Intel Drops Tejas, Xeon To Focus On Dual-Core Chips 329
PunkerTFC writes "Reuters has an article about Intel dropping the fourth-generation P4 chip (codenamed "Tejas") and the Xeon server processor. Intel says they want to concentrate on their new 'dual-core' technology for desktop and notebook systems. This is essentially putting two processors on one chip, allowing for a doubling of performance with less energy use. The introduction of this technology was not expected for another year and a half. Rival chip maker AMD says they have the capability to produce dual-core chips and will introduce the technology when they "feel there is a market need.""
It seems may seem obvious... (Score:4, Insightful)
Dual processors are nice. (Score:3, Insightful)
And right after AMD.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Dupe Scoop... (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean this was interesting a couple days ago, but now it is old news...
Exactly.. Market Need. (Score:2, Insightful)
Real impact (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, people are going to find themselves having to pay higher licensing fees with regular desktop computers as well as servers. Small workgroup servers could be really hard hit by this from some vendors.
I wonder how this will play out with XP Home which only supports one CPU? AMD has the technology so they may well respond in kind when Intel does (dammit lead AMD, lead), which could have a fair impact in weaning the masses of XP Home. I dont think MS will let this go the route of hyperthreading with the "logical processor" support.
Re:Real impact (Score:2, Insightful)
Instead, with everyone doing these small multi-core chips, you'll probably see "Per MIPS" pricing like in the mainframe world.
Remember (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD, like Nokia, Apple and Nintendo, is not.
AMD's strategy (Opteron instead of dual-core?) will therefore be called "a significant risk given the current market reality" while Intel's strategy (dual-core instead of Itanium?) will be called "a savvy decision for the technology giant," even though the media wouldn't know an Opteron or a dual-core CPU if one jumped up on their desk and did the tap number from 42nd street.
All of the general stories will make repeated and redundant references to the effect of Intel's strategy on the "tech-heavy Nasdaq."
This is no different than the Sony vs. Nintendo console competition. The media doesn't like competition. Neither do the markets. (There is only room for three companies in any given market) It's so much easier to be a sycophant when your favored company has 80% of the market.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Parallel? (Score:2, Insightful)
Is this a parallel implementation then? In that case performance is only doubled for processes that can be performed in parallel.
This is only accurate if you're describing single-task performance. System-wide performance may be *more* than doubled, if you're dealing with loads that are causing a lot of switching overhead.
And I don't think it's just a server thing. When my old dual cpu system finally died, I replaced it with a single cpu setup that ran nearly twice as fast (by MHz) as the two chips in the old system combined. Yet the feel of the system under load was substantially worse. I'm pretty stoked about this. I think it could improve the average user's desktop experience a great deal.
Re:Dual processors are nice. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And right after AMD.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Realistically, long-term strategies are in the pipeline for months before they're ever announced to the public. Intel surely had several different plans, and decided that this one was more future-proof than the previous one. I doubt that a one-week trend had anything to do with their decision.
Deja vu...? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Exactly.. Market Need. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's exactly what they try to avoid. Each core in a multi-core processors is simpler than a single processor of the current generation, but they make it up by putting two or more of them on the same chip. Another way to look at it is that the parallel execution units of a current generation processor are made even more autonomous, and this is made explicit by declaring them to to be separate processor cores.
The point is to use the available transistors on a chip as effictively as possible. For a long time computer architects used the growning number of transistors to enlarge caches and pipelines, add execution units, and add other niceties (e.g. branch prediction, MMX), but the gains have gotten less and less (and were sometimes dubious to begin with).
Multicore processors are only useful if people have enough parallelism in their applications to make it worthwhile. Therefore, it won't help every application, but that's also true for many tricks in existing architectures.
Re:It seems may seem obvious... (Score:3, Insightful)
AMD's Opteron, with its onboard memory controller, has been a perfect candidate for a dual-core setup since it was released (and will be getting one later this year). The Athlon64 is very similiar to the Opteron and thus it will be very easy to transition it to dual-core. The P4, on the other hand, has already got its dual-core in the form of hyperthreading.
I'd think AMD was already ahead of the game and invested in the onboard memory controller rather than something similiar to hyperthreading, because they knew that a real dual-core setup would be necessary in the future. They were planning ahead for this. So, it could be that MS's annoucement about Longhorn needing a dual-core setup stems not from Intel but from AMD.
Re:It seems may seem obvious... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it has everything to do with Pentium M and AMD64 architectures kicking PIV's a$$.
Re:Dual processors are nice. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dual processors are nice. (Score:3, Insightful)
I ask because I run dual proc now, hate to live without it.
Re:It seems may seem obvious... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, and of course Gamers will buy the new systems, especially if they label the chips "Radical Edition".
Re:It seems may seem obvious... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Parallel? (Score:2, Insightful)
I wouldn't be so quick to characterize the Pentium-M as a low end chip. From what I've read of it's inception, they took the P3 core, added some advancements gleaned from the development of the P4, and optimized it for power efficiency. A while back, while googling about, I found that others have wondered about PM's in an SMP configuration. That's not possible (perhaps not even in the way ABIT made the dual P3 VP6 -- i.e. with a hardware hack), but interest in this chip as a performer has at least created a market for PM based blades. This chip isn't a P4EE, but it's hardly a Celeron.
Re:Dual processors are nice. (Score:3, Insightful)
The ABit BP6 and Intel Celerons "pioneered consumer market multi-processor machines".