Intel - Market Doesn't Need Eight Cores

PeterK writes "TG Daily has posted an interesting interview with Intel's top mobility executive David Perlmutter. While he sideswipes AMD very carefully ('I am not underestimating the competition, but..'), he shares some details about the successor of Core, which goes by the name 'Nehalem.' Especially interesting are his remarks about power consumption, which he believes will 'dramatically' decrease in the next years as well as the number of cores in processors: Two are enough for now, four will be mainstream in three years and eight is something the desktop market does not need." From the article: "Core scales and it will be scaling to the level we expect it to. That also applies to the upcoming generations - they all will come with the right scaling factors. But, of course, I would be lying if I said that it scales from here to eternity. In general, I believe that we will be able to do very well against what AMD will be able to do. I want everybody to go from a frequency world to a number-of-cores-world. But especially in the client space, we have to be very careful with overloading the market with a number of cores and see what is useful."

What he missed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Two are enough for now, four will be mainstream in three years and eight is something the desktop market does not need.

oh, and 640k is going to be enough for everyone.

Silly Perlmutter

[ackthpt]

If the home user can justify (even indirectly due to demands of the operating system or changes in software architecture) 4 cores then 8 is immenently logical. Seems some minds at Intel are falling back to the dubious position they held regarding home users never needing 64 bit CPUs. Then again, maybe they're just playing dumb and are slaving away, burning midnight oil by the drum, to make 8 and 16 core processors.

Three Cores for the Clippy, but I don't know why,
Seven for the Vista kernel which is defect prone,
Nine for for Bloat which will make the cooling fry,
One for the Screensaver to toil alone,
In the Land of Redmond where Marketing lies.
One Core to rule them all, One Core to find them,
One Core to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Redmond where Marketing lies.

Neither four nor eight.

[MarkByers]

I think there is a world market for maybe five cores.

Re:We've heard that before.

[kfg]

I don't "need" an R sticker and turbo sound synthesizer either, but they sure make my FIAT 500 go faster.

The Little Mouse that Roars!

KFG

Re:We've heard that before.

[rbgaynor]

eight is something the desktop market does not need

So is he the only person on the planet who has not tried the Vista beta?

My own redundant reply

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't someone once say "283 slices of pizza ought to be enough for anybody" or something like that?

this reminds me of theonion

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades [theonion.com]

6 Coors enough

[CrazyJim1]

The 6 pack has been tried and true, why try and stuff an additional 2 Coors into it.

Re:We've heard that before.

[Mayhem178]

And that will almost let you run Oblivion at max settings.

I'll be the first to say it...

[Junior J. Junior III]

640 cores ought to be enough for anybody.

Re:We've heard that before.

[soft_guy]

I've been doing my part to help increase memory usage with the following handy function:

void * allocateMemory(size_t bytesNeeded)
{
time_t myTime;
time(&myTime);
struct tm * myTm = localtime(&myTime);
unsigned int ramWastingFactor = myTm->tm_year > 100 ? (myTim->tm_year - 100) : 1;

return malloc(bytesNeeded * ramWastingFactor);
}

Re:We've heard that before.

[tashanna]

I'm not so sure. I think there's more demand than you suspect
CPU 1: User
CPU 2: Windows Vista (Swap baby swap)
CPU 3: Outlook Anti-spam filter
CPU 4: Norton Anti-virus scanner
CPU 5: Web-security system
CPU 6: Sony "DRM Enabling" root-kit

Now, if you had said that average Linux user...
***Ducking And Covering***

- Tash
Yippie... Hybrids! [tashcorp.net]

Re:I'll be the first to say it...

[ManuelKelly]

I guess nobody with mod points caught that one.

Here is another.

I estimate the global market for cores at about 4.

Re:We've heard that before.

[pseudorand]

> Another thing that will have to change is that RAM should not be as random.

I agree. All these years we've been suffering with RANDOM access memory, an crutch of an antiquated technology that's time is over. Considering that computers do a whole bunch of searching, and a binary search is so much faster than a sequential search, and that you can only do a binary search on sorted data, if we could just get SORTED access memory instead of the end-of-its-usefull-life RANDOM crap, computers would be much faster.

Re:We've heard that before.

[steveo777]

I, for one, plan on living forever... so far, so good.

Re:We've heard that before.

[metaforth]

Nice. Except Moore's law will kill you unless you grow the factor exponentially. Here's what I recommend: unsigned int ramWastingFactor = myTm->tm_year > 100 ? (int)pow(2,(myTim->tm_year - 100.0)) : 1; --- Clown Car Discounts [blogspot.com]