Intel To Redesign PC With "Grantsdale" Chip 309
MarkRH writes "Over at ExtremeTech, we tracked down some Intel roadmaps that discuss "Grantsdale", Intel's most important chipset in nearly a decade. Grantsdale brings PCI Express to the PC, so get ready to toss out your motherboard, AGP graphics card, and maybe a host of other components, too. Also check out our articles on the "Tejas" microprocessor, Intel's first CPU to forego pins (check out the waffle iron socket!), as well as the real reason Banias saves so much power."
Hey (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hey (Score:2)
The funny thing is that this joke will still be funny for years to come ..
PCI Express effect on graphics cards (Score:5, Interesting)
It looks like PCI will be supported in some way, but it's almost up to a motherboard manufacturer to come forward and say, "OK, we're only going to support one PCI slot, so figure out what you want to keep, now."
My guess is that Nvidia's NV35 will be released later this year (fall?) on AGP8X, but that it will REALLY run well on PCI Express. So--wait, or buy? An old question, but with far more significance.
Re:PCI Express effect on graphics cards (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt this holiday season will be any big break for PCI Express. Remember when PCI was introduced? Roughly around the time of the first Pentiums. You can still buy motherboards with ISA slots...
It looks like PCI will be supported in some way, but it's almost up to a motherboard manufacturer to come forward and say, "OK, we're only going to support one PCI slot, so figure out what you want to keep, now."
The same applies here, the transition won't happen over night. There is lots of stuff which runs just fine on the bandwidth that PCI has to offer. You will have to decide what to keep, but I'd say that years from now.
Re:PCI Express effect on graphics cards (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure they're slow, ancient, legacy (appologize for the redundancy there) but sometimes you just really need an older piece of hardware or a board you can solder and design yourself without an EE degree.
The same will be true of PCI. There are more PCI cards out there than ISA, so PCI-Express should really be backwards compatible, capable of both modes. Or at least have a few slots on it that are mutual, then faze it out over a few years.
Why don't major vendors get the fact that some of us like our legacy stuff and don't want to move just because we "have" to?
Re:PCI Express effect on graphics cards (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh I'm sure they do, it's just they make more money this way.
Re:PCI Express effect on graphics cards (Score:2, Interesting)
Why don't consumers get the fact that their hardware would be faster, cleaner, easier to use, and downright sexier if legacy stuff didn't have to be supported?
Take Intel CPUs. They're a kludge. A terrible, messy, evil kludge. And they're a kludge because they have to support legacy applications that ran on the 8086.
Intel, of course, is making exactly the same mistake by attempting to emulate x86 modes on the Itaniums.
If you really, really want to use legacy stuff, then go and get a PCI to ISA Bridge or something. But don't try and force ISA compatibility into PCI-Express, because that's just going to make things slower (and messier) for everyone else.
-Shane
Re:PCI Express effect on graphics cards (Score:2, Troll)
Intel, of course, is making exactly the same mistake by attempting to emulate x86 modes on the Itaniums.
Because of its abysmal performance, Intel has abandoned this approach and now uses a Celeron coprocessor to handle x86 software execution.
Take Intel CPUs. They're a kludge. A terrible, messy, evil kludge. And they're a kludge because they have to support legacy applications that ran on the 8086.
Even though this is quite a popular sentiment on /., the reality is that consumers and businesses don't want their computers to be some sort of Platonic ideal of a perfect machine. They just want the damn things to work reliably, chock full of "evil kludges" or not.
So the attitude you're propagating, that older is bad and anything supporting something older is therefore also bad, is pretty much not a viable approach to the economic realities at work here. You seem to think that sweeping revisions and corrections that throw out the work of previous generations are justified, but really all they would do is anger users and create chaos. It might be faster, cleaner, easier to use, and sexier, but it also be much less useful simply because there wouldn't be any software that ran on it.
And you can argue that it's the principle of the matter, and that we shouldn't compromise our ideals just because they are unworkable in the market. But keep in mind that computers are a tool, not a religion, however tempting it may be to categorize them as such, and it's a bit silly to attach an ideology and a morality ("evil kludges" indeed!) to tools.
Re:PCI Express effect on graphics cards (Score:2)
Yep, I know so many Mac users that just hate the PowerPC and want to go back to the old 68k CPUs. And OS/X is a big failure for the same reason.
Hint: do it right, and 90% of the consumers won't even know about the sweeping revisions.
Re:PCI Express effect on graphics cards (Score:2)
The issue is that such a bridge costs money and space. The majority of people purchasing new computers (with no intent on upgrading HW) will want the cheapest, most-compact solution. This is the problem that faces video card retailers. They'll ahve to carry two lines of video cards (3 if they seriously still sell PCI versions), and they'll have to conflict amongst themselves as they market different HW. Especially in the months leading up to the roll out.
No word on whether AMD boards have any chance of supporting the new BUS. If not, then AGP cards will persist for some time.
Re:But how many PCI slots will there be? (Score:4, Interesting)
OK...so does that mean those are going to take the place of the PCI slots that will normally be found within a motherboard? PCI will be supported--but how many slots will we have to work with?
ISA is not dead (Score:2)
One's a modem (a REAL modem that I can configure with jumpers, that works under linux... don't even get me started on winmodems)
I also have a WINRADIO [winradio.com] (or LINRADIO [linradio.com] under linux); Those come as ISA cards if you get the internal version...
Yes, I know it's a dinosaur hardware interface, but I still find it useful... and I'll bet I'm not the only one. Hardware may find itself deprecated and unsupported (Apple's Newton, anyone?), but still useful.
Re:PCI Express effect on graphics cards (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem is that the bandwidth that is offered by the AGP bus tends to be a PCI-AGP bridge, rather than a true AGP graphics card, so what you essentially have is a PCI card running at a slightly faster dedicated bus speed.
If PCI Express can truly deliver, I'll be impressed... but Intel's known for making decisions that are not necessarily widely implemented in the long run (remember Rambus?). I'm taking a wait and see approach with this one.
Re:PCI Express effect on graphics cards (Score:3, Informative)
Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
Second, PCI-Express x 16 just double AGP8X bandwidth. We can expect same "dramatic" (1-2%) performance increase as we saw with AGP8X and AGP4X. It will take many years until this kind of performance is really needed. Since high-end video cards will have 512MB of very fast (~40GB/s) local memory in H2-2004, 4GB/s bandwidth offered by PCI-Express won't make much difference compared to 2GB/s AGP solution.
PCI-Express add-on cards won't be popular anytime soon. Since:
1) PCI replacement (PCI-Express x 1) offers just 250MB/s of bandwidth, thats isn't a lot more than current 133MB/s offered by PCI.
2) >90% of users won't need any external cards in H2-2004. Currently we have following stuff integrated on the chipset/motherboard:
-two 100Mbps NICs
-Sound with better quality than original Audigy
-Firewire/USB2 etc
In 2004 we will also have:
- NICs will be updated to 1Gbps
- Wireless LAN
- DSL modem
3) In the server market PCI-Express won't be popular since it isn't compatible with PCI. Currently servers use PCI-X (1GB/s) and it will be replaced with PCI-X 2.0 (2GB/s). This is enough bandwidth for many SCSI-raids and Gigabit NICs.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
Your processor runs at an internal clockspeed of what, 1.5GHz? And your PCI bus? IIRC, it maxes out out a paltry 66MHz. The peripheral bus is already a bottleneck, today.
I don't care how much they can integrate onto the mainboard, it's still going over the same bus -- the only difference is that the connections are etched onto the board instead of having card slots.
Furthermore, bundling peripherals onto a mainboard is exactly as bad as bundling web browsers and such into an operating system: it's harder to choose solutions from other vendors even if they're better suited to your needs, you're paying for features you may never use or need, there's no incentive for the hardware company NOT to cut corners and put the cheapest shite on there that they can find.
The beauty of the x86 PC architecture, if any, is the extreme modularity. I hope that this feature of the design doesn't get eroded away by increasing levels of device integration, and a stronger, faster PCI spec can help a lot towards retaining openness and modularity.
What's the point? (Score:2)
Re:What's the point? (Score:2, Interesting)
Imagine having a board with several PCI Express slots - put a Good Graphics Card in, say, each of 3 slots, and multihead your games
Also, if I understand it correctly, PCI Express is an upgrade to / replacement for PCI. Sure, it allows high-bandwidth comm to a Graphics Adapter, but also to SCSI/IDE Controllers, NIC's, Video Capture Hardware etc, etc.
Re:PCI Express effect on graphics cards (Score:2)
Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when can you upgrade to a new generation CPU and not have to replace the motherboard?
Jason
ProfQuotes [profquotes.com]
Re:Big deal (Score:3, Insightful)
If they're going to hold the basic architecture steady for at least a few years this is going to be quite handy, but if each iteration is going to require a general upgrade to properly utilize the new speed and features anyway. .
The motherboard manufacturers like to see a steady upgrade cycle too you know and it almost always comes down to "gut the case" and hope a few cards are still usable.
KFG
Gut the case? (Score:2)
Re:Gut the case? (Score:2)
Vat ees thees "fla-pee" you speek off?
Bye Bye Floppys (Score:2)
Re:Big deal (Score:2)
Heh, and people say that Macs can't be upgraded. Sheesh.
Socket-5 upgrades (Score:2)
> 5 mb when you upgraded from a P100?
You might not have been able to do that, but the Centaur (the cpu design team that nowadays makes VIA's C3 chips) 240MHz WinChip could make that jump, if I recall correctly.
I am not certain if the WinChip 2 or 2A could work on Socket 5. They were basically just WinChips with 3DNow! tacked on, but they might have been out of spec for Socket 5, ever so slightly.
Oh, and there were probably "upgrade" chips, which were newer processors with adaptor thingies between the cpu and the socket.
-JC
Re:Has anyone upgraded from Athlon to Athlon XP? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually thinking about it, every time I've upgraded CPUs, I've gotten a new motherboard - even though it wasn't really necessary every time. There's always either something else the new boards support that I "gotta have", or my mother's computer is getting old and she wants my old board.
By the time I start to feel like my XP1600 is slow, I won't want to just buy a 3000 and slap it on this board, even if I can. I'll want a new board with DDR2, Serial ATA, and FireWire. CPU upgradability is overrated, IMHO.
Why NewCard? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is the goal to make it so that users with two PCs can carry peripherals from one computer to the other? I would also hope that there will be legacy ports. I'm not planning on buying a new chip for a while, but I really don't feel like having to buy brand new hardware when I do. I'll have to buy a new video card (no AGP port), but they could at least put a few standard PCI ports on the mobo so I could slap in my more expensive expansion cards.
Re:Why NewCard? (Score:2)
If you have expensive expansion cards, you'll be able to find PCI motherboards for a long, long, long time.
Unless, of course, you think that a $150 sound card is "expensive." Then, you're fucked.
Re:Why NewCard? (Score:4, Informative)
The parent makes it seem as if PCI Express only defines the standard for new generation PC Cards. It doesn't simply do that; otherwise it would be nearly worthless as the next generation successor to PCI. Take a look at relevant quotes from the PCI-SIG [pcisig.com]:
The "Mini PCI Express Electromechanical specification, an alternate for the existing Mini PCI form factor specification, is being completed for membership review and is expected to be finalized for publication in the first quarter of 2003."
"IBM is excited about the PCI Express architecture because of its compatibility with the past and its high-bandwidth options for the future," said Peter Hortensius, Vice President of Development, IBM Personal Computing Division. "IBM embraces open industry standards and provides innovation on top of them, and PCI Express presents outstanding opportunities for solving real customer problems."
Mini-PCI Express, then, is a spec in its infancy that is designed to replace the previous generation PC Card. It should make future laptops far more expandable, which is a great thing. And PCI Express is one of multiple candidates for desktop expansion. Yet, it seems that PCI Express is going to be backward compatible with important specs, and that it seemingly has industry support. I just wanted to make sure everyone understands the PCI card isn't going to be replaced by the PC Card.
Mmmm Chip Waffles (Score:2, Funny)
Banias is the real deal... (Score:3, Interesting)
The ones I've been playing with at work just absolutely rock. You can clearly see the difference that 1mb L2 cache makes...and combined with systems that already have decent battery life you won't have to worry about whether or not you'll be able to finish the Braveheart DVD on battery power.
Craenor
Intel's first CPU to forego pins... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Intel's first CPU to forego pins... (Score:5, Informative)
In addition, slot-based packaging (SEP, Slot-A, etc.) all used gold fingers just like PCI cards.
Forced Obsolecense? (Score:2, Insightful)
I just see this happening.
Hey. So you want a new sound card? Great! What? You only have regular PCI? I'm sorry we only have it in PCI Express. No worries. We offer this brand new Intel board and chip and ram that will solve your problem. Only $1,200!
What am I missing? I hope I'm missing somthing =/
Re:Forced Obsolecense? (Score:2, Interesting)
Honestly, a PC with eight $20 CPUs would end up far more responsive and just as useful for every task than one with one single several-hundred-dollar chip
More CPU's dont mean faster (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More CPU's dont mean faster (Score:2)
There are lots of ways of using multiple processors for computations; threads is only one of them, and probably among the most cumbersome.
One Fast CPU is always going to have an advantage over multiple slower CPUs.
If that were true, the fastest computers would be like the supercomputers of the past. But multi-processor designs and compute clusters have pretty much killed the supercomputers of the past.
Re:More CPU's dont mean faster (Score:3, Interesting)
It's worth paying for a more complex design, etc., to get a faster unitary CPU instead of two slower ones, for the bookkeeping reasons that you point out, but not worth paying an unlimited amount more. OTOH, simple parallelization schemes have their limits also.
My view of where we are headed is:
1) CPUs will advance to some optimum level of power.
2) Clusters of CPUs will increase the power of the individuals.
3) Clusters will be linked along a fast bus, with one CPU out of each cluster attached to the bus. (This cpu is effectively a member of two separate clusters, but one of the clusters does practically nothing but manage communications.
4) A node at one end of the bus will be linked into an orthogonal bus, which will contain similar nodes...
Now this is just a design for a maximally compute intensive processor. At each step you must pay additional overhead, so you would be better off it the problem could be addressed by a system one level simpler. But if you can't...
At this point we come up against the issue of "but how do you USE it!?" This system will probably not be effective until compilers, or possibly interpreters or VMs can automatically partition problems and assign the pieces to various chunks. This will probably require a message-passing operating system. (Not too unreasonable. I think that Linux could be adapted into one.) But, e.g., when a job wants to open a file, it wouldn't need to know where the disk was, it would just send out a message asking for the file. This is like the separation between files and devices, so the basic layers are already in the design. File permissions would need to include lock status, though, or else file access would need to be managed by a dedicated cpu (which could do it in about the current manner). Etc.
There's lots of details that will need to be thrashed out, and the design isn't going to happen this year, or the next. (Probably.)
At some point, all higher levels would get turned over to a TCP/IP like connection set, slightly redesigned to optimize it for use within one connected computer system. (Probably just a matter of adding some additional protocols for internal use that are more efficient over the known network configuration, and are less concerned with security, but which will only talk internally. [And which have their own limits, so that a virus can't spread unchecked.])
I see all external communication occuring over standard TCP/IP, and possibly even using only a subset of the standard protocols. (N.B.: I'm talking about limiting protocols, not ports. Think of it as a sanitation measure. You want the system to be able to evaluate incoming communications, and react sensibly. If someone tells it "Drop dead!", it should decide not to obey the literal, or even the figurative, interpretation, but rather to consider that this is an expression of frustration. And this should be true even if the remote user is "root". Some commands should require local access.)
N.B.: I talked as if this were a strictly hierarchical system, and, to a large extent it would be. But it should take advantage of sideways links also. This would be largely for error recovery, as the high speed communications would be hierarchical. But it should enable reconfiguration and recovery (and diagnosis) in case of hardware errors. (Think of the cell system for underground agents.)
Re:Forced Obsolecense? (Score:2)
Also, there is no such thing as a $20 CPU. The only reason you can buy them on PriceWatch for $20 is because they're subsidized by sales of the $400 CPUs. And a PC with eight $20 CPUs would be dead slow. Most code is not that parallizable, and any interconnect that can handle 8 CPUs is going to be a whole lot more than a few hundred dollars.
Re:Forced Obsolecense? (Score:2)
Re:Forced Obsolecense? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Forced Obsolecense? (Score:2)
Also, saying that PCI-E will also replace AGP is misleading...AGP is nothing more than a slight variation on PCI to start with...so if you replace PCI, you automatically replace AGP, I'd say.
Re:Forced Obsolecense? (Score:2)
IEEE 1394b (400MB/sec!)
Uh, no. IEEE 1394 runs at 400Mb/s (50MB/s), IEEE 1394b runs at 800Mb/s (100MB/s). While this come close to saturting a 32-bit, 33MHz PCI bus, it doesn't dent a 64-bit or 66MHz PCI bus, of the type commonly found in servers, and Macs (The PowerMacs I've looked in had 2 64-bit PCI slots).transemta crusoe? (Score:4, Informative)
also... if you're currious about PCI Express, this link seems to be pretty... informative:
http://www.intel.com/technology/pciexpress/
and is anyone else disappointed that the new "Grantsdale" chipset isn't supporting rambus ram!? i know i am :(
Re:transemta crusoe? (Score:3, Informative)
Crusoe is their old chip. I think you want to compare it with Astro, coming out RSN.
What about ISA? (Score:2, Funny)
Oh Yeah! (Score:3, Funny)
I'm stoked. I'm going to pull in some serious coin on this deal.
Every socket designer dreams about being chosen to do a major Intel processor. It doesn't get any bigger than this, baby!
Bloody tricks! (Score:4, Insightful)
Not that I hold this against them or anything; if in the end it increases battery life, that's a Good Thing. I just wish they wouldn't hype up their new processor as being so great, when really there isn't much more improvement over the PIII.
Nice (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't wait until I have no choice but to buy some hardware that's not compatible with anything I might possibly already own. What's even cooler is that I get to do my part and add my obsoleted hardware to our local dump.
P.S.: It would be nice to get the computing companies to do a bit more in the way of reuse. I don't think it's a good idea to use until there's no more, and then just move on to a new resource.
</rant>
Re:Nice (Score:3, Insightful)
And your hardware will be compatible for years to come. Legacy interfaces linger for a LOOOONG time.
PCI Express FAQ (Score:5, Informative)
Quick summary: Formerly known as 3GIO, Software compatibility. Point-to-point instead of bus. 1 to 32 bits wide @ 2Gbps per bit = 16 GB/sec max (vs. 1-4 GB/sec for regular PCI; this is about AGP16X)
Re:PCI Express FAQ (Score:2)
Joy of joys (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure it looks good, yea, I'm all exited about a "new era of computing," but it breaks backwards compatibility with all of my old stuff and I bet it still can't outperform the mainframe I program on now in terms of raw MIPS.
Why did we ever move to PC's from thin clients in the first place? We have consoles for gaming, windows for PC gaming, and *nix for serious work (try doing something else under say Solaris, and posting to slashdot doesn't count.) now. Why all of the redundancy? Aren't we in an economic downturn? The bus speeds and improvements are nice, don't get me wrong... but in a PC? It removes the PCI bottleneck problem, but I don't see where it removes the HDD bottleneck in terms of raw speed.
All in all i'd say it's a nifty gadget.
When we get holographic/full immersion, give me a call. I'd love to see what my brain can output in raw source without needing to actually type.
--I'm just continuing my tradition of posting drunk, pay me no head. Don't post to slashdot under wine.
Re:Joy of joys (Score:4, Interesting)
Thin clients: How are people going to use this at home? Over their 28.8 dialup connection? With the work I do, I can peg pretty much anything you throw at me. You think they want user's like me on shared systems? You think I want other users slowing me down?
PC architecture: A modern PC has more resources than most RISC workstations that are 5x the price. Ever since the P4 came out, PC memory bandwidth (one of it's traditional weak points) has skyrocketed. By the end of the year, it will be up at 6.4 GB/sec, which is an impressive number even for an SGI or Sun machine.
Bottlenecks: What do you do where the HDD is the bottleneck? After an hour of use or so, my Linux system pretty much runs out of RAM. On workstation tasks, the HDD is often not the benchmark. It's not the benchmark for the 3D rendering I do, the scientific sims, the gaming, the programming, pretty much everything. In fact, I thought it was going to really suck moving to a P4 laptop, because of the slow 4200 RPM hard drive. Ever since I put 640MB of RAM in there, I don't noticed any slowdown at all.
Re:Joy of joys (Score:3, Interesting)
Between faster chipsets, big increases in memory bandwidth (PC3200 DDR-SDRAM is only the beginning), and Serial ATA, you'll see overall faster computers anyway.
Re:Joy of joys (Score:2)
Trust me...you don't want to be working on the same mainframe as me when I'm editing/rendering huge 3D animations
Re:Joy of joys (Score:2)
Re:Joy of joys (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought that was what serial ATA [explosivelabs.com] is supposed to do.
Re:Joy of joys (Score:2)
Modern ATA drives are already pushing 25-50 MB/Sec, doubling the capacity also doubles this sustained rate. Within a year we will likely see single drives that are able to max out the initial 150MB/Sec SATA spec.
I think we should be more concerned that most people are still on 100Mbit LANs. Duplicating a single 200GB hard disk over 100Mbit LAN takes ages. Gigabit is still pretty expensive, compared to how extremely cheap 100Mbit is. An example, we checked into adding a 8 port copper Gbit card to our Cisco at work, and I think the figure was something like $5000. We have a few fiber Gbit slots, but just the GBIC for those costs around $400 a port.
I just have the feeling that by the time Gbit becomes cheap enough for the masses (i.e. someone is heard saying "we might as well go Gbit, it's not much more expensive"), it will already be obselete.
Not to mention that there are a whole lot of crappy Gbit NICs that can do no where near Gbit speeds.
Re:Joy of joys (Score:2)
Whine whine whine. Have you looked at a modern system? Unless you have specialized needs you probably have one card - the video card. Everything else - sound, USB, firewire, network, HD, other I/O - is on the motherboard. The most common add-ons are a TV encoder/decoder (although increasingly becoming part of the video card) or a SCSI controller - which will certainly be available for PCI-X (and you'd want to move anyway to get the additional bandwidth).
Oh, you have a specialized card available only on <insert ancient standard here>? Guess what - specialized means costs more. Get over it. And I bet you'll still pay less than anything else on the market.
I bet it still can't outperform the mainframe I program on now in terms of raw MIPS
I bet you're wrong. A top line PC often outperforms everything else on MIPS per CPU basis. The issue is that the bus sucks and it can't do anywhere near as many transactions or I/Os as a high-end workstation (Sun, MIPS, etc), much less a mainframe.
Of course, PCI-X helps address this bus issue - it doesn't solve it, but it'll go a long way toward improving the problem. And will narrow the gap between PC and mini/mainframe performance even further.
Why did we ever move to PC's from thin clients in the first place?
Besides, not every problem needs the throughput of a mainframe or even a Sun class box. Why spend several hundred thousand or a couple million on a box when you can get the job done with a $1000 PC? What was that you were babbling on about regarding an economic downturn?
Whole new bus? (Score:4, Funny)
Cost implications ? (Score:2, Insightful)
The price to upgrade could easily reach $1200 US for early adopters.
I don't see much of a problem with the PCI slots as the majority of current modern systems have a lot of components onboard already, such as LAN, Sound, Video etc.
I guess the safe bet is they'll include 2xPCI slots which should be enough for most peoples purposes.
Grantsdale? (Score:5, Funny)
Personally, I'm waiting for the Higgenbotham chips in early 2005. After that, the Ranmatheau chips. In earlier 2007, expect amazing performance from the Cleodranvier chipset.
2008 brings us the amazing 10-GHz Hefnestranthellhaller chipset, and 2009 unveils Intel's most impressive chip: the Quackenbush.
But the true surprise comes in 2010, when the world experiences the amazing speed of the Gentrecktagazunt.
Truly wonderous times ahead.
Re:Grantsdale? (Score:2)
But even if he saw the real plans, I think the post is a joke. (And one that is pointed, funny, and accurate.)
first to forgoe pins? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:first to forgoe pins? (Score:2)
Yes.
What, you didn't see the processor on the center of that board? With the pins soldered to the board?
Even so, the statment is incorrect, since there have been previous CPUs that were pinless - such as some revisions of the 80286.
A CPU this complex without pins is a pretty nifty thing though.
6 month driver releases? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, what exactly does this mean? If I have a problem with Intel's drivers that, say, prevents my machine from booting (not that THAT has ever happened) I have to wait 6 months for the next revision? I don't understand what driver revision schedules have to do with product release cycles.
Also from the article: "...[people buying] the latest GeForce card near the end of this year, when six months later it won't work [fit] inside a new PC?"
This is a non-issue for most people, I think. Those people who buy new video cards every six months (you know who you are) aren't really going to balk at replacing motherboard, CPU, and video card all at the same time, if it yields a 25% performance improvement (or more). At the other end of the scale are people who upgrade video cards by buying a new Dell (or whatever), for whom this is also not an issue. Those of us in the middle just won't buy a new motherboard/CPU until we can afford to replace the whole shebang anyway. Once we do, we will most likely build a whole new machine.
Anyway, it's not like nVidia and ATI are going to stop making AGP cards; I'm sure that both connections will be supported. If you look around, you can still get PCI versions of most cards on the market (shudder).
Re:6 month driver releases? (Score:3)
What's going to happen to USB ports? (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, that's pretty weird. But why would they get rid of a popular, reasonably high-performance, and cheap interface like USB? Is Firewire 800 going to take it's place? SATA? Is everything going to be wireless?
thad
But there are other important PC updates left out (Score:3, Interesting)
1) the PC BIOS!!! for how long should we tolerate the shitty 16-bit PC BIOSes ? I mean, in the days of PCI-X and 800MHz memory buses, the PC's BIOS is still 16-bit and operating systems need to perform wild tricks to boot.
2) the partioning scheme. Only 4 partitions!!!! this is an artifact from the days of the original PC.
Ok, not so important but irritating nevertheless.
Re:But there are other important PC updates left o (Score:2)
You can definitely have more than 4 partitions. I think
2 primary plus 8 logical is the maximum (total of 10).
It would be nice to have an arbitrary number of partitions
but this is not very important in my opinion.
Regarding the BIOS, I have to say that I like it the way it
is. Complex things fail and BIOS should be 99.999% error
free. I don't see the need for a themeable GUI-Bios with
transparent windows. If it works, don't break it.
P.
What's Obsolete? (Score:4, Insightful)
We shall not forget that, as any other enterprise, Intel's business is to make MONEY. Cutting edge technology is just a plus...
It's in their best interest to push forward the their latest family of products. This is how Intel works and obsolescence is carefully planed by them.
It's up to us, as consumers, to set the pace and not get swept by the low-tech fears. An upgrade is really only necessary when your PC performance gets in the way of you doing your usual tasks.
Therefore, we must keep in our minds that obsolescence is dictated by our needs, not by theirs.
your old stuff (Score:2, Informative)
Who exactly is in the PR/Graphic/Ad Design Dept at (Score:3, Insightful)
Not being Apple bias, but you have to hand it to Apple Computer's PR/Design/Ad/Graphic Design Departments. They even get press for what they name variations of the operating system. It's not goofy either. Jaguar and all the promotional material has spawned the entire design industry into using animal prints, especially Jaguar.
However? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ohh, for I/O and power ! I thought they would be used for..... umm... Well, that's about all they can be used for. Why does that sentence begin with "However"?
Re:However? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:However? (Score:2)
Aren't those all data transmission pins, otherwise known as input/output pins, aka IO pins?
IP and lock-in aspects (Score:5, Interesting)
But the IP/lock-in aspects still bother me. Intel behaved like a spanked puppy for a few years after their Rambus fiasco, but lately they seem to be back at those games, again.
They've taken steps to ensure that Banias/Centrino only sells with their chipset. It's only a logo program, but it probably carries a heavy enough advertising kickback behind it to have the force of law.
The Itanium is *the most proprietary* CPU on the planet, or at least a contender for the crown. No second sources, no cross-licensing on any of the IP.
So in this light, anyone want to bet that Tejas is not tied to Grantsdale?
Assuming it is, the net effects are questionable. It appears that Intel is driving compatibility away from the CPU pins, and out to the motherboard plug interface. I seriously doubt they have the capability to push it any further than that. In the long run, this probably opens the market niche for AMD and Via C3, because it's closing the market for low-cost chipset providers to service Intel CPUs.
First to forego pins? (Score:2)
Proprietary bus? (Score:2)
Didn't IBM try this a decade and a half ago? Intel needs to read up on something called Micro Channel and learn why it didn't work for IBM, and it won't work for them either.
Intel needs to tread carefully. They may be Chipzilla today, but something like this could be the turning point, like Micro Channel was for IBM, where they turned the screws a little too tight and the customers fled to something more open.
This is dumb (Score:2, Interesting)
The CPU will look like old style ceramic power triodes, with a built-in bonded heat sink. There will be two low inductance connections for power, and a hard line SMA connector for everything else.
Re: (Score:2)
no pins (Score:3, Informative)
How could PCI Express possibly be a benefit? (Score:3, Insightful)
PCI spec is 133MB/s, which is hardly a marked improvement. 16-bit ISA, by contrast, was barely 16MB/s.
If I am to believe the theoretical numbers for AGP, then PCI Express as a graphics bus makes even less sense:
AGP 1x = 264MB/s ( 66.6 mHz, 64-bit )
AGP 2x = 528MB/s ( 66.6 mHz rise and fall, 64-bit )
AGP 4x ~ 1GB/s ( 66.6 mHz - 4 strobe, 64-bit )
AGP 8x
What in the hell do we need a PCI replacement for that has zero potential for handling enormous video bandwidth as well as or better than AGP?
What in hell do we need a PCI replacement for that doesn't even utilize the PCI-X or 64-bit, 66MHz PCI already being pushed for servers? Not to mention that fact that any device that can push the bandwidth of PCI is already available in one of the above formats, who wants to build yet another model for PCI Express?
Honestly, if you need to find emerging technologies, just look to the server path. Intel has always been about trickle-down, this move doesn't make any sense.
Re:How could PCI Express possibly be a benefit? (Score:3, Informative)
So if you're using a measly 2 bit connection sure you might only get 250 MB a second, but if you read the article you'll see that Intel is planning on using a 16-bit wide connection for the graphics card. This would give you 32Gbps, or roughly the same as AGP 8X. There is potential to go much faster by using a 32-bit PCI-X connection. In comparison, the other PCI-X slots on the motherboard for peripherals will be much slower, probably only using 2 bits.
I fully expect server boards to have multiple 32-bit PCI-X slots for maximum I/O throughput. In addition, we will probably see new technologies for clustering that utilize a PCI-X expansion card as a high speed server-to-server bus.
First improvement in 6 years (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I hope APPLE uses this chip! (Score:2, Insightful)
wow! let's add this into an apple! then what will we have.
uhhh. G4s at the same speed, using a different chipset.
Did you RTFA?
Re:Not necessary (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not necessary (Score:2)
Anyone know of one?
Re:Not necessary (Score:2)
Upgrading a video card is usually simple, even though sometimes you need a certain level of motherboard for some cards. Upgrading the processor, is rarely easy. Intel changes so much so quickly that the upgradability of PCs is, and has been for some time, a myth.
64 bits is going to make a ridiculous difference to what I do.
Only if you're planning on having more than 4 gigabytes of memory. In almost all other cases, a 64-bit processor will be slower. It's amazing how few people catch on to this.
Re:hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:hmmm (Score:2, Funny)
* small that? that's my karma going up in flames *
Re:"Grantsdale"? Jesus H. Christ (Score:2)
Re:"Grantsdale"? Jesus H. Christ (Score:2)
Hmm, perhaps even more?
Wait...
http://www.amiga-society.de/ahwbook/achips.html
There you go.
Re:Most Important? (Score:4, Interesting)
>Of course, because this will be the first chipset to fail in the marketplace
>because computers are already fast enough for businesses, and gamers already have
>overkill. The first market failure is always an important landmark.
If anything, I'd like to see an addon vector processor for high speed math. G4
motherboards have them under an Altivec core instruction set. I would also want
the ability to directly program (in chip asm) to do misc functions.
Personally, they can take this waffle-chip and shove it. If anything, I'd want
an architechure where EVERYTHING's on a very high speed, very high bandwidth
quad-plane bus with basic controllable logic. You put drive cards on it,gfx
cards, sound cards, network cards, memory on it, cpu's on it.. anything. It
would be the backbone of the system where anything would go. You could build a
simple scan/bootstrap code to find what devices do what. It could be a simple
hex line of simple "whatis information". To those who say this isnt possible, I
believe the Altair 8800 used this similar architechure. You want a
"beowulf"system, add 1 drive controller, and rest cpu controllers. BAM! You now
have insta-BeoBox. You could also add DIFFERENT CPU architechures with this
system, given they coincide to your bus setup (including the altivec and x86like
one I want).
Re:Most Important? (Score:2)
motherboards have them under an Altivec core instruction set.
>>>>>>>>
It's not a component of the motherboard, but of the CPU. And Intel CPU's *do* have vector units, just like AltiVec. These units (SSE units) probably aren't as powerful as the G4's AltiVec units, but both are essentially limited by bus bandwidth, of which the P4 has 3x as much.
I would also want
the ability to directly program (in chip asm) to do misc functions.
>>>>>>>
They do. It's called a "function call." If you're worried about the extra-overhead, don't be. Features like the Trace Cache in the P4 remove a whole lot of the decode overhead associated with x86 CPUs.
If anything, I'd want
an architechure where EVERYTHING's on a very high speed, very high bandwidth
quad-plane bus
>>>>>>
And I want to be the Queen of England.
with basic controllable logic.
>>>>>>>>>
No such thing as "basic" control logic anymore. Read the tome that is the Infiniband specs and weep.
To those who say this isnt possible, I
believe the Altair 8800 used this similar architechure
>>>>>>
Life was easier back then. Today, we're hitting a whole bunch of limits, both engineering and physical. We can't engineer a bus that fast to those tolerences and have it work in existing environments. Not enough precision, too much environmental interference, etc.
Re:Most Important? (Score:2)
Re:What about Hypertransport? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:trivia: "Tejas" means "Friend"... (Score:3, Interesting)