Intel "East Fork" Technology Migration 165
Hack Jandy writes "When Intel's Centrino platform first unveiled, industry experts were surprised to see such great performance of the Pentium M, based off Intel's P6 (Pentium III) architecture. According to sources in the industry, Intel has officially adopted the approach to migrating Pentium M to the desktop (hence, "East Fork") to offset some of its Pentium 4 processor sales. Cheaper, slower, cooler, but higher performing processors are on the way to an Intel desktop near you!"
Re:So Intel is basically saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So Intel is basically saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not that deep pipeline is bad in itself; the point is, the decision to build the pIV that way was slaved to the use of MHZ as a marketing tool. That, in itself, drove the chip design in a way that essentially banned it from the laptop market, which in turn drove the design of the pentium-m , a.k.a. Centrino.
Now Intel itself is at a fork in the road, because Prescott is also geared towards higher frequencies, which means it will probably be hotter still. [tech-report.com]
Now, I do not know how much money Intel sunk in the prescott design, but if it is serious in building this new Centrino derivative processor, all this money will be washed away; and if Intel tries to keep this processor one step behind Prescott in performance, it risks a royal Chewing up by AMD.
Re:Great for servers (Score:1, Insightful)
processing intensive things like a DB would be happier with multiple low power cores. we have a 2.2Ghz Xeon server here and the 4 processor P-III 500 server next to it regularly kicks the faster and newer machines arse HARD every single time. and that performance gap increases as the load increases.. having 20 users on each server really shows it off. the Older P-III kicks the Xeon's head so hard it is not even funny.
and the 2.2ghz Xeon server has 4X the ram.
I have been trading new servers to other departments for their older MP servers... they happily trade me, and I get the better end of the deal.
and this is running the crappy MSSQL. I'm betting Oracle will show even more pperformance under the older MP designes.
Re:What do you do when Itanic sinks? (Score:5, Insightful)
So are the Pentium II and Pentium III, what's your point? The article clearly states (and it is common knowlegde) that the "M" is based on the PIII, this is no secret or some massive Intel conspiracy... Yes the Pentium Pro was a great design; it really has legs to go from 166MHz to 2GHz or whatever the "M" runs at these days. But it has been a long evolutionary process, not a direct jump from the Pro to "M".
Re:M beats lots of stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
People have been using VIA EPIA because they want little, cool, quiet computers. Now it looks like little, cool, quiet computers will finally get a REAL processor.
And yes! It runs Linux! ^_^
PS: I'd welcome AMD trying a similar tack to make a cooler chip that requires less active cooling. I'm not an Intel fangirl. I'm a fan of computers that work.
Let’s be precise folks (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's be precise here folks. Slower clock rate. I got the wrong impression the first time I read this, and likely others did too.
Uh, Excuse Me... (Score:3, Insightful)
Excuse me. Certainly we're not referring to 802.11g wireless networking here, are we?
It's statements like that one that make me doubt the entire article. Just who are these guys anyway?
Re:Don't think so (Score:1, Insightful)
Having the fastest desktop CPU is more of a prestige thing than reasonable behavior for a capitalist company. Not that prestige isn't a great way to sell your technology in other segments, but even companies like AMD and Intel actually make a lot of their revenues (if maybe not their profits) in other sectors, like flash memory, chipsets, and the embedded processor markets.
Not Pentium M on the desktop. (Score:3, Insightful)
This comment seems to suggest that the processor will be something else entirely:
"East Fork will include a newly designed Intel microprocessor with two processing cores, a supporting chip set, and a Wi-Fi wireless radio. The package will be designed for "digital home" PCs, which shuttle music and movies around the home and can store TV shows digitally,"
However, this does sound like the platform will target the same applications that VIA's Mini-ITX systems are widely used for. Therefore, it would make sense that the "newly designed Intel microprocessor" will be based on or similar to the Pentium M, but I wouldn't say that this is an announcement of a desktop Pentium M.
Re:What do you do when Itanic sinks? (Score:2, Insightful)
It shouldn't be too much longer until a critical mass of multi-platform software is available (OpenOffice, etc.) but the real kicker is games. As soon as another hardware platform that is cheap and viable for games in addition to all the other work stuff is available, we may see a shift or two
Re:What do you do when Itanic sinks? (Score:3, Insightful)
No. That is half of intel's problems. The Itanium was aimed at high end, possibly expanding to the lower end. For the lower end they had their P4s and variants.
Their Itanium problem is that adoption has been slow (for a number of reasons), and as performance of standard x86 chips has improved the window for Itanium as shrunk even smaller, to be used only in the highest of high end computing.
Their other problem is with the lower end chips. Put simply the decision to lengthen the pipline for the P4 was a bad one. It was a marketing decision to bring out higher numbers for clock speed. Intel has now discovered that the design doesn't scale well (either in performance or heat).
Hence the interest in Pentium M, which does scale well. If you read the Ars Technica articles on the subject this will all be clearer.
I'm surprised to hear this news becuase the last I had heard intel was continuing to base new cores on the P4, rather than the Pentium M, even though the Pentium M is the logical direction.