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.'"

Which innovation?

[hyc]

Of course, IBM had multicores years ago, so AMD wasn't really the innovator on that front.

Re:Which innovation?

[cfx666]

>Of course, IBM had multicores years ago,
So did SUN with their UltraSparc platform. But for the consumer market this really was something new.

Cfx

Innovative dick comparison

[Opportunist]

Where's the innovation? And I'm not talking about AMD, Intel is just as guilty for equaling innovation with "make that damn thing run faster". Instead of shifting gear, they just basically upped the engine speed. 100 MHz, 600 MHz, 1 GHz, 4 GHz... now that the ceiling is more or less reached and enough waste heat is generated to heat a medium sized home, they change the measurement. Instead of length, we compare circumference. One core, 2 cores, 4 cores, 8...

Where is that innovation?

Too Little, Too late?

[zaguar]

I think intel might be too late to the party. The dual-cores of this generation have been bought already, and the upgrade cycle won't start again until 2007-2008. And guess what? Intel lost this battle. My X2 3800+ performs better, OC's better, and is faster than a similar priced Pentium D. And I got it a good few months ago. So did many others.

Intel needs to accept that they lost this war, and focus on the 07-08 season, when the target market is upgrading again.

Also - faster, more efficient chips? Compared to what? The Netburst architecture chips? They put out more heat per watt than my heater, FFS!

Pretty light reading, but...

[porkThreeWays]

It's a fluff piece, but there was nothing mentioned in there to make me believe Intel is really doing anything new. All I saw was mention of 4 cores. Are cores the new mhz race? 2 cores is all 99% of people will see benefit from right now. The 4 core race is moot because it's like a race for automakers to produce the first production 16 cylinder family sedan. It's not going to really benefit anyone. Really only a marketing gimmick. I'd rather see Intel clean up their current 2 core chips.

Here's what most consumers need in a computer...
A low latency desktop that can handle about 2-3 running applications with no slowdown that runs cool and doesn't use a lot of power.

Here's what we are getting...
A high latency desktop with fat pipes that run hot, optimized for running 7-8 cpu intensive applications at once, and idles at 200 watts. Because it should take 10+ seconds to open a basic program on an out of box pc.

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[cfx666]

The innovation is that the good old software you are running does not automatically profit from cpu upgrades any more. So you need some new <insert buzzword here> which is a good thing for me, cause Im a software developer.

Cfx

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[smash]

I see your point, but really, who cares?

Up till now, pushing Mhz has likely been the cheapest way of ramping up speed.

At the end of the day, I couldn't give a crap whether or not my CPU that performs X teraflops does it by running a "dumb" core at extreme speed, or runs a really complex core at slow speed.

Now is the time to get into the nitty gritty of making chips more efficient, now we've exploited the cheap and easy ways...

smash

Re:Pretty light reading, but...

[Tim C]

Because it should take 10+ seconds to open a basic program on an out of box pc.

Most of that will be down to the disks, which is nothing to do with Intel or AMD.

love that headline...

[smash]

Intel aims to get back on track with new chips

As opposed to "Intel aims to get further behind with new chips"?

What the hell else would they be doing??

smash.

Re:Too Little, Too late?

[10Ghz]

The dual-cores of this generation have been bought already, and the upgrade cycle won't start again until 2007-2008.

Dude, WTF?!? Are you saying that everybody who is going to buy a dual-core processor has already bought one, and next such CPU's wont be sold until 2007-2008?? What if someone decides to upgrade his computer in the summer (for example) to a dual-core machine? By your logic, he does not exist and/or he should wait until 2007/2008 because "that's when the next upgrade-sycle is in, you can't upgrade before that"?

People are upgrading their computer all the time. People are buying new computers all the time.

Competition good... Sloth bad...

[ursabear]

I think the competition has been good for all of us. AMD's strength in the market has kept Intel on its toes, and advances from IBM's Power processors has kept many architectures running pretty well.

I (this is IMHO) believe that Intel has been doing some laurel-resting for a number of years now. I do believe that they will come to bear with better stuff on a gradual basis. My only fear is that Intel will allow itself to do like GM, Ford, AT&T... allow itself to be way too slow to be quick to adapt. I personally would like to see IBM, AMD, and Intel all have truly great, smokin' processors going way into the future - it seems that it would only be good for us in the long run.

Re:wanna compare cpu speeds?

[SamBeckett]

The only thing your "test" is testing is the FPU on the processor. The code for factorial is small, so that and all the intermediaries are able to be stored in cache, regardless of the processor. And how exactly are you timing it? Do you sit there and say "1-one thousand, 2-one thousand, ..." ?

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[khellendros1984]

I'm guessing that the gp is referring to picking a single aspect of processor performance, and equating that single aspect directly to performance of the machine, i.e. "1200Mhz will always perform faster than 1000Mhz". No manufacturer says this (that I know of), but so many consumers take it as a given, when the only number quoted to them concerning a processor is clock speed.

That isn't to say that I agree with the grandparent, though. Intel's Pentium-m processors are pretty nifty...lower power usage, high performance (compared to a P4).

So, while it may not be some amazing quantum leap, I'd say that Intel is showing plenty of innovation, at least from the standpoint of the consumer market.

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[big_gibbon]

How about making them run cooler and more efficiently, and hence quieter since they wont need 3 fans pointing at them? The best chip that intel have made in recent times was the Pentium M, in large because they focussed on the needs of a mobile chip, i.e. power consumption and hence efficiency.

Also take a look at Via's new chips and boards, particularly the Epia series of boards. They're ideal for media centre applications, since the chips run very cool but quickly enough to do the necessary work.

P

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[muhgcee]

At the end of the day, I couldn't give a crap whether or not my CPU that performs X teraflops does it by running a "dumb" core at extreme speed, or runs a really complex core at slow speed.

You might not care at the end of the day, but at the end of the month when your power bill comes in you might care at least a little bit.

General Rant - no need for multi-threaded aps!

[MadCow42]

>> * 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 bolded section continually drives me nuts... NO, you don't have to have multi-threaded applications to get benefits from a multi-CPU system. When was the last time you EVER ran one program on your computer? Take a look at the Task List some day... there are probably 20-30 threads listed there at any one time.

I love my dual-Athlon system because there is NO lag... it never freezes up while starting an application or while one task is doing somethign intensive. I'm free to do surf while burning CD's, or read email while rendering images.

The world of one-program thinking is over, and has been for YEARS. Think SYSTEM when you look at the benefits of multiple CPUs.

MadCow.

multithreaded programming

[marco.antonio.costa]

I know I'd love to see great built-in multithreading/concurrency support in the next C++ standard. Java already does MT pretty well, right?

bottom line, people won't see massive improvements in performance with those new multicores until ppl really get the hang on developing multithreaded soft. I better read up on the subject.

Re:love that headline...

[marcushnk]

perhaps just to perpetuate the status quo, by minimizing effort? (and letting their winged marketing monkeys of doom go for broke)

Keeping the options afloat

[the eric conspiracy]

Intel has a serious problem in that they are perceived, and rightly so that to be a technical laggard. They are bleeding market share and their stock price has dived.

As a result Intel is trying to revamp their product line to become more competitive - but to keep from losing customers they are trying to darken the sky with marketing. This will work for a while because Intel has some credibility amassed from its earlier successes.

But if they fail to deliver at least parity with the next round of designs they are going to lose market share as fast as AMD can build Fabs. And right now they are running the risk of the 'Osborne Effect' - promising new product so attractive that the company loses large sales volume on current sales.

So Intel is making some really big bets here. If we get into the same time frame in 2007 with AMD still having a clear technical lead we could see AMD and Intel all of a sudden having a 40/60 split in market share, and a duopoly where once there was a monopoly.

Intel Marketing

[Exter-C]

Although Intel is not alone on this front it has been shown many times in the past that Intel will announce a technology or chip or both and yet it takes 6+ months for those to actually hit the market. We really should just wait until we actually HAVE the products from Intel (and other people) before raving about how fantatic they are.

Re:wanna compare cpu speeds?

[Jepler]

I don't know what method you're using to compute factorials, or whether the time includes converting to decimal and displaying on a terminal. My programs do not. (actually, the last one does convert to decimal and write to a file, and it still runs quite a bit faster than yours)

My test system is a Sempron 1800MHz 64-bit processor, and I wrote my programs in Python

A naive program which calculates 1 * 2 * ... * 100000 just as written takes 54s CPU time. Another program which uses a "divide and conquer" approach takes 2.6s CPU time. Once again, it's clear that algorithm can make a much bigger difference than CPU speed.

The "divide and conquer" method creates a list of all the numbers to be multiplied. At each stage, it divides this list into two sublists of equal length, and multiplies the pairs to create a new list. If there's an odd item, it's simply placed on the new list. This means that the intermediate products stay smaller longer.

If you *are* timing the conversion and output stage, then you should use a math package that is designed to create decimal output. I used "DecInt", and added a step which converted Python longs to DecInts when they appeared in the intermediate results. The run time is a bit longer, but the result is still calculated and written to a file in just 5.5s CPU time.

Here's the best I can do at getting my code into this post without hitting the fitlers:

def f(n):
nums = range(2, n+1)
while len(nums) > 1:
. print len(nums)
. hl = len(nums)/2
. if len(nums) % 2:
.. a = nums[:hl]
.. b = nums[hl:2*hl]; b.reverse()
.. odd = nums[2*hl]
.. nums = [odd] + [i*j for i, j in zip(a, b)]
. else:
.. a = nums[:hl]
.. b = nums[hl:2*hl]; b.reverse()
.. nums = [i*j for i, j in zip(a, b)]
return nums[0]

Re:Why woule Apple pick Intel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of it this way. Apple wants to transition to the x86 world. Now there is no doubt that Intel is the better partner for this in terms of resources, marketing and stability. *HOWEVER* once they have a stable x86 product line, *THEN* they will IMO look to AMD and discard Intel if Intel falls behind again.

you already got it...

[YesIAmAScript]

What you list "most consumers need", that's already what Intel is providing. Core Duo is their desktop solution.

These new chips mentioned are server/workstation chips.

Also, I find your latency comments incongruous. Yes, P4 has an overly-long pipeline. But it's not user-perceiveable in terms of latency. It's only reflected in how the processor just doesn't perform as well as might be expected from the processor clocking and transistor count or heat production.

The 10+ seconds thing is more attributable to other factors, if it's even true. Most apps launch very quickly for me and besides, it's more related to the OS and how it uses the disk than the pipeline of the processor.

I'd like to see Intel improve their processors further, but they do seem to be on the right track now and away from NetBurst.