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Intel Unveils New Chips to Battle AMD 247

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the go-down-swinging dept.
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.'"
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Intel Unveils New Chips to Battle AMD More

Intel Unveils New Chips to Battle AMD

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  • Which innovation? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hyc ( 241590 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @05:44AM (#14865198) Homepage Journal
    Of course, IBM had multicores years ago, so AMD wasn't really the innovator on that front.

    • Re:Which innovation? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cfx666 ( 887251 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @05:51AM (#14865213)
      >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

      • Re:Which innovation? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by vitya404 ( 959458 )
        Well, I do think Fokker was a great guy, but whatever you say, the Wright brothers (or Whitehead) were the first to fly with a self-propelled plane. I could enumerate many other examples. It is great to have something that anybody can buy, but it is rarely the first step.

        • Re:Which innovation? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Sique ( 173459 )
          They just claim to have been flying first with a self propelled plane. Alberto Santos-Dumont [wikipedia.org] was the first to show the large public himself flying in a self propelled airplane :) (and there is still this odd picture allegedly taken in 1902 showing him in one of the early constructions).

          • Re:Which innovation? (Score:5, Informative)

            by samkass ( 174571 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @09:45AM (#14865779) Homepage Journal
            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:Which innovation? (Score:4, Interesting)

              by Sique ( 173459 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @10:53AM (#14866200) Homepage
              The main accomplishment of the Wright Brothers was the steering. The principle of flying 'heavier than air' was shown to be sound before (Lilienthal et.al.), and the idea to have the plane being self propelled was obvious. It was just a matter of time until the gas engines were light and powerful enough.
              But it was the Wright's analysis of the bird flight, and the realisation that you have to have bendable wings and tail/front flaps to get to a controlled flight, that was really new. Ironically it was this idea that was published in the patent application of 1904, which enabled the other flight pioneers to get their planes ready until 1910.

      • Re:Which innovation? (Score:5, Informative)

        by dunstan ( 97493 ) <dvavasour@i e e . o rg> on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @06:39AM (#14865309) Homepage
        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.
  • 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.

  • Innovative dick comparison (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @06:01AM (#14865234)
    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?

    • Re:Innovative dick comparison (Score:4, Insightful)

      by cfx666 ( 887251 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @06:15AM (#14865279)
      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

      • The buzzword you are looking for is Extreme Multiprogramming. (Well ok, two words).

        Not to be mistaken for extreme programming. It's based on CSP (Communicating Sequential processes) - Occam, c++csp, jcsp etc. support this model originally made for transputer.

    • Re:Innovative dick comparison (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 10Ghz ( 453478 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @06:50AM (#14865326)
      And I'm not talking about AMD, Intel is just as guilty for equaling innovation with "make that damn thing run faster".


      If they made their processors slower, then they would be "innovating"? What do you want processors to do, really? EVERYBODY wants their CPU to be as fast as possible. If you could choose between two identical CPU's, but one of them were twice as fast as the other, which one would you choose? the slower one? I doubt it. So why are you then whining as if making CPU's faster is a bad thing, since everybody wants faster CPU's? What benefit would there be in having slow processors?

      And they have been doing pretty interesting things in order to make it faster. Pentium Pro with the on-die cache, SIMD, multithreading etc. etc.. Hell, even Cell with it's SPU's was designed the way it is, so it would be as fast as possible. But according to you, that's not innovcation?

      ow 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.a


      Uh, they are still comparing performance, the means to get performance has just been changed that's all. They are NOT adding cores for the sake of adding cores. They are adding cores in order to increase performance.

      But since you apparently think that making CPU's faster is not the way to go, why not share ith us what YOU want processors to do?

      • Re:Innovative dick comparison (Score:4, Insightful)

        by khellendros1984 ( 792761 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @07:28AM (#14865408) Journal
        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.
      • The question remains, though, if more throttle is more speed, too, or just more smoke? Or rather, if that smoke generated is warranted by the speed increase. More horsepower only equals more speed if you manage to get it onto the ground, if your traction sucks because you try to run metal tires instead of rubber, you will generate a lot of heat, noise and some quite cool FX, but you won't pick up more speed.

        To get out of bad analogies, of course more MHz == more speed. The question is, though, if there are
        • I fail to see why this turned in to discussion about clock-speeds. The GP was talking about "making the damn thing faster". That IMO means just what is sounds like: Making the CPU as fast as possible. It does not mean "squeeze as much Mhz from that thing as possible!" CPU's haven't been about Mhz in a long time already.

          if there are not more fruitful ways to pump speed out of your CPU.

          Yes there are, and Intel and AMD are pursuing them as we speak. But even that isn't good enough for the GP, who is now whinio

      • 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

        • How about making them run cooler and more efficiently

          They are doing just that. And they are doing that because the excessive heat was killing performance. They couldn't make it faster because it was running so hot.

          and hence quieter since they wont need 3 fans pointing at them?

          My A64 3200+ has exactly ONE fan cooling it.

          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

      • But what happens here is the same as with cars. Ok, bad analogy follows, but oh well. If you put too much HP in your car, you might not even be able to attain the highest speed as other components comes into play: tires, trasmission, aerodynamics, etc. Putting a dual-V12-whatever won't magically make a Mini as fast a a ferrari. HP = MHz and Twin Engine = Core/Dual procs, etc.

        Furthermore, why aren't EVERYONE buying ferraris/lambo/porsche/etc? I mean, they want the fastest car possible right? Or why aren't ev
      • If they made their processors slower, then they would be "innovating"? What do you want processors to do, really?

        Lower power consumption? Lower heat output to the point where I don't need a Rube [xbitlabs.com] Goldberg [silentpcreview.com] Device? [swiftnets.com]
      • heat my house and cook my dinner? i mean why else would i buy a p4 prescott
    • 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

      • 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.

    • Re:Innovative dick comparison (Score:5, Informative)

      by gormanly ( 134067 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @07:25AM (#14865400)

      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.

      • P-100s had a 66 MHz bus and a 1.5x multiplier. The 50 MHz bus was used only on the P-75 and the rare 486DX-50.
      • holy shit, that is really innovative

        • Re:512MB L2 Cache? (Score:2, Informative)

          by Amouth ( 879122 )
          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 d
    • enough waste heat is generated to heat a medium sized home

      Maybe it's about time someone came up with a method to use this heat for additional productivity. Maybe the element used in heating water for an expresso machine!

  • Energy efficiency (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @06:03AM (#14865240)
    "Multicore gives us the ability to get back on traditional performance growth lines," Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner told reporters on Monday. "We have become fanatical about energy efficiency. We have to continue to make progress in terms of energy efficiency."

        Does this means these new multicores will fry eggs even faster? I hate it when my meal isn't done in time!

    • Re:Energy efficiency (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anne Thwacks ( 531696 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @06:36AM (#14865304)
      Does this means these new multicores will fry eggs even faster? I hate it when my meal isn't done in time!

      No - Sun manage to get four multithreading cores in their Niagra, and only run at 72 watts with 32 threads. see this [theregister.co.uk]

      However, with Intel's cores, I expect be able to have a hot dinner faster than you can say Microwave".

      • [quote] No - Sun manage to get four multithreading cores in their Niagra, and only run at 72 watts with 32 threads. see this However, with Intel's cores, I expect be able to have a hot dinner faster than you can say Microwave". [/quote]

        Oh, do you expect to fry an egg with a 31W (TDP) Sossaman [endian.net], or do you expect to do it with a (TDP not confirmed officially) 80W Woodcrest [wikipedia.org]? I can understand faboi comments like these, but for it to get modded to 4-Interesting is seriously lame.

  • Advantages and disadvantages of multicore (Score:5, Informative)

    by replicant108 ( 690832 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @06:04AM (#14865246) Journal
    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]

    • Multi-core processors require operating system (OS) support to make optimal use of the second computing resource.

      And that support exists in just about all OS'es already

      Also, making optimal use of multiprocessing in a desktop context requires application software support.

      Not really. Your OS is already running several processos in the background. SMP allows for those processes to be evenly distributed to two cores. Also, if you run more than one app at the same time (like we all do, basically), you will benef

    • >> * 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

  • Pretty light reading, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by porkThreeWays ( 895269 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @06:08AM (#14865259)
    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.
    • 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.
    • A few months ago released a press release saying that they were going to cut power inefficiency in their chips to 1 millionth their previous levels. We've already seen the chips they produced with this breakthrough.

      Net power loss less than 5%...

      Intel is not wrht gambling on anymore, too many false rumours... Wait for some real results before believing ANYTHING from them.
    • There's very little intel can do in its chip designs to make the desktop low latency. That's all about app and OS design. Intel is putting a lot of focus into getting their chips to run cool, and if people are really demanding the sort of PC you're describing then surely someone will build one out of the ULV chips intel is going to be supplying.

      And on the other hand, I'm thinking about whether or not I can afford to get a dual-processor dual-core in my next box, so I'd love to see them move to quad-core,
    • 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 oth
  • 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 lon

    • Re:wanna compare cpu speeds? (Score:5, Informative)

      by 80 85 83 83 89 33 ( 819873 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @06:19AM (#14865286) Journal
      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:wanna compare cpu speeds? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @07:17AM (#14865382)
        I'll add this to the list:
        Opteron 146 (2.0GHz) : 43 seconds

        Now I know what is the purpose of 64bit desktop CPUs - extreme Calculator performance!
      • 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" a

      • You *REALLY* need to look at the Pentium M...

        OS: Slackware Linux (Current)
        Application: kcalc (Comes with KDE)

        These are both ASUS laptops with PC3200 RAM:
        2.8 GHz Celeron: 65 secs
        1.6 GHz Celeron M: 18.5 secs

        This kind of makes you wonder now, doesn't it? It appears that the Pentium M achieves *quite* a bit more per MHz then the Pentium 4.

        Aside from that... the calculator in windows is obviously a joke, as the 1.6 GHz machine took 118 secs to do it in WinXP >_<
      • PIII 800 (XP pro) 378 seconds (used msconfig to kill all crap running)
        474 seconds (lots of junk running)
        That one is interesting. So XP Pro has enough unnecessary stuff running by default to make it 25% slower??

    • Re:wanna compare cpu speeds? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 80 85 83 83 89 33 ( 819873 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @06:36AM (#14865303) Journal
      sorry for the formatting, here it is easier to understand:

      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

      **64 bit XP is twice as fast

      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....

      • 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, ..." ?

      • Ha! My super-optimized Gentoo x86-64 system, running on a 2 GHz Turion64 CPU, all unnecessary services and processes killed, under optimal condition (downslope, wind from behind, air temp below 10C) uses exactly zero seconds to tell me "Error" in kcalc...
      • Is windows Calc threaded? Will it use both processors in a dual core machine?

  • IBM Power 6 @ 6Ghz (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CypherOz ( 570528 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @06:34AM (#14865301) Journal
    IBM have Power6 chips running at 6Ghz. IBM have been able to do 4 cores with this new technology.

    Refer here [slashdot.org]

    • Re:IBM Power 6 @ 6Ghz (Score:5, Informative)

      by Somegeek ( 624100 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @08:17AM (#14865507)
      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]

      • IIRC Intel has made 10Ghz transistors already but the trick is to make enough of them (at once) to make a processor.

        So it is possible that Intel makes a 4.5Ghz P4 and AMD makes a 3.2Ghz AMD64 but the yield would be so low that you'd be paying nearly 5 digits per processor to recoup costs.

        Would you honestly pay [say] $17,000 for a 4.5Ghz processor? Specially when you could get an entire 2P SMP system for that much? (and often less).

        Tom

  • love that headline... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by smash ( 1351 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @07:02AM (#14865350) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Competition good... Sloth bad... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ursabear ( 818651 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @07:24AM (#14865398) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • 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.

  • Keeping the options afloat (Score:4, Insightful)

    by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @09:49AM (#14865798)
    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 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Exter-C ( 310390 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @09:51AM (#14865805) Homepage
    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.
  • So I'm guessing next week we'll have the story about Intel overhyping their product release.

  • No news here (Score:3)

    by ChrisA90278 ( 905188 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @12:34PM (#14866965)
    Title: Intel Unveils New Chips to Battle AMD
    Summary: Intel will anounce new chip at upcomming event
    Real World: At a future event Intel will talk about a chip that will be available some months after the event
    What this means: In the future Intel will talk about the future

    No news here. Tell me whan I can buy one.

  • I Really Wonder (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2006 @12:51PM (#14867135)
    I really wonder how many i486 cores -- quite a competent chip for the x86 archtecture, all things considered -- Intel could put onto a die if they decided to do so. And with a modern process technology, how fast they could run.

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