing, but who actually buys it? Very few. I don't know anyone that bought the latest FX when it came out, or an Opteron 185 when they hit, or even a Core2Duo Extreme. All this does is push the mid- to low-end products down, and a ~$65 dual core that overclocks like crazy (some are getting 3 GHz on stock volts on the 3600) would seem like the best price/performance to me.
AMD's not out because they don't control the high end. Remember, you can get the X2 3600 w/ a Biostar TForce 550 motherboard at Newegg for the same price as an E4300 CPU (no mobo), and that's the board folks are using to get it up to crazy clock speeds.
In this case that's actually a relevant question. Will the full GPU specs and/or open source drivers be available?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I can see those being quite hot for servers, where running "many small" tasks is where the game is.
On a desktop PC you often need the focused application (say, some sort of graphical/audio editor, game, or just a very fancy flash web site even) to get most of the power of the CPU to render well.
If you split the speed potential in 16, would desktop users see actual speed benefit? They'll see increased responsiveness from the smoother multitasking of the more and more background tasks running on our everyday OS-es, but can a mostly single-task focused desktop usage really benefit?
How of course, we're witnessing ways to split concerns of a single task application into multiple threads: the new interface of Windows runs in a separate CPU thread and on the GPU, never mind if the app itself is single threaded or not. That's helping.
Still, serial programming is, and is going to be, prevalent for many many years to come, as most tasks a casual / consumer applications performs are inherently serial and not "paralelizable" or whatever that would be called.
My point being, I hope we'll still be getting *faster* threads, not just *more* threads. The situation now is that i's harder harder to communicate "hey we have only 1000 threads/cores unlike the competition which has 1 million, but we're faster!". It's just like AMD's tough position in the past, explaining their chips are faster despite having slower clock-rate.
Not quite. Intel projects are usually named after local geographical features, not all of them rivers. For example, Banias, Dothan, Yonah, and Merom (Centrino/core2 duo project names) are not rivers in Israel. Also, the first PIII project was done in Folsom and named "Katmai" -- again, there is no Katmai river in Northern California.
It's quite common in the industry to give projects names that don't mean anything, and each company uses a different scheme for generating the monikers. One interesting story is what happened when Apple used an internal project name of "Sagan". Carl Sagan took exception to this use of his name and threatened a lawsuit. Apple responded by changing the project name to "BHA", a TLA for "Butt-Head Astronomer". Sagan filed a lawsuit over this but it was thrown out of court when the judge ruled the new name was a generic one since Sagan was probably not the world's only butthead astronomer. (As least that's what I recall of it. Perhaps someone who worked at Apple during this time can add more detail?)
OK, these new parallel chips aren't even out yet, and software has to get the hardware before SW can improve to exploit the HW. But the HW has all the momentum, as usual. SW for parallel computing is as rudimentary as a 16bit microprocessor.
What we need is new models of computing that programmers can use, not just new tools. Languages that specify purely sequential operations on specific virtual hardware (like scalar variables that merely represent specific allocated memory hardware), or metaphors for info management that computing killed in the last century ("file cabinets", trashcans of unique items and universal "documents" are going extinct) are like speaking Latin about quantum physics.
There's already a way forward. Compiler geeks should be incorporating features of VHDL and VeriLog, inherently parallel languages, into gcc. And better "languages", like flowchart diagrams and other modes of expressing info flow, that aren't constrained by the procedural roots of those HW synthesis old guard, should spring up on these new chips like mushrooms on dewy morning lawns.
The hardware is always ahead of the software - as instructions for hardware to do what it does, software cannot do more. But now the HW is growing capacity literally geometrically, even arguably exponentially, in power and complexity beyond our ability to even articulate what it should do within what it can. Let's see some better ways to talk the walk.
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make install -not war
Look at some of the memory tests done on the Mac Pro. The memory bus issue most definitely rears its ugly head there, and is the reason that the new 2-way systems only run with the slower FBDIMMs. The integrated memory controller is needed for any serious server work, which is why Intel is getting trounced in the server market.
Integrated GPU... SGI? I can't think of another high-end modularly integrated GPU, and I'm not even 100% sure about the SGI one.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
A lot of amd fanboys here. PErformance wise intels latest chips are winning versus amds chips. Without an integrated memory controller.
Now intel will have that also. This means that amds only advantage they will lose. AMD needs something huge to stay in the game.
Also baiscally this news sounds like Intels Version of the Cell processor.(they stated configurable cores that each core can be set to do something else.)