The Future of Intel Processors

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."

Instead of more power

[nurb432]

How about more code efficiency? That would also improve overall security too.

If people coded properly, we wouldn't need this 'speed race' just to watch our word processors and browsers get slower and slower each release..

Multicore vs. implicit parallelism

[BritneySP2]

While multicores, obviously, have their use, the future belongs to CPUs with massive internal implicit parallelism, IMHO.

Clock Speed?

[tji]

It seems that Intel very rarely mentions clock speed in any of their roadmap briefings. The clock speed increases over the last five years or so have been pretty minimal. Moore's law talks about the rate transistor density increases. But, clock speed has followed a similar curve until recently. The last 4-5 years has to be the longest plateau in the history of the industry.

Yes, I know they changed to a new architecture that put less emphasis on raw clock speed. But, given that more efficient architecture, clock speed increases are still going to be a major benefit.

So, what's the story? Has the industry hit a wall? How long will it take to get back to above 3GHz for a mainstream processor, or even to the 4GHz levels that the old Pentium IVs were pushing.

Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of the power efficiencies of the new chips. For my primary purposes (laptop, HTPC) the new chips are a godsend. And, the thought of specialized "accelerator" cores is fantastic (a video decoder core for MPEG2 & H.264, please). But, doing that same thing at 4GHz is even more compelling (of course, with the speedstep++ stuff to shut down cores when not needed, and throttle back to low GHz to save power).

Re:Multicore vs. implicit parallelism

[BritneySP2]

move that into the processor

In a manner of speaking, yes. For a compiler of a programming language to be able to implement the language's constructs efficiently, there must be an adequate support of those constructs by the target hardware.

On a more general note, the boundaries between hardware and software are always blurred, in that you cannot completely abstract one from another without hurting the performance of the system.

Re:New term war.

[Anonymous Coward]

What people often fail to understand about that "GHz war" is that the problem is not that Intel and AMD pursued high clock speeds, but that they were sacrificing other factors. The Pentium 4's high clock speeds were attained by using a very long pipeline, resulting in various drawbacks like a long flush / warm-up phase.

I don't think that's the case now - I'm sure there has been some small sacrifices to accommodate the large number of cores, but not that great. Furthermore, unlike the GHz war, the focus is about scalability- so the overhead for operating 4 cores would not be very large compared with 8 cores.

I think the industry is going in a very good direction, especially with the concept of specialized cores.

Energy Efficiency

[zentec]

The thing that is the future for Intel is not only the bizillion cores and cheaper/faster, but to do so with outstanding energy efficiency. This is obviously important for portable computing, but it's also important to reduce heat load and power consumption in large data centers. Cost of ownership comparisons have yet to include power consumption, but as green house gas taxes start making their way onto electric bills, it's likely to be a selling point.

More and more there's a need for extremely energy efficient, low footprint devices for special purpose applications. It just doesn't make a lot of sense to have PC sucking 60 watts when all you need is something to run Minicom to a simple 15" LCD screen.

Multiple cores appear as one

[gilesjuk]

That's what they need to do. Rather than make one chip look like two, it's easier to get max performance by making more than one core appear as one.