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Intel Breathes New Life Into Pentium
angry tapir writes "Intel is giving new life to its Pentium processor for servers, and has started shipping the new Pentium 350 chip for low-end servers. The dual-core processor operates at a clock speed of 1.2GHz and has 3MB of cache. Like many server chips, the Pentium 350 lacks features such as integrated graphics, which are on most of Intel's laptop and desktop processors."
A chip like this would work good for servers that are limited more by network bandwidth and disk IO than by CPU load.
... What exactly does this have to do with the older pentium architechtures?
That'd be a very very low end server!
You can buy more powerful hardware, a desktop actually, with 4 cores and call it your server.
Naaa, Intel is killing the Pentium.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Until Intel brings back the Pentium brand in general.
Unless they're stupid.
I'll never understand why they killed their most visible, most recognised brand.
it was a 59.97, actually...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Is to try and stop people using Atom chips on the server due to their low profit margins? Doesn't have me fooled atleast. On the subject of the Pentium brand, it's best off where they left it. I think of Pentium I think slow, old and crap. To they extent I was put off the second I read the name.
And this is also nothing new. They've been selling "Pentiums" for some time now. The Pentium G6950 is one for the last generation Core i series systems (LGA1156). The Pentium G600 and G800 series are for this generation core i series (LGA1155, Sandy Bridge). They are the same architecture as the i series chips, just more cut down.
So for example with the current LGA1155 offerings:
-- The i7-2600/2700 are the quad core, hyperthreaded chips with 8MB cache.
-- The i5s are quad core, non-HT, 6MB cache.
-- The i3s are dual core, hyperthreaded, 3MB cache. They also lack AES-NI instructions.
-- The Pentiums are dual core, non-HT, 3MB cache and have slower graphics and clockspeed. They also lack AVX instructions (and AES-NI).
-- The Celerons are even slower, and 2 or 1MB of cache, and the lowest end one is single core.
In all cases they are all Sandy Bridge. They are 32nm chips with that core architecture. The lower end ones just have less features, cache, clockspeed, and so on and thus can be made cheaper.
Basically these days "Core" is Intel's mainstream and high end brand. Everything from about $120 up is branded Core. Pentiums are their budget brand, the $60-100 range. Celerons are their extreme budget brand. $40-50 (only sold to OEMs).
I suppose. Although these days I see most serious customers by a few high end servers and use vmware. I've yet to see a single low end low power server in a datacentre in this country
... all their 32-bit x86 CPUs as Pentiums, including the recent names, such as Pentium i3 Dual Cores, etc, an come up w/ a new name for all their x64 CPUs - maybe call it Hexiums, or Sexiums, and append them w/ their current names, such as Xeon, Core2Quad, et al, so that they'd have a good branding strategy. And come up w/ low cost versions of the Itanium, since it's obviously going nowhere in servers, and they might as well get some lower cost versions of that CPU and offer systems on that loaded w/ things like FreeBSD, Debian, et al.
Hmmm... processors do do more work per clock nowadays as compared to 12 years ago. And, they do it at waaaaaaaay less power and cost. Think about your huge many-fanned nearly 1kW rig from the turn of the millennium vs. the cramped space of a 1U slot pulling maybe 100W. This ain't your father's Pentium.
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HP Microservers sold like hotcakes, and were based around AMD's Athlon II Neo N36L processor - which is 64bit, dual core, 25W TDP, VT-x etc. No doubt Intel want part of this pie
What happened to the Pentium 5 through 349?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
A mate had a bugged P90 that he got cheap. For 99.9% of users, there was no issue. It certainly made for a cheap machine that kicked arse at quake, back when he got it for about the price of a 486.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
It's pretty obvious that the low TDP means it's meant for something fanless/low-noise like MacMini servers. Though the MacMini already runs a laptop i5 chip for the same reason.
I hope, but have little faith in Intel when it comes to putting out cooler chips with lower TDP. When they have 100W+ TDP, you can only stuff 4 of them in a 15A rack. When they're 15W, that comes up to 24 ,machines or even blade systems.
But I think it might actually be an attempt to beat Calxeda before it sells any servers. http://www.calxeda.com/products/energycore/ecx1000 1.5Watts per chip (5Watts at maximum power.) The point to notice is the Pentium VTd feature is missing, which means it's not meant for VM's
So if Intel is now pushing the Pentium brand, and having suffered Intel's legal belligerence myself, I feel sorry for all those who have brand names starting with P and having less than 12 letters.
Basically these days "Core" is Intel's mainstream and high end brand. Everything from about $120 up is branded Core. Pentiums are their budget brand, the $60-100 range. Celerons are their extreme budget brand. $40-50 (only sold to OEMs).
Good grief, Intel's marketing department really needs a good slapping.
Their brand positioning used to make sense when you knew that Celeron was their budget line (though sometimes quite decent) and Pentium-XXX (later replaced by Core-XXX) the standard midrange, with Xeon for servers.
So when they brought back Pentium, I was confused until (as you say) realising that it was meant as a kind-of-lower-priced line, but not as cheap as the Celeron (*). Confused partly because they still had the Core 2 (**) then i3/i5/i7 lines as their mainstream brand which Pentium used to represent.
In other words, they brought back the Pentium name due (presumably) to some vague consumer recognition, but not for what it was used before and for some vaguely-defined semi-budget segment.
Worse, it isn't even necessary because the current "Core" line is split into i3, i5 and i7, which is an easily-understood hierarchy, and along with the "Celeron", there's absolutely no need for another damn confusing name.
*Now* they're making things even more of a cluster**** by using the Pentium name on low-end *server* (not mainstream) processors.
Please note that I'm *not* talking about the underlying architecture, which marketing doesn't necessarily follow, and which the man on the street probably doesn't care about much. I'm simply talking about incompetent marketing and positioning in that there are a mess of names that no longer represent their intended price segment and/or use clearly.
Then again, perhaps confusion is the aim of the game, as it makes it easier for sales people to bamboozle the public and upsell more expensive CPUs than they need? But I suspect not.
(*) You say that Celeron is now an ultra-cheap OEM-only thing, but I can still apparently purchase boxed versions here and here, for example.
(**) And while I'm here, "Core" and "Core 2" were absolutely stupid choices for a processor name, as "core" already had a technologically-defined use we all know well, and "Core" (the name) was thus guaranteed to confused anyone not in the field, e.g. a dual-core Core, etc. etc..... "Core 2" was even worse, as it's going to get easily confused with "dual core" and terms like "Core 2 Quad" (i.e. a four-core "Core 2"!) are just a confusing mess for Joe Public. I know of at least one alleged computer technician (i.e. someone who *could* be expected to know this) who thought that "Core 2" in itself meant that it was a dual-core processor! I'll give them a free pass on the fact that the original "Core" line didn't actually feature the "Core" architecture, as I was complaining about bad marketing, and marketing doesn't normally mention internal architectures anyway.
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Actually I'm shocked nobody has tried cooking up a low cost low power server based on brazos. With OpenCL you could harness the built in Radeon GPU and at 18w for a dual core 1.6GHz part its a power sipper. You could slap 4 of them into a blade and only be using 72 watts for an 8 core with 4 Radeon GPUs you could run GP/GPU code on. Now that even Nvidia is supporting OpenCL it seems like that would be a better deal over the Pentium in TFA.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Somehow I doubt that integrated graphics are on "most" of their chips, unless you're talking about the volume shipped for laptops, and even then I thought the graphics were on a separate chip in most cases.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It's a Pentium in as much as they named it "Pentium," much like a Ford Taurus of today is just as much a Ford Taurus as one they made 20 years ago, even though they have no parts in common. It's a Taurus because Ford named it that.
The Intel Atom probably has more in common with the original P54C than the Pentium Pro did.
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