Intel Launches Power-Efficient Penryn Processors 172
Bergkamp10 writes "Over the weekend Intel launched its long-awaited new 'Penryn' line of power-efficient microprocessors, designed to deliver better graphics and application performance as well as virtualization capabilities.
The processors are the first to use high-k metal-gate transistors, which makes them faster and less leaky compared with earlier processors that have silicon gates. The processor is lead free and by next year Intel is planning to produce chips that are halogen free, making them more environmentally friendly.
Penryn processors jump to higher clock rates and feature cache and design improvements that boost the processors' performance compared with earlier 65-nm processors, which should attract the interest of business workstation users and gamers looking for improved system and media performance."
Re:revolutionary? no, but still noteworthy (Score:5, Insightful)
If this is how it ends for AMD, this is how it goes. I'll be sad, and may buy AMD anyway for some other reason (even if it's just stubborn fangirlism) but I respect Intel's design team. Their ethics, no, but their design is top notch this time around.
x86 already has elements of RISC & PowerPC is (Score:5, Insightful)
As for PowerPC Macs, I doubt it. The switch to Intel is what made most new Mac users switch because there was no longer a risk of not being able to run the one Windoze program they might need. If Mac ever went to a non-mainstream CPU again it would be a big big mistake.
Re:revolutionary? no, but still noteworthy (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if you are getting a worse deal in the short run, an upgrade cycle or two in the future may be much worse (comparatively) if everyone goes Intel.
Re:Still sticking (Score:3, Insightful)
Why? Once upon a time, the x86 ISA had too few registers. Today, that problem has vanished (simply by throwing more GP registers at the problem) - And even then, so few people actually see the problem (and I say that as one of the increasingly rare guys who still codes in ASM on occasion) as to make it a non-issue, more a matter of trivia than actual import.
The Power/PowerPC architecture was good
I know I risk a holy-war here, but: No, not really. PPC didn't suck, and held its own for its era. But it didn't scale well, it always cost significantly more for a given level of performance, and even its biggest advantage, "Vector" processing (aka SIMD), vanished with the introduction of the original MMX into the x86 line. After that point, only clock speed and number of execution units mattered (and of course price, never forget price), and the PPC simply fell further and further behind. Apple "switched" for a damned good reason, and "Intel Inside" doesn't describe it.
It should've been replaced a long time ago with a pure RISC instruction set especially now with the quest for less power-hungry chips
First of all, all modern chips have a native RISC-like core with an x86 frontend implemented entirely in microcode - So if the world still wanted PPC, Intel could release a C2D tomorrow that exported that as the visible interface. Arguing CISC vs RISC in today's world has as much meaning as arguing over case colors.
Second, the CPU's ISA has no (direct) effect on power consumption. RISC processors traditionally drew less power because they simply had fewer transistors (and a painfully small instruction set to show for it). A "modern" RISC processor, with multiple cores, multiple deep pipelined execution units, a variety of FP and SIMD units, and multiple levels of fairly large cache, would draw power comparably to anything currently available from AMD or Intel.
Finally, this battle died with DEC and SGI and MIPS. Let it rest in peace.
AMD Cannot Compete Unless... (Score:2, Insightful)
AMD is fighting a losing battle. Intel defined the current market and AMD cannot beat them at their own game. They are condemned to always play second fiddle unless they can find a way to redefine the market. They can only do so by reassessing the current state of the art in multicore CPU architecture and computer programming and correct what is wrong with it. And there is a lot that is wrong with it. I call it The Age of Crappy Concurrency [blogspot.com]. Check it out.
Now that the industry is transitioning to massive parallelism, AMD has the chance of a lifetime to change the computing landscape in its favor and leave Intel and everybody else in the dust.
Re:Still sticking (Score:3, Insightful)
Hydrogen power is best when it doesn't suffer the 40% losses of combustion, i.e. when it goes through a fuel cell and is converted to electricity with 85% efficiency.