Intel Unveils New Chips to Battle AMD

An anonymous reader writes "Reuters is reporting that chip giant Intel hopes to get back on track in their continued market share war with AMD when they unveil a new line of chips at their upcoming twice-annual developers forum. From the article: 'AMD, once content to mimic Intel's advances, has set the technological pace in recent years with innovations such as putting two processing cores in a single chip -- moves that have helped it gobble market share from its much-larger rival.'"

Intel giving in to the pressure

[grindcorefan]

Does anyone really wonder why Intel's announcement are getting so much press coverage lately?

Well, I don't wonder. It's all looking like good old IBM vs. Amdahl again. Surprising though that Intel seems to think they need to resort to FUD already. Perhaps they really think the heat is on.

Advantages and disadvantages of multicore

[replicant108]

Advantages

        * Proximity of multiple CPU cores on the same die have the advantage that the cache coherency circuitry can operate at a much higher clock rate than is possible if the signals have to travel off-chip, so combining equivalent CPUs on a single die significantly improves the performance of cache snoop operations.
        * Assuming that the die can fit into the package, physically, the multi-core CPU designs require much less Printed Circuit Board (PCB) space than multi-chip SMP designs.
        * A dual-core processor uses slightly less power than two coupled single-core processors, principally because of the increased power required to drive signals external to the chip and because the smaller silicon process geometry allows the cores to operate at lower voltages.
        * In terms of competing technologies for the available silicon die area, multi-core design can make use of proven CPU core library designs and produce a product with lower risk of design error than devising a new wider core design. Also, adding more cache suffers from diminishing returns.

Disadvantages

        * Multi-core processors require operating system (OS) support to make optimal use of the second computing resource.[1] Also, making optimal use of multiprocessing in a desktop context requires application software support.
        * The higher integration of the multi-core chip drives the production yields down and are more difficult to manage thermally than lower density single-chip designs.
        * From an architectural point of view, ultimately, single CPU designs may make better use of the silicon surface area than multiprocessing cores, so a development commitment to this architecture may carry the risk of obsolescence.
        * Scaling efficiency is largely dependent on the application or problem set. For example, applications that require processing large amounts of data with low computer-overhead algorithms may find this architecture has an I/O bottleneck, underutilizing the device.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-core [wikipedia.org]

wanna compare cpu speeds?

[80 85 83 83 89 33]

if you want to do an easy way to compare amd and intel chips, here is a very simple perfomance check i love to run on every computer i come across: put windows calculator in scientific mode (yes, mathmatica or maple will do factorials in a fraction of the time, but try to post windows scores for comparison purposes....) type in 100,000 hit the n! button ignore the warnings that it will take a long time, don't even bother clicking on "Continue", because the calculation is still going. and report how long it takes to complete a factorial of 100,000 please report what CPU you have **windows XP 64-bit edition is twice as fast as 32-windows** celeron 800MHz (coppermine): 333 seconds (5min 33sec) 1.4GHz celeron (tualatin) does it in 205 seconds P4 3.2Ghz and Athlon 3200+ both do it in about 80 seconds.... my next post will have a long list of scores. from slowest to fastest, there is a difference of 66x...

Naming Conventions

[Freaky Spook]

They also need to name their chips better to actually differentiate more simply between their lines.

Telling a customer the difference between a Pentium D, Pentium 4, Pentium 4 EE, Celeron D is hard enough without actually having to know what chips are out and what is offering the best performance for price. It feels a lot like market saturation sometimes.

AMD at least is a little bit simpler to follow.

Re:wanna compare cpu speeds?

[80 85 83 83 89 33]

sorry for the bad formatting, but the lamness filter is killing the proper layout.

factorial times for "100,000!"

look at the two athlons running at 2.0GHZ (3200+ and 2400+) and notice how it is frequency dependant

P4 3.2GHz 81 seconds

athlon XP 3200+ (2.2GHz socket A, barton)81 seconds

Pentium 930 dualcore (3.0GHz) 82 seconds

P4 3.0GHz (laptop) 90 seconds

Pentium 920 dualcore (2.8GHz) 90 seconds

athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz socket 939, venice) 91 seconds

athlon XP 2400+ (2.0GHz) 93 seconds

athlon XP 2100+ 106 seconds

athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz) 121 seconds

athlon mobile XP 1800+ (1.52GHz) 122 seconds

celeron 2.7 GHz (northwood core) 130 seconds

celeron 1.4GHz (tualatin) 205 seconds

athlon 900 (thunderbird) 228 seconds
(used msconfig to disable everything)

celeron 1.1GHz 253 seconds

celeron 800MHz (win98) 333 seconds (5min 33sec)

celeron 800MHz (XP pro) 373 seconds

PIII 800 (XP pro) 378 seconds (used msconfig to kill all crap running)
474 seconds (lots of junk running)

PIII 450MHz (underclocked coppermine) 490 seconds

PII 333MHz 686 seconds

PII 300MHz 760 SECONDS

P 166MHz 2417 seconds

P 100MHz ~4000 seconds (66 minutes)

P 75MHz 5330 seconds (1:28:50)
                   

Re:Which innovation?

[dunstan]

No, IBM were first with the dual core Power. Sun have now leapfrogged ahead with Niagara, which not only has 8 cores but has four threads per core, so the OS sees a single processor as a 32 way system.

Re:Too Little, Too late? My Arse!

[zaguar]

...your head stuck so far up your front side bus...

Ironically, the AMD64 series CPU's have no front side bus. This includes the X2 series. They have a hypertransport bus, which is similar but different. This is one of the premier reasons that the X2/Opterons scale so much better than the Intel equivalents, they do not have a saturated FSB as they have direct HTT links CPU-CPU.

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[gormanly]

Well, there's been tons of innovaton at Intel. Even just looking at the CPU side, between the speeds you list:

100 MHz (1994):

DX4 (P24C), Pentium (P54 version) - both, AFAICR were 0.6 um processes, and the DX4 had a 33 MHz bus and the P100 had a 50 MHz bus. I can't remember which was released first though.

600 MHz (Summer 1999):

Pentium III (Katmai), the first rev of Pentium III, which was a new revision of the P6 core used in the PPro and PII chips. It had a new instruction set, SSE, and 512MB (external) L2 cache and a 100 MHz bus. Like the Pentium II, it also had Intel's MMX instructions for 64-bit SIMD integer operations.

1 GHz (Spring 2000):

Still a Pentium III, though now with 133 MHz FSB and smaller (256MB), on-die L2 cache. No real changes from the 600 MHz version, but then it's only 2/3 faster again - and Intel were working on the Netburst architecture for the Pentium 4 and had somewhat taken their eye off the ball at this point.

4 GHz does not exist.

Currently P4EE is at 3.73 GHz, but the clock speed race is over.

Intel gambled on Netburst, which was designed to get faster rapidly, and scale all the way from the 1.4 GHz at launch to 6 or 7 by now. Yes, they lost, but that doesn't mean that they weren't innovative - it's just that their process teechnology couldn't keep up, and failed to meet predictions. That's not the CPU designers' fault.

The earlier processors did scale fantastically well (486 16->120 MHz; P6 150->1400 MHz) but they hit an unexpected brick wall this time, so they've gone around it with clever scheduling and power management, and doing dual core versions of what is essentially a new rev of the P6. There's plenty of innovation in that chip too...

Also, remember that during the same timeframe, they've invented and developed the PCI, PCI Express and Universal Serial Bus(es). Pretty innovative, really, IMHO.

And yes, I'm typing this on an Athlon 64 and all 3 of my home PCs are AMD-powered.

Re:Which innovation?

[Bert64]

But that's multiple physical processors on a single board, that's no more sophisticated than a dual processor motherboard.

Re:Intel has unrealistic expectations

[Anonymous Coward]

If nobody learns multithreaded programming, and it is as important as you think it is, then every microprocessor company (or, rather, their customers) is screwed. This is the way the industry is moving, so the software industry had better keep up.

However, since I'm usually doing more than one thing on a computer at a time, I don't require programs to be multithreaded in order to see the benefit of multicore processors. For instance, I can transcode video while web browsing or watching HD video and still have a snappy user interface. Perhaps most programs aren't multithreaded, but at least I am.

Re:IBM Power 6 @ 6Ghz

[Somegeek]

Unfortunately your link (or the article that it links to) doesn't say anything about 6 GHz. A little googling found some that did however, but they still talk about this as 'in the Lab'. I bet Intel and AMD can get stuff running at high speed 'in the lab' too. All of the stories that I have seen say that the chip will come out at 4-5 GHz, and not for another year.

It's also important to remember that one of the reasons that Intel is walking away from the clock speed race is that AMD showed that it wasn't necessarily the best way to higher performance. My point is that just because the new IBM chip may have four cores and a high clock speed doesn't mean it will be any faster than a chip with AMD's architecture. No one will really know until it's released and compared against whatever else is available at the time.

Link to an article that does mention the 6Ghz Power 6:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/07/ibm_power6 _show/ [theregister.co.uk]

TRANSPUTER

[poptones]

I'm pretty sure transputer predates IBM's multicore POWER. Furthermore, transputer was inherently multi - up to four cores on a die and they could be interconnected easily via into larger arrays.

Re:Which innovation?

[samkass]

There was large amounts of photographic evidence of the Wright brothers' accomplishments, some of which was lost in the Ohio floods early in the 1900's, and some of which survives today. Needless to say, NO ONE is documented to have flown out of ground effect, nor make a coordinated turn, until the Wright brothers demonstrated their plane publicly in France. By 1906 when Santos-Dumont made his little hop, the Wright brothers were flying for 20-30 minutes at a time at heights of 100 feet before spectators from the US Army as well as others in his town.

The Wright brothers didn't demonstrate publicly because they were in it for more than a hobby. Not being an independently wealthy tinkerer, they wanted to make their living making airplanes, and realized that they had the only viable design anyone had come up with, so not trusting the patent system, held out until they could secure agreements with various military organizations. They were engineers more than scientists.

Much of the "evidence" of earlier flight, including claims that Ader flew in the late 1800's, was concocted to try to overturn the Wright brothers' patents on their system of differing the angle of attack of the two wings in order to bank the plane. (Almost no one had banked planes before, either... most others were still thinking of planes like ships that would use the rudder to steer, which at those speeds every pilot now knows would lead to a stall.) Newspaper reports from before the patent battle clearly admit the Wright brothers unique invention, while those after the patent battle try to find almost anyone else to assign the invention to. As most know, though, the Wright brothers won every patent battle they faced and the only "evidence" of earlier flight lies in retellings of myths on sites like wikipedia.

Re:slightly off-topic

[dtsazza]

Check it out. [cnet.com]

Re:TRANSPUTER

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm almost certain that Inmos never released a multicore version of the Transputer. You are correct, however, in that the Transputer were designed for parallel processing using high-speed communication links. It was very easy to assemble massive numbers of Transputers into a cohesive computing system. I have a 256-processor sysyem in my basement, right now (it was used for missile simulations and weather modeling, before it was surplused).

On the other hand, Inmos did release a 32-MAC DSP chip, but it wasn't really programmable, you could only change the filter coefficients.

Re:slightly off-topic

[Anonymous Coward]

Um those arent the yonahs(Core duos), these are the yonahs:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2648&p=14 [anandtech.com]

To save you the trouble, "We continue to see that the Core Duo can offer, clock for clock, overall performance identical to that of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 - without the use of an on-die memory controller. The only remaining exception at this point appears to be 3D games, where the Athlon 64 X2 continues to do quite well, most likely due to its on-die memory controller. "

So basically intels laptop chips use less power, and can go head to head against AMD's desktop chips.

In any case Q3 Intel will be releasing the desktop version of the core duo which will up the power envelope slightly, but still be less then the amd,a dn should offer significantly better performance per clock then the core duo.

Re:Which innovation?

[justthinkit]

And why do you arbitrarily pick the thing that the Wright brothers achieved as the first significant step? The Wright brothers, even if you accept their disputed claim, were merely the first to fly with a self-propelled plane. But surely a far greater achievement was that of by the glider pioneers who preceded them by decades - Otto Lilienthal and the like - who actually proved that a heavier-than-air machine could fly, and built up the basic understanding of wings and aerodynamics without which the Wright brothers would never have had a frame to strap their engine into?

The progression of gliding begins with a child holding a piece of paper above their head, then jumping. After that it is only about flight duration.

Wright innovations like realizing that the propeller was like the wing, and designing both for maximum lift (unlike everyone else), using a wind tunnel (unlike anyone else) to a level of propeller efficiency comparable to propellers made 100 years later IS remarkable.

As is their work with engines. I believe it was about 5 horsepower but about as heavy as a modern automotive engine. And, as mentioned earlier, their work with control services, introducing one that no one else had ever used before.

In short, comparing gliders to airplanes is like comparing the typewriter to the computer.

Re:512MB L2 Cache?

[Amouth]

yea i saw that 512mb & 256mb L2's.. can i have one :)

it is 512kb & 256kb L2's.. and for the record the p3 coppermine (which is the one with 256kb L2) is not jsut another p3 "No real changes from the 600 MHz version" is completely wrong..

clock for clock the p3 coppermine is the fastest proccessor ever designed.. sure it can't do everything that the new stuff can do, but that wasn't what it was ment to do.

the coppermine was a wonderfull design and i would love to see intel bring it back from the dead and make some new high clock cpus with that core - i have heard some reports that that is what they did with the new line "core" but i don't know...

Re:slightly off-topic - not 64-bit

[Nom du Keyboard]

How do Intel Core Duos rate against Athlon x 2s?

Well, for starters the current Core Duo is a 32-bit only chip. And while 64-bit processing doesn't double your CPU speed or anything like that, there are other improvements in the AMD64 design (more registers, NX bit, etc.) that make for improvements beyond 64-bit integer processing and >4GB address space.

Comparing these two particular processor lines would be a lot like comparing 80286 processors at 16MHz with 800386 processors at the same clock rate. Both might run DOS at the time at a similar speed (IIRC the 286 was actually slightly faster with 16-bit code), but in the end the old architecture rapidly fell away to the new 32-bit processors.

I, for one, would only take a Core Duo system today (including every Intel-based Apple Mac) if it was given to me. I wouldn't spend my own money on one.

Re:Which innovation?

[owlstead]

Basically, I don't think too many game creators will program the cell vectors directly. They'll just use the correct API's to make use of all that power. Let the 3D, audio and physics engine worry about the cells...

http://news.com.com/PlayStation+3+chip+goes+easy+o n+developers/2100-1043_3-5476933.html [com.com]

Don't know if the above link says this, but I googled it up, and lets hope it is right.