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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.
I do. I feel that AMD should stop beating itself and get back to beating Intel!
No, seriously, though. I'm holding out on the hope that AMD's licensing of ZRAM will be able to keep them in the game.
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I agree. Despite of the fact of AMD market share growing in the past 3 years, the most recent products coming from AMD are headed to beat the AMD ones, unless AMD takes a shift in the current direction and starts to follow AMD example. Nowadays, when I order my processors from my retailer, I always ask for AMD first, and only if the AMD price is significantly lower, I order AMD. I remember back in the days when you could only buy AMD processors, while now you can choose between AMD and AMD (and some other minor producers), isn't competition marvelous?
From your truly,
Marklar
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.
I can't wait for the Frodo and Samwise chips
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I'm not sure what reviews you've been looking at but AMD is not nearly "keeping pace" with Intel, not for the last year anyway. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2879 clearly shows the intel architecture shining, with many benchmarks having the slowest Intel core beating the fastest AMD. At the same time, Intel is acheiving twice the performance per watt, and these are cores, some of which have been on the market for 6-12 months. Intel has also already released their dual-chip, eight core server line which is slated to make its way into a Mac Pro within 3 weeks. AMD's "hold" on the 4-way market exists because of the conditions 2 years ago when those servers were built. If you want a true comparison (as you claim to be striving for) then you need to look at what new servers are being sold and what the sales numbers are like (I don't have that information). But since the 8-core Intel is again using less than half of the thermal power an 8-core AMD offering, I would wager that an informed IT department wouldn't be choosing the Opteron route.
AMD is capable of great things but Intel has set their minds on dominating the processor world for at least the next 5 years and it will take nothing short of a major evolutionary step from AMD to bring things back into equilibrium. Whilst AMD struggles to get their full line onto the 65nm production scheme, Intel has already started ramping up the 45nm, and that's something that AMD won't quickly be able to compete with.
Intel's latest announcement of modular chip designs and further chipset integration are interesting but I'll reserve judgement until some engineering samples have been evaluated. I'm not ready to say that an on-board memory controllers is hands-down the best solution, but I do agree that this is a great step towards mobile hardware (think smart phones / pda's / tablets ) using less energy and having more processing power while fititng in a smaller form factor.