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!"
Make sense noise-wise (Score:3, Interesting)
Great for servers (Score:2, Interesting)
Low power usage...
Great performance..
Low heat emission (easy to make passive cooled..)
GamePC made a test not long ago, and it performed on par with p4EE and amds FX5x...
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.
Original Reuters Article (Score:4, Interesting)
Since it's from Reuters anyhow... old news too (11th Nov).
I guess. (Score:4, Interesting)
So yep, they respond very quickly to customer needs and wants.
Re:So Intel is basically saying... (Score:5, Interesting)
What you've seen in the past couple years is a game of chess. With each move, the other hopes that they have positioned themselves to better reach a licensing deal. Intel's move to non-clock processor ratings was a big move in this game.
From what I've seen at Intel's developer forums, they're working on some radically different architecture. Something that isn't von Neumann at all. They're calling it "massively parallel" but the industry seems to think that this means multiple cores on one chip. I think that it means thousands or millions of "processing elements" on one chip (think really small processing elements). Their claim is that they'll be able to apply this architecture to everything from mobile to high-end servers simply by adding or subtracting elements as power constraints allow.
How high can it climb? (Score:5, Interesting)
What do you do when Itanic sinks? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why Xeon became an architectural dead end: Intel wasn't willing to move the technology forward, because Xeon was supposed to be superseded by Itanium.
Did you know that "Pentium M" is actually based on the same technology they originally called Pentium Pro? It's true. It was a good design. It didn't do all that well initially because its 16-bit performance was abysmal, and people were still running a lot of 16-bit software at the time. Now that everything is 32-bit, Pentium Pro (now Pentium M) is just fine. The fact that it gets used in laptops is a testament to its ratio of performance to power consumption.
Intel would be wise to move forward with this. They ought to ditch Xeon entirely, and perhaps even graft the AMD64 instruction set onto this chip.
Re:Why do this? (Score:3, Interesting)
While the Pentium M may be able to close the gap to the Athlon 64 when running in 32 bit mode, possibly even beat the AMD chip if Intel are successful in increasing the M's clock speed, the Athlon is just waiting to really stretch it's legs. In some situations moving to 64 bits will not improve performance, and could possibly even hamper it, but for the majority of desktop applications and games with optimised code the 64 bit version with the extra registers will trounce the 32 bit chips.
Re:So Intel is basically saying... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Pentium M fast due to large CPU cache? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a design philosophy based around high IPC, not the large cache, that makes the Pentium M such a strong performer.
Re:So Intel is basically saying... (Score:3, Interesting)
Von Neumann assumes uniform memory access times - this is largely untrue for any ordinary scalar processor with a cache - ten years ago processors had internal memory write buffers, l1 cache, possibly l2 cache and main memory - today it's even more complicated. But common for all of this is that even a simple hierarchical memory system with a single level cache and the main memory makes your computer very far from Von Neumann.
So, if Intel wants to present something that "isn't von Neumann at all", all they need to do is pull an i386 out of a hat and wave it at the drooling masses.
Re:So Intel is basically saying... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Bout bloody time (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course its marketable. The new model number scheme puts the p4 at 4xx, while the M is 6xx. Thats 200 more. It must be a lot better. I knew they'd do this as soon as they came out with the model numbers.
Note: I'm not a moron. I'm just writing what "joe sixpack" thinks.
Re:What do you do when Itanic sinks? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not "going to"... "have"... They have been for sale (and actually shipping) for a couple months now.
I have to wonder if we are possibly seeing the end of the X86 ISA?
Well... If one thing has been proven in the past it is that software is the driving force, not hardware. It will still take some time for the near 30 years of x86 software to be replaced by "platform independent" stuff (like Java and
I mean Microsoft is droping the X86 from the XBoxII that means a port of WindowsXP to the PowerPC.
Yeah... this is really interesting... especially along with the three versions of the XBox2 that will be shipping (one of which is actually called a "PC").
Really kind of funny since WindowsNT was supposed to be multiplatform for the start.
It was. I had PPC, Alpha, and MIPS versions. One major problem for those was that there wasn't a market for them. There were only a few machines of those types of architectures that wanted to run Windows and no one for home would buy them. It just didn't make sense to keep them around (from a making money perspective). Also, some of the work to support those ports were supposed to be done by hardware vendors and they didn't do it (also because of the making money issue) so Microsoft was either left to do it themselves (on a losing money platform) or drop them from the support line.
Will Microsoft support Longhorn on IBMs power cpus?
Very good question... with the XBox2, it certainly seems that it wouldn't be too much of a step farther.
Frankly Intel has really had a dismal record with cpus except for the x86 The 8080 and later 8085 because second string players to the Zilog Z80 a better 8080 much like the Athlons are now. The 432 and 80860 where never hits. Intel even dropped its 890 line of embeded risc cpus to jump on the ARM bandwagon with it's Xscale line it bought from DEC.
Well... some folks would disagree with this. The 8051 (and followons) were huge in the embedded world. The i860 wasn't intended to be a "home PC" type processor and saw good use in the HPC world (Intel Paragons, iPSC860s, etc.) and in the graphics world (high end SGI graphics cards were based on i860s - RealityEngine, etc.) Likewise, the i960 family was huge in embedded systems. They were big in printers and all sorts of other devices. The i960s were phased out for newer/better technology in the XScales. The i960 was getting pretty old
Just confirming what google knows? (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't think so (Score:4, Interesting)
Intel has basically been hanging itself with the awful lot of rope their own marketting gave them. The "MHz is everything" marketting was an easy thing to push, since most people actually _want_ one number that tells them everything about a CPU.
(True story: I actually spent some time arguing with a marketroid about it, and gave up. He was arguing that it must be Anantech's and everyone else's benchmarks that are at fault, because CPU A is in some apps 50% faster than CPU B, in some apps equal, and in some apps actually a little slower. "It can't be! If CPU A is X% faster than CPU B, it must be X% faster in everything!" Any explanations about differences in CPU architecture and such, went right above his head.)
So it was easy for Intel to push the MHz as the one true speed indicator. And for a while all they had to do was keep putting out CPUs with more and more MHz.
Except after a while it became a trap. Any new design _had_ to be higher MHz, or have Intel's own marketting working against it. All those many millions that went into telling people "buy a higher clocked CPU", now would basically tell them "don't buy the newest Intel CPU chip", if Intel made one with less MHz.
And now Intel finally _has_ to find a way out of the hole it dug itself into.
As for Cyrix (now VIA), it was never really a problem for Intel. Cyrix just fell behind performance-wise on its own. The last proper Cyrix versions were already falling beind in integer performance too, but it was their floating point performance that was abysmal. So what killed Cyrix was not as much Intel, as games going 3D: now everyone had benchmarks everywhere, clearly showing the Cyrix as barely crawling.
And Via's versions fell behind even more. They aren't just slower in MHz, they're also slower _per_ MHz. Other than being low power, they just suck.
And it's not that VIA really _wants_ to be the poor-man's niche, for Chinese families who can't afford an Intel or AMD. People find such niches to survive, but noone really wants to _stay_ in such a niche. Noone actually wants to sell their top CPU at $30 or less, instead of, say, the $600+ that an Athlon 64 FX sells for.
So if VIA could break out of that unprofitable niche, believe me, they would. The problem is simply that they can't.
Re:What do you do when Itanic sinks? (Score:5, Interesting)
They still are extermly popular but not really an inovative design. But very successful but mainly for other companies Intel left the 8085 bussines a long time ago.
" The i860 wasn't intended to be a "home PC" type processor and saw good use in the HPC world (Intel Paragons, iPSC860s, etc.) and in the graphics world (high end SGI graphics cards were based on i860s - RealityEngine, etc.)" Actually the i860 was going to be a major new family of CPUs for workstations and the like. It never really lived up to it's billing. The worst problem with it was context switching was dog slow and the "smart" compilers never got smart enough. Running really tight code writen by hand running a single task they proved very fast and as you pointed out ended up in graphics cards and the like.
" Likewise, the i960 family was huge in embedded systems. They were big in printers and all sorts of other devices. The i960s were phased out for newer/better technology in the XScales. The i960 was getting pretty old
"
The i960 is no older than the ARM. In fact it came out a year after the first of the ARMs did. I would have to say that Intel except for the HUGE Wintel market really has not been all that successful. Frankly the have not had to since the x86 has been a huge money pump for them. I mean if you are going to win only one market that was the right one to win.
I do wonder what type of perfromance you could squeeze out of an ARM or an Alpha if you put as much money into them as Intel has with the x86.
"Well... If one thing has been proven in the past it is that software is the driving force, not hardware. It will still take some time for the near 30 years of x86 software to be replaced by "platform independent" stuff (like Java and
" You have forgoten the stealth platfrom independent stuff" Linux and c. For the server market anyway things like Samba, Apache, PHP, Perl, Postgres, and MySQL are all available to run on none Intel platforms. Linux and c are bringing write once compiler everywhere to the server world. Think of all the companies that are already porting stuff to Linux from old unix systems. Do you think they care if they are moving from a Sun or Vax to a linux box if they recompile for x86 or PPC? For the desktop you are right but even that is changing now. OpenOffice and Firebird/Thunderbird are bigger changes than anyone really wants to admit.
Re:Why do this? (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with you whole-heartedly. Although the only thing I'd add to what you've said is that they're going back to a chip design that they didn't actually design! If anyone recalls, the Pentium was basically ripped off from DEC. Sure, adding SSE and other "add-ons" was a way of extending the life of the base design until Intel could design its own chip from scratch: the Pentium IV.
Figures they'd go back to a design that was more efficient clock-for-clock than what they could come up with on their own.
And before anyone reads too much AMD kudos in this, AMD bought DEC engineers for chip design and traded flash tech for copper fabrication tech from Motorola to help them leapfrog from K6 (Intel-clone) to the K7.
Re:What do you do when Itanic sinks? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Great for servers (Score:3, Interesting)
It was only truly competitive with the FX when it was overclocked. Granted, it did very well for a low-power chip though. It was also interesting that AGP 8x appears to make very little difference over 4x for the games they tested.
The new 90 nm. Athlon64s overclock quite a bit also, though, and they are 64 bit (64 bit mode is faster, and wasn't tested). The upcoming dual core Athlon64s and Opterons also sound very good. There are also low-power versions which get a lot closer to Dothan power consumption.
All told, though, I'd like to see Intel market Dothan as a desktop solution with faster frontside bus, AGP 8x or PCIe and so on.
Competition is good! :-)