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Intel Next-Gen CPU Has Memory Controller and GPU

Posted by kdawson on from the mmmm-threads dept.

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.

7 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Is AMD beaten? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.)

    1. Re:Is AMD beaten? by LWATCDR · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Simple Nothing has shipped yet.
      So we will see. Intel's GPUs are fine for home use but not in the same category as ATI or NVidia. The company that might really loose big in all this is NVidia. If Intel and AMD start integrating good GPU cores on the same die as the CPU where will that leave NVidia?
      It could be left in the dust.

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    2. Re:Is AMD beaten? by Gr8Apes · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.) Oh, good lord. Intel announces the "new" technology for something that's not due for years (most likely 2) which happens, just happens, to be tech you can already buy from AMD today (or with their next CPU release in the next few months) and you're running around "the sky is falling, the sky is falling".

      This reminds me of MS during the OS/2 days, when they first announced Cairo with its DB file system and OO interface (sound familiar? It should - features of Longhorn, then moved to Blackcomb, and now off the map as a major release). Unlike MS, I don't doubt Intel will finally release most of what they've announced, but to think that they're "ahead" is ludicrous. At this moment, their new architecture will barely beat AMD's 3+ year old architecture (See Anandtech or Tom's, I forget which, but there was a head to head comparison of AMD's 4X4 platform with Intel's latest and greatest quad CPU, and AMD's platform kept pace. That should scare the bejeebers out of Intel, and apparently it has, because they're now following the architectural trail blazed by AMD, or announced previously, like multi-core chips with specialty cores.

      In other words, not much to see here, wake me when the chips come out. Until Barcelona ships, Intel holds the 1-2 CPU crown. When it ships, we'll finally be able to compare CPUs. AMD still holds the 4-way and up market, hence its stranglehold in the enterprise. Intel's announcement of an onboard memory controller in Nehalem indicates that they're finally maybe going to try to tackle the multi-CPU market again, depending upon how well architected that solution is.
      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    3. Re:Is AMD beaten? by Vulva+R.+Thompson,+P · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That will give AMD the opportunity to blow ahead as it did time and time again in the past.

      That's assuming they'll have the cash and/or debt availability to do so; a large chunk went into the ATI acquisition. Their balance sheet reads worse now than any time in the past (imho) and the safety net of a private equity buyout is weak at best. Now that ATI is in the mix, it seems that competition in two segments is now at risk.

      Point being that the underdog in a two horse race is always skating on thin ice. Let's hope that he doesn't hit a spot that's too thin this time.

  2. Imitation is the highest form of flattery by Zebra_X · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Price still factors, though, and AMD competes. by sjwaste · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Sure thats nice but... by MrFlibbs · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?)