The Future of Intel Processors 164
madison writes to mention coverage at ZDNet on the future of Intel technology. Multicore chips are their focus for the future, and researchers at the company are working on methods to adapt them for specific uses. The article cites an example were the majority of the cores are x86, with some accelerators and embedded graphics cores added on for added functionality. "Intel is also tinkering with ways to let multicore chips share caches, pools of memory embedded in processors for rapid data access. Cores on many dual- and quad-core chips on the market today share caches, but it's a somewhat manageable problem. "When you get to eight and 16 cores, it can get pretty complicated," Bautista said. The technology would prioritize operations. Early indications show that improved cache management could improve overall chip performance by 10 percent to 20 percent, according to Intel." madison also writes, "In another development news Intel has updated its Itanium roadmap to include a new chip dubbed 'Kittson' to follow the release of Poulson. That chip will be based on a new microarchitecture that provides higher levels of parallelism."
Re:gcc? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Clock Speed? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:For the long term (Score:3, Informative)
For example, they could put a Java bytecode interpreter "cpu" into the system. Java CPUs didn't take off because a mainstream processor would always have better process and funding, and you had to totally switch to Java. But if everybody had a Java "cpu" that only cost $0.25 extra to put in the chip and got faster as the main CPU got faster, then it might actually be useful (incidentally
Alternatively, they could put in generic garbage collection as a separate processor that runs all the time. This could accelerate Python, Java,
I don't think multi-threaded code is necessarily the only way to take advantage of multiple cores.
Re:Clock Speed? (Score:4, Informative)
When comparing different processors with the same ISA (ie x86), IPS is the best measure of CPU performance, not clock speed.
Re:Clock Speed? (Score:3, Informative)
Tell that to the Amiga guys and to AMD when they chose IPC over clock while the P4 was around. Both are very important. The industry spent years ramping up the clock and now they're spending a few years working on IPC. It makes perfect sense to me. Moore's law also doesn't refer to the frequency of a chip but to the number of transistors which has kept pace especially now with the 45nm processes.
Personally I think for the moment IPC is far more important than frequency given computers are doing more and more these days not just doing one thing faster.
Re:Remaining Interchangable (Score:3, Informative)
If intel used just one socket, then you would have portions of a socket unused on some systems, but it would cost less to do the design, because there would be only one design. They don't do this because a socket with less pins costs less.
I don't know if that's what you wanted to know...
Intel and AMD could ostensibly remain eternally interchangeable; they are not and long have not been socket-level-compatible anyway. And they're not 100% interchangeable, if you fritter around at low levels you will find things that must be done differently on each processor, which is why [for example] the Linux kernel is configured differently for each.
The last time intel and AMD were socket-compatible was Socket Super 7.
Re:More energy efficient chips... (Score:3, Informative)
Primary enemy of electronics is heat caused by inefficiency. By moving to a smaller process we reduce voltage, thus we reduce power (P=VI) and thus we reduce heat. So we can go faster. But we can also not go faster, and go lower power. VIA is the current leader, AFAIK, in low-power x86-compatible processors/systems. But beyond their equipment, much of which is very sad and slow, you can simply underclock any CPU and depending on the design, often run it at a lower voltage still.
Look into underclocking - the same work that went into making a faster processor also produced a lower-power processor. It simply isn't both at once.
I do wish processors would clock themselves down further. Core Duo T2600 peak is 2.16GHz, but it only goes down to 1GHz. Why not, say, 500MHz? Most of the time, two Core cores running at 500MHz would more than cover my CPU needs. It's only when I'm encoding video or playing a game or running a big report that I need all the processing power.
Re:Size doesnt matter to me. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Clock Speed? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. There was a big story about three years ago that when Intel got its first chips from some new process shrink (90 nm?), they were startled to find that they couldn't get them to run substantially faster than the previous version. Up until then, they'd always gotten a significant speedup from that with no design changes, but they did hit some sort of physical limit no one was expecting. I haven't heard anything since about whether they figured out what it was.
Basically immediately, the Pentium 4 line was ended, and they started planning to go back to the Pentium 3 design (P-6 architecture, introduced in 1995 on the Pentium Pro), which had been quietly improving as the Pentium M in the meantime.
even to the 4GHz levels that the old Pentium IVs were pushing
The Pentium IV had a couple of really good ideas ("trace cache", off the top of my head -- the instruction cache was post-decode), but it was fundamentally a really dumb design. It was optimized for a clock speed number they could put on a label, even though it degraded performance by taking pipelining too far. It was really fast if you could keep the pipeline full, but the only common application that could do so was video encoding.