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Dual Core Intel Processors Sooner Than Expected

Posted by CowboyNeal on Sat Jan 29, 2005 12:33 PM
from the rolling-out-like-autobots dept.
Intel IT Hardware
Hack Jandy writes "AnandTech reports that Intel's Smithfield processors are going to get here sooner than they originally predicted; most likely within the next few months. Apparently, the Intel roadmaps reveal that the launch dates for next generation desktop chipsets, 2MB L2 Prescotts and Dual Core Smithfield processors (operating at 3.2GHz per core) are almost upon us - way ahead of the original Q4'05 roadmap estimates. Hopefully, that means Intel will actually start shipping the new technology instead of waiting four months after the announcement for retail products."
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  • Bleh... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GreyWolf3000 (468618) on Saturday January 29 2005, @12:35PM (#11514120) Journal
    I want to see dual-core Pentium-Ms.

    At the rate that power consumption and heat dissipation are increasing on these chips, I consider Pentium-Ms to be the only processor worth using.

  • Great news (Score:5, Funny)

    by Junior J. Junior III (192702) on Saturday January 29 2005, @12:35PM (#11514122) Homepage
    This means I can shut my furnace off this winter, instead of waiting until the end of 05.

  • But will they be 64-bit? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by agraupe (769778) on Saturday January 29 2005, @12:36PM (#11514128) Journal
    As I see it, the smart step to take would be to start with consumer-level 64-bit chips, make them as fast as they can be, and then move on to dual-core. The only way dual-core could be better at this point is if it is given to the server market, where 64-bit Intel processors already exist.

  • Just to be clear... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lisandro (799651) on Saturday January 29 2005, @12:41PM (#11514157)
    ...these are the 130 watts power-hungry dual P4s mentioned in a previous article right? No thankie.
    • Ever since AMD became the definitive number 1 in the market, I seriously lost interest in Intel stuff.

      • Re:Just to be clear... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Lisandro (799651) on Saturday January 29 2005, @01:47PM (#11514584)
        I wouldn't write Intel off that quickly, but yes, AMD offerings are much interesting from every conceviable point of view: performance, price and power consumption. You can get yourself a dual AMD Athlon64 system for the price of a single DC Intel Smithfield. It will run cooler aswell and most likely perform better.

        I don't know what's up with Intel lately. They're giving too much away in the x86 market to AMD, and they can make good processors (P-M, for example).

  • Office use? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by spectrokid (660550) on Saturday January 29 2005, @12:49PM (#11514215) Homepage
    I can see how this is good for gamers, but normal office use? The biggest waiting time I have on my centrino is network. (In a big company, network by Siemens, it can take 15 seconds between O and a complete list of network drives. Go figure.) Servers will opt for the 64 bit thingies, your secretary doesn't need one; is gamers a big enough market share to make money on this shit?
    • I can see how this is good for gamers, but normal office use?

      I'm not even sure gamers will notice the difference at the moment, how many games are multithreaded these days ?. Iam sure some games do take adavantage of it if its there but only to a small degree. The vast majority of games today are designed to be played on single cpu computers (this includes the current consoles).

      Of course both the ps3 and xbox next make use of parrellism so in another year or two almost all games will probaby run better
      • You do know that when playing a game, it is not the only executing process on the system. The graphics and sound subsystems are all heavily used and take cycles away from the game.

        Sure, the speed-up isn't nearly as large, but having a spare core sure would prevent many slowdowns.
        • Yeah, especially if you use an affinity tool and assign your game its very own CPU... That means the only slowdowns will come from drivers blocking one another, or random processes spawning on your windows box :)
        • Your right that GPU's are ahead of CPU's but games need to be written to take full advantage of dual cores/cpus. At the moment they are not.
    • There are more uses for computers besides games and spreadsheets. It's not hard to imagine, just try and look beyond your own navel.

      Me, I'd really want it for quicker compiles. Think quick 3d rendering of models, etc.
    • I can see how this is good for gamers, but normal office use?

      You're gonna need these to run Longhorn... ;) They're planning for the future...

  • Programs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bios_Hakr (68586) <xptical&gmail,com> on Saturday January 29 2005, @12:53PM (#11514239) Homepage
    I ran dual P3s for a while last year. While I loved the responsiveness of the system, I hated the lack of programs avalible to take advantage of SMP.

    How is this year going to be different?

    Even if you *could* get SMP aware versions of your software, would it be worth it? Lots of problems are harder to solve when you add SMP to the mix.

    Gamers will be put off by the fact that games can't take advantage of SMP.

    Home users will be put off by the fact that their $500 Dell surfs the world-wide e-mail just fine.

    Buisness user may take advantage of this in servers, but there's only so much cooling and power you can provide to a 1-U server.

    So, how is dual core going to ever be anything bigger than Itanium, Xeon, or any of the other technologies that fail to meet customer expectations?

    • Re:Programs (Score:4, Informative)

      by impaler (78415) <{clinton} {at} {unknownlamer.org}> on Saturday January 29 2005, @01:09PM (#11514341) Homepage

      ffmpeg/libavcodec takes advantage of SMP now so I can encode videos almost twice as fast as before. Quake III kind of uses it, not very much to be noticeable.

      I also run more than one program at a time so the entire system is faster.

      Two dual core processors would rock hard (when my AthlonMP 2800+ system stop being usable I'm going to get dual dua-core Opterons, or PPC64s if they exist).

    • We have at the moment we have kind of reached a plateau where everyday office desktop use rarely stretches the fastest cpu's.

      The cpus in question are being developed for the areas of computing where more power is needed, primarly servers, games, and media work (video in particular). These are areas where people are willing to throw in multithreading if it increases performance despite the complexity it also brings.

      We might not see these cpus in desktops any time soon, it depends on how proccessor intensi

      • Re:Programs (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Tim C (15259)
        We might not see these cpus in desktops any time soon, it depends on how proccessor intensive longhorn is.

        No - you said it yourself, an area where extra CPU power is useful is video work. More and more people are getting digital camcorders, and want to transfer the movies to PC to email to friends, burn to DVD, or whatever. Ordinary people are going to ask for PCs that are "good at video".

        Further, if the CPU manufacturers move exclusively to dual-core procs, where are the OEMs going to get single-core on
    • "Even if you *could* get SMP aware versions of your software, would it be worth it? Lots of problems are harder to solve when you add SMP to the mix."

      For the time being, dual-core chips will be primarily for people that stand to benefit. Video, graphics, compiling, servers that have multiple processes or threads, etc.

      "Gamers will be put off by the fact that games can't take advantage of SMP."

      Games have been updated to take advantage of hyperthreading. Not only does that allow some games to benefit immedi
    • Well, you don't need multi-threaded apps to benefit from smp.

      I've been running dual p3's for a while in Linux, and it's nice being able to compile, check slashdot, stream music, etc. without a problem.

    • Consider that 5 years ago, the amount of software capable of running SMP was even smaller. As more and more systems become SMP or SMT, more applications are written to take advantage of this.

      Also, consider that when one multitasks, the loads are split between processors. Also, these new chips aren't even marketed towards consumers just yet. Instead, they will be going into the server market and the high-end workstation market. These markets are usually the first to receive any major changes to the way
    • You get a lot of value even using non-multithreaded apps, eg make -j2 almost doubles compile speed on largish projects on a dual processor system even though the compiler is not multithreaded.

      Until multiprocessor systems are more widespread, its barely worth the effort. Writing multithreaded apps is a royal pain, and the development tools don't help either. For instance std::string in VC6 is not thread-safe - you dont even find these things out until trying to do multithreaded stuff.

  • Pork Products (Score:5, Funny)

    by jackalope (99754) on Saturday January 29 2005, @12:54PM (#11514242)
    I find it interesting that Intel has code named these chips using the same name as one of the world's largest pork processors, Smithfield Foods.

    I expect that these chips will be large power hungry pigs.

    • And for those who are going to ask: But does it run Linux? The answer is: Linux == communism; Systems run by large powerhungry pigs [online-literature.com] == communism --> Smithfield will be Linux only. Or maybe it will come bundled with GNU Hurd and Duke Nukem Forever.

      (And for large powerhungry pigs with modpoints: This comment is meant as an attempt at humour)
  • Let me get this straight..... Intel(or most any other company).... getting something out earlier than expected ... I felt a great disturbance in the force. The earth has stopped moving.
  • I would have thought Dual core chips would have already been available by Intel already.

    People complain a lot about Sun Microsystems, but the Dual Core in Sun's SPARC IV has been out since last April or May I believe.

    Doesn't AMD already have dual core cpu's shipping as well? IBM is working on a dual core G5 as well aren't they?

    Heck, is this even news?

    Shouldn't we be talking about 4 core cpus that are already working in development labs around the world. Sun and IBM both have those... I would bet money t

  • Don't print useless press releases! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fuzzy12345 (745891) on Saturday January 29 2005, @01:20PM (#11514413)
    Hopefully, that means Intel will actually start shipping the new technology instead of waiting four months after the announcement for retail products.

    Want to change Intel's behaviour? Don't give them any press when they announce "real soon now" stuff, only when they actually ship. But if /. (and other media) print every press release, the press releases will keep coming.

  • my epiphany... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ltwally (313043) on Saturday January 29 2005, @01:27PM (#11514453) Homepage Journal
    Has anyone stopped to look at modern software while thinking about Dual-Core?

    Both Intel and AMD have decided upon dual-core as the future of desktop computing. There will be no more massive Mhz increases... instead the focus is now on parallel computing.... But, seriously, how many CPU intensive applications outside of the server arena take advantage of SMP?

    As someone who has ran dual-cpu workstations for years, I can personally attest to the fact that 99% of CPU heavy tasks do not make use of SMP.

    Think about it... That copy of Doom3 or Half-Life 2 that you just bought, that runs like shit on even top-of-the-line hardware, isn't going to run any better on Dual-Core, because these games are not designed to run multiple threads simultaneously. Neither do most archival programs (WinAce, WinRar, WinZip, SevenZip, etc etc). Nor do many of your encoding tools (though FlaskMPEG and GoGo-No-Coda are noteworthy exceptions).

    As a geek, I can attest that the *nix arena isn't much better. Just because the source is open and available does NOT mean that the author(s) ever considered coding CPU intensive tasks for multiple processors. And "porting" tasks from single threaded to multiple threads is NOT a simple task. This is one of the reasons that there are Computer Science degrees -- writing good SMP code isn't something you learn at technical schools (or even half the full Universities out there).

    Don't get me wrong... as someone who has ran SMP boxes for the past 10 years, I'm really excited about Dual-Core. But don't expect it to be worth a whole lot for the immediate future... as no one outside the server arena really codes for SMP.
    • I don't know what decade you're living in, but no modern game runs single-thread, single-process. Try opening up top or task manager. They all take advantage of SMP or HyperThreading to some degree, and the added responsiveness is priceless.
      • The core work of most modern games is done on a single thread. A lot of games use a thread to read input, but that's about it.

        Do you know of any examples of games (other than, I believe, Quake 3) that use threads to actually divide real work, as opposed to a minor scheduling convenience?

      • Re:my epiphany... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ltwally (313043) on Saturday January 29 2005, @08:26PM (#11516992) Homepage Journal
        As already stated by another reply: just because a game is running multiple threads does not mean those extra threads are doing CPU intensive work.

        Somebody mod this guy down, he's talking out of his ass, and does not deserve an "Insightful" mod.

        Sorry if that sounds harsh, but he really doesn't know what he's talking about. He should try running a dual-cpu box before he makes comments on the state of software and SMP.
    • CPUs are fast enough for most home user type purposes now. The only major exceptions besides gaming (important) are 3D graphics for video, and video encoding. Video processing and 3d graphics are already aggressively multithreaded applications in most instances. Having multiple CPUs means users will be able to watch a dvd and unzip a file at the same time without either one slowing down, so from that standpoint, it's worth it today. If multiprocessor systems become common, so will multithreaded applications

    • Re:my epiphany... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Bill Dimm (463823) on Saturday January 29 2005, @01:47PM (#11514579) Homepage
      As someone who has ran dual-cpu workstations for years, I can personally attest to the fact that 99% of CPU heavy tasks do not make use of SMP.

      CPU-heavy tasks aren't the target. Intel and AMD have picked up on a very important trend in computing that you are overlooking. While one core runs your word processor, web browser, spreadsheet, etc., the other core handes the 100 spyware programs that are running on your computer. Sure, a few years ago one core would have been enough, but not for the modern Windows user.

    • Re:my epiphany... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Rob_Bryerton (606093) on Saturday January 29 2005, @07:18PM (#11516655) Homepage
      Frankly, I'm bewildered at the responses here resisting the change to SMP. I've never understood the focus on pure MHz as opposed to parallelism and MHz. Anyone on an SMP box that is multitasking sees the benefits of SMP immediately. You can work with a completely responsive system even when you have a compute-intensive non-SMP-aware process hogging a CPU. This is not the case with single CPU sysems.

      What we have here is simply the fact that, as always, software is years behind the hardware it runs on. This is a classic chicken-and-the-egg situation. "There's no SMP software, so why by a dual?" vs. "Nobody has SMP hardware, so why write SMP-aware apps?".

      Thankfully, there are many SMP-aware apps available, not even getting to the fact that with single-threaded apps on SMP you can for example encode video and do other CPU-intensive tasks simultaneously and at their "native" speeds.

      Games are probably the worst example to use for touting SMP benefits because they are written with the single-CPU mindset. This is a software shortcoming, yet many posters see this is a flaw of SMP? Silly. If you're using games as an SMP detraction, then you're not the target for SMP until the software is written to take advantage of SMP. Again, this is a software shortcoming, not a hardware flaw.

      Then we have the "well office-type users have no need for SMP". Well, that may be true, but so is the fact that office use does not require >1GHz CPU's, yet offices are filled with >1GHz machines. The nature of the "CPU business" is such that your products must constantly improve, or you will soon become irrelevant. You can only make CPU's run so fast in the physical world, so after you've wrung all the easy MHz gains out of a process, what's the next "easy" gain? Parallelism. We don't expect Intel, AMD, et al to just say "Well, that's it, we can make them no faster", do we? Heck no. Instead of more MHz, we now have more cores. The software will follow, and in the meantime the hardware is usuable now.

      The fact of the matter is this: there are real, physical limitations to the manufacture of ever higher speed CPU's. We're going to hit the brick wall shortly using current processes, so the next logical step is to parallelize the CPU. If you can't make 'em faster, then you divide and conquer.

      As someone who runs a few SMP systems, I, for one, welcome our dual-core overlords. So I can run dual-core? Heck no, that's for the gamers and office-workers ;). I'll settle for no less than dual dual-cores, getting more accomplished in a shorter frame of time with little to no effort on my part.

      This will lower the barrier of entry for SMP use for the masses. After they are dragged, kicking and screaming to SMP, people will notice a smoother, more productive computing environment. Also, us dual-CPU folk can now move up to quad cores with relatively little additional expense. As SMP moves into the mainstream, the software will follow. Any programmer worth his salt knows that it is trivial to parallelize many compute intensive tasks such as media encoding/manipulation, imaging, rendering etc. Now that the hardware is (almost) here, the apps will follow.

      I am sincerely interested in hearing any response to these points I've made.

  • Nice for some apps. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MrBandersnatch (544818) on Saturday January 29 2005, @01:31PM (#11514480)
    Im a software developer and REALLY hate the movement towards dual-cores. While dual-cores will be great for some things (I tend to write everything using threads where its easy to leverage performance) there are many apps (many of which I have no control over, no source access or the cost of re-writing (legacy apps) to be multi-threaded is too high) which need pure-raw processing power and this means its going to take far longer for that power to be available.

    Its a bad move IMO on AMDs and Intels part - personally rather than head to dual cores I'll be looking more and more towards how to get the maximum (i.e. overclock) out of the higher rated single core processors - and this is from someone who normally upgrades every 12-18 months.

    That said if the dual-cores overclock well my stance may change....

    • Re:Nice for some apps. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JamieF (16832) on Saturday January 29 2005, @07:55PM (#11516865) Homepage
      >Im a software developer and REALLY hate the movement towards dual-cores.

      Tough. Chip makers are up against a technology barrier right now, and clock speed increases in the CPU don't make RAM or disk or interconnect faster anyway. How about just putting a 4MB cache on-die? That wouldn't require a massive clock speed increase but it would speed things up. I'm not an EE but I'm just pointing out that there are many, many things that have been left in the dust by Moore's law that could catch up and make quite a difference. Does your computer have 4+GB of DDR memory? ATA-133 drives with 8MB cache? PCI-X? A 64-bit CPU and an OS that knows how to use it fully? In what other ways are CPUs waiting on everything else, that could be improved to make things run faster overall?

      Learn to parallelize your code where possible. Optimize your existing code. Software optimizations yield stunning improvements compared to incremental clock speed bumps anyway, and (unlike hardware) affect every installation of your app.

      >Its a bad move IMO on AMDs and Intels part

      OK genius, what's the alternative? No improvements in processors for years, until somebody makes a breakthrough that enables 4+ GHz processors? What happens when they hit the next roadblock?

      Hardware has been so far ahead of software for so long that we've become accustomed to solving bloat with "just buy a new computer". It wouldn't kill us to spend a little time profiling code. The economics have been (in many cases) such that it just made more sense to throw money at new hardware. If that no longer makes sense, throw money at software optimizations for a little while. It doesn't exclusively mean that we have to force every algorithm to operate in parallel. It could be as simple as releasing fat binaries of apps that are compiled to target recent CPUs (no more shipping 386-optimized code to every customer), or *gasp* writing more efficient code in the first place.

  • Picture This (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MOMOCROME (207697) <momocrome@gmaiDEBIANl.com minus distro> on Saturday January 29 2005, @03:32PM (#11515177)
    Today's CPUs are, in the final analysis, little different than the 386 launched in 1985. Notable exceptions are in details like feature size and operating frequency. Other significant differences are in the pipelining logic, crufted on instruction sets (mmx anyone?) that are rarely called into action, cache and pinouts.

    Now, take a step back and imagine what a classic 386 would look like on a .09 micron process... consider that the 386 had 275,000 transistors- compared to the P4s 42 million. You could fit around 150 386s in the space (on the die) of a single P4.

    Now, of course there are many advances to consider over the 386, but fundamentally, that processor logic is capable of handling 99% of 32 bit computing tasks. They may have done so slowly, but there you are.

    My thinking is, they could use some of this old logic, buff it up a little to accomodate some modern techniques and carve it all into a single die. Imagine a CPU with 64 simple processors, 4Mb of cache and some controlling logic running at 3-5 Ghz. All this in the space of and at the (manufacturing) cost of a single P4.

    This chip could be used in clusters like nobody's business. An array of 128 of these processors could simultaneously handle 8,192 active threads.

    What use would it be? Off the top of my head, this would be perfect for real-time monitoring, transaction processing, switching and so forth. There would also be serious advantages in the desktop space as compilers and kernels were built to adapt to the new distribution of resources. Image processing could be handled using the same techniques as SLI cards use to split the tasks up over two or more video cards, and any other large body of data could be simlarly broken up. Compilers would be designed to break a program up not into a paltry 2 or 3 threads, but into dozens. Speed and responsiveness would skyrocket, while fab costs and board speeds remained stable.

    This might be the logical outcome of the current drift towards multiple CPUs per die, and it could also unite and surpass the schools of CISC vs RISC, as strategies from both would benefit the endeavor.

  • zerg (Score:3, Informative)

    by Lord Omlette (124579) on Saturday January 29 2005, @06:57PM (#11516486) Homepage
    RAWR, no discussion of dual-core CPUs is complete w/out a mention of Herb Sutter's The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software [www.gotw.ca]!

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