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Dual Core Intel Processors Sooner Than Expected 257
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."
Bleh... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Bleh... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx
Re:Bleh... (Score:2)
Re:Bleh... (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.hugeurl.com/?ZTlkODQ4ZWE5MzM2Y2E2ZjhlN
Re:Bleh... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bleh... (Score:2)
Re:Bleh... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Bleh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bleh... (Score:2, Interesting)
Imagine having four to eight high-end Pentium Ms, with cooling fans out the back. Noisy monster, sure. But fast. Add in kernel-level support for treating them as CPUs, and you can build an extensible machine limited by your expansion slots, not by your DIMM slots and CPU sockets.
Great news (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great news (Score:2)
But will they be 64-bit? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:But will they be 64-bit? (Score:5, Funny)
Sure. 2 cores x 32 bits/core = 64 bits. Duh.
Re:But will they be 64-bit? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But will they be 64-bit? (Score:2)
No, he means Nocona cores. (Score:4, Informative)
Read up!
http://www.intel.com/technology/64bitextensions/ [intel.com]
Re:No, he means Nocona cores. (Score:2)
Re:But will they be 64-bit? (Score:2)
Admittedly, I don't know what the roadmap is for AMD dual core chips, so maybe Intel's just trying to keep up by pretending the whole 64-bit thing never happened.
Re:But will they be 64-bit? (Score:2)
Yes. The link to the article started at the 3rd page, skipping the part about Intel's move to 64-bit on the desktop (even Celerons) in Q2 2005. From the 2nd page [anandtech.com] of TFA:
Re:But will they be 64-bit? (Score:2)
Re:But will they be 64-bit? (Score:2)
NetBSD had the first AMD64 system. FreeBSD still has the most cohesive system that works with the least amount of headaches (it's why I use it over the various linux distros i've tried on AMD64 - namely Ubuntu and Gentoo).
Just to be clear... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just to be clear... (Score:2)
Re:Just to be clear... (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Re:Just to be clear... (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong, there h
Re:Just to be clear... (Score:2)
Re:Just to be clear... (Score:2)
Except that if Intel takes his dual core out first, they'll be numer 1 again
BTW, Intel still owns 80% of the market, no mater how nice opterons can be. AMD can hardly be called "number 1". They'll become quickly 1 if they release the dual core stuff faster, though.
Remember, AMD was the first to get a 1 Ghz CPU, and that didn't give them the market.
Re:Just to be clear... (Score:2)
Office use? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Office use? (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Office use? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, the speed-up isn't nearly as large, but having a spare core sure would prevent many slowdowns.
Re:Office use? (Score:2)
Re:Office use? (Score:2)
Re:Office use? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Office use? (Score:2)
Re:Office use? (Score:2)
Me, I'd really want it for quicker compiles. Think quick 3d rendering of models, etc.
Re:Office use? (Score:2)
You're gonna need these to run Longhorn... ;) They're planning for the future...
Re:Office use? (Score:2)
I can't see today's processors being much of a challenge to 'normal office use'. Modern processors are exceedingly fast -- throw RAM at 'em and I bet they're good for a long while to come.
There will always be a market for faster CPUs. Someone needs 'em. But I think processors are beginning to out strip consumer needs by a long shot.
Think of all the people who probably never really use more than a few percent of their CPU power -- and we'r
Re:Office use? (Score:2)
Programs (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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).
Re:Programs (Score:2, Informative)
Are you serious, the POWER4 and POWER5 IBM workstation/server chips have been out for years. If you want a consumer friendly version, try the 64 bit dual G5's from Apple. The G5's are not available dual core yet, but the IBM ones have been for quite some time already.
Re:Programs (Score:2)
I want dual dual-core PPC64s. I know that single core ones are available now and have been available for a while.
And I'm broke right now so this is a few years out so they should exist at a more reasonable price.
Re:Programs (Score:2)
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)
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
Re:Programs (Score:2)
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
Re:Programs (Score:2)
I think not [tomshardware.com]
Re:Programs (Score:2)
Re:Programs (Score:2)
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.
Re:Programs (Score:2)
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
make -j2 (Score:2)
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.
Re:Programs (Score:2)
Quake 3 used Dual CPUs (Score:2)
I believe Id took advantage of dual G4 CPUs in Quake 3. From what I recall one CPU was assigned to AI and audio while the other handled graphics and such.
As AI gets more realistic, it needs more cycles. I think dual core CPUs have their place.
Re:Programs (Score:2)
If you multitask at all, you're "taking advantage of SMP".
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?
Because dual core setups are a *lot* cheaper than dual CPU setups. So you'll get most of the benefits (and performance) of an SMP machine, without the f
Re:Programs (Score:2)
Pork Products (Score:5, Funny)
I expect that these chips will be large power hungry pigs.
Re:Pork Products (Score:2)
(And for large powerhungry pigs with modpoints: This comment is meant as an attempt at humour)
Hold on (Score:2)
Re:Hold on (Score:2)
Guess Duke Nuke'Em Forever must be due soon.
Re:Hold on (Score:2)
It's about time. (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:It's about time. (Score:2)
IBM is probably working on a dual core PPC970, but the reason they simplified the design in the first place was mainly a cost thing - the G5 was designed for consumer systems.
IBM's main priority with the PPC970 is reducing power consumption and thermal output it seems, which they have done to some extent with PPC970FX. Still a way to go before 3GHz though, or G5 laptops.
Don't print useless press releases! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Reminds me of the race to 1 GHz in March 2000 (Score:2)
Will AMD respond by moving up the "release" (in very limited quantities) of their dual-core CPUs? Will the race to dual-core cause Intel to release a chip that's not ready, like the 1.13 GHz Pentium III [com.com]?
my epiphany... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:my epiphany... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:my epiphany... (Score:3, Informative)
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)
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.
Re:my epiphany... (Score:2)
Re:my epiphany... (Score:5, Funny)
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:2)
But, seriously... There really isn't a reason to code applications like Microsoft Word for SMP... but why the hell aren't game companies future-proofing their games?
I mean, take Half-Life 2 for example... If sales of the original HL are any indication, they should assume HL2 will be selling in volume for the next couple of years, at least, and yet the game does not take advantage of SMP.
Too
Re:my epiphany... (Score:2)
As far as games go, they certainly CAN take advantage or multiprocessor machines. Giants, Citizen Kabuto for OS X speeds up around 80% on a dual processor mac. The game wasn't even designed with SMP in mind of the PC side. If they can do it, why can't future games?
It doesn't take much imagination to think of even more e
Re:my epiphany... (Score:2)
Would you ever want to run more than one of these at the same time? Or for that fact run any application at the same as one of these CPU-intensive apps? If so you could still see a real-time benefit.
There is also continuing research in automatic parallelization, so even your legacy single threaded apps can take advantage of some of that extra cpu. For the most part the speedups attained this way are quite modest, but
The Apple Example... (Score:2)
Now, software developers had no choice but to build their apps multithreaded if they wanted to keep their clientele coming. But even more interesting is that the OS became more and more SMP-a
Re:my epiphany... (Score:2)
Re:my epiphany... (Score:2)
Not a whole lot of programs really need a fast CPU, but it helps to have a fast CPU and more than one of them if you run a lot of little programs.
Re:my epiphany... (Score:2)
Re:my epiphany... (Score:2)
Actually, they are. Since Quake III, Id has been doing SMP support. Both HL2 and Doom3 have support for SMP out-of-the-box.
Re:my epiphany... (Score:2)
Neither Doom3 or HL2 are actually written for SMP. They are NOT SMP-aware. They do NOT scale to multiple processors. Trust me on this, I'd know -- I run dual-cpu boxes (and I'm not talking that pseudo-SMP "hyperthreading")
As to Quake III Arena... yes, it is SMP aware. But was it written well? Oh HELL NO. It rarely sees anything above a 25% performance bo
Re:my epiphany... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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.
Re:my epiphany... (Score:2)
Secondly, Dual-Core is a good idea, and I'm happy about it (as I've already stated...)
... HOWEVER, this does not change the validity of my point: all that software that is out there today does not actually make use of SMP boxes. Sure, that will change... in time. But for now, you'll see all these people buying Dual-Core machines
Nice for some apps. (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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.
Re:Nice for some apps. (Score:2)
Databases can only do certain operations in parallel, and some of those require additional optimizations like separate drives to operate at maxmimum efficiency. An OLTP database with 10000 users is an inherently parallel problem domain.
OS vendors do code for SMP. Not all of them code for large numbers of processors, though, or they may not have succeeded at the high end. Sometimes there are performan
Funny thought (Score:2, Interesting)
Lately I have been doing a lot of work on distributing software to the internal network and RARing files. I would like the option of just RARing and not have my system turn to mud. Having one core running flat out giving me a chance to still do work is a great idea! Besides I'm sure a better balance with all of those 50 processes on my Windows box would be nice.
Transmeta (Score:2)
Re:Transmeta (Score:2)
With my ATX system, powered off the system consumes roughly 9-10 watts of power (attached power usage device). Idle its around 160 and cpu load its around 230.
(P4 2.8C)
Medevo
Re:Transmeta (Score:2)
BTW, transmeta... (Score:2)
Picture This (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, take a step back and imagine what a classic 386 would look like on a
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.
Re:Picture This (Score:2)
IBM called... (Score:2)
Also note, at 12 MHz, 128 386's could do an amazing 1.5 GHz clocks in total, not counting all the overhead for getting memory to flow between 128 different processors not even designed for dual-processing.
Re:IBM called... (Score:2)
The way that modern chips are able to be clocked so high is the use of deeper pipelines and more parallel operations, both of which requir
Re:Picture This (Score:2)
zerg (Score:3, Informative)
Re:ATI and Intel should have a contest (Score:2)
So I guess the answer would be the ATI video card.
Re:not a peep about G5 heat and power issues (Score:2)
Re:Minesweep/Solitare (Score:2)
it's not apps taking advantage of two processor (Score:2)
I edit up a movie and choose- burn this sucker to DVD.. anywhere from 4-12 hours later, using the computer for nothing more intensive than webbrowsing and email, I have a DVD..
now I could plain doom3 while I wait..
Re:I really hope WE can see this. (Score:2)