Analyst Doubts Intel's Dual-Core Demo 193
bakeacake writes "At Xbitlabs they have a article on the possibility that Intel's Dual core Preview at the IDF was not real. Would Intel sink this low?
"An analyst expressed doubts about demonstration of a 'real' dual-core microprocessor during an Intel's recent demonstration at Intel Developer Forum Fall 2004 in San Francisco, California. Insight's Nathan Brookwood believes that Intel was most likely to showcase a dual-processor system instead of a dual-core processor-based system during the show.""
Vaporware (Score:5, Interesting)
In other news: IBM is preparing a dual-core version of its 90nm PowerPC 970FX processor - aka the G5. Codenamed Antares, the chip will be delivered - likely in sample form - to Apple later this summer.
News article here [theregister.co.uk]
Re:Vaporware (Score:1, Funny)
Technically it's still Summer for a few more days. ;-)
Re:Vaporware (Score:3, Funny)
It is all a matter of reference
Re:Vaporware (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Vaporware (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardly an apples/apples comparison (no pun intended). IBM has been shipping dual core Power4 processors now for a couple of years. Wouldn't be that much of a stretch to believe that they would have a dual core G5 out in that timeframe. After all, if you read the article and applied the three scenarios, you'd see that the dual core G5 actually meets there first one (it really was a dual core).
Re:Vaporware (Score:2)
Would either company necessarily want it to be public knowledge when they actually deliver those samples?
Apple may have been testing samples for the last month, for all we know.
They could have both agreed that once again, surprise would work really well in their favor in the market for this next leap in te
Re:Vaporware (Score:2)
While on a bike holiday in southern France, I stopped for a burger at one of the small huts on the beach. I wondered why the guy was so careful about picking out the best lettuce and arranged the buns just so until he took out his camera and snapped a few pictures of the burger before handing it to me, the perplexed tourist. Apparently, he was in the process of making a new menu but was too cheap to make all the kinds of burgers just for the pictures, so he had to w
Intel always has rocking tech in their R&D dep (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel's R&D department routinely has processors way more advanced than its current offerings running at near production stability so I am confused as to why Mr. Brookwood believes something different. Intel rarely trumpets any news "loudly". They are much more likely to wait until they are confident that they can release the product on time (unlike MSFT which likes to do exactly the opposite).
Mr. Brookwood should be moderated -1 Troll. He's likely being paid off by another chip manufacturer to "trumpet this news loudly" and keep the public's attention away from other people's lack of success in the same arena.
Don't underestimate the power of Demo! (Score:2, Funny)
Bill Gates dies in a car accident. He finds himself in purgatory, being sized up by St. Peter. "Well, Bill, I`m really confused on this call; I`m not sure whether to send you to Heaven or Hell. After all, you enormously helped society by putting a computer in almost every home, yet you also created that ghastly Windows `95. I`m going to do something I`ve never done before in your case; I`m going to let you decide where you want to go." Bill replied, "wel
Harsh (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a bit harsh. Yes, Intel is going to have stuff in R&D that would make your eyes pop and have you salivating and the thought of being posessed of such technology (a friend, back in 1980, was working on CPUs for the DoD clocked at 100 MHz, while we dinked around with sub 10 MHz stuff) but you would probably find it in such a state that it couldn't be housed in a standard cabinet or the motherboard is fairly jury-rigged to support it, and that says nothing about actually having a compiled O/S to run on the thing and take full advantage of it.
Re:Harsh (Score:3, Informative)
I'd say you're spot on. . . Seing that the northbridge, CPU, ans PCIe are on one board and the southbridge, PCI and other I/O controllers are on a seperate board. Of course as anyone in the CPU industry knows, that is a relatively common debug platform setup.
posting AC for hopefully obvious reasons.
oh and the OS is likely an internal OS der
Re:Harsh (Score:2)
Now tell me... why would a dual core CPU need any more OS support than a dual processor motherboard. There is no more CPU state that has to be saved off. About the only thing I could see is a tweak to the scheduler to expand CPU affinity to both cores in the package if there were a shared cache (which my understanding of the Intel offering is there isn't)
Nothing to see here. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nothing to see here. (Score:3, Insightful)
I realized we realy need a new
moderation category 'paranoid'.
Seriously, i do believe that the
'maybe intel didnt demo a real
dualcore cpu but said they did'
article is near 100% speculation.
Any facts here? Didnt saw them.
Or maybe it was a dual core (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Or maybe it was a dual core (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Or maybe it was a dual core (Score:2)
They don't intend to have any of that stuff anyway.
It's like the redundant cache their chips have always sported... they just don't get it.
Re:Or maybe it was a dual core (Score:5, Informative)
I think the implication is that this was Dual die - single package rather than "Single die"
I think people often confuse the packaging of a chip and the "chip" itself (silicon) thinking that the plastic they see is the chip itself
-Em
Re:Or maybe it was a dual core (Score:5, Informative)
Where then do performance gains over simple dual core operation come from then? Well in many multithreaded applications there is a significant ammount of shared data. When processing this shared data only one copy needs to exist in the L2 cache. On top of that if one core is using the data (or used it recently) and the second processor needs to use it, the data exists in the first processors L1 cache (generally dual cores won't share L1 cache due to the necessity to locate L1 cache near the core of the processor for speed reasons. When this happens the 2nd processor must wait longer then normal for the first processor to update the L2 cache (cache coherence protocols and the fact that L1 cache is duplicated in L2 cache), but this is still an order of magnitude faster then a standard dual processor setup.
So there you have it, the advantages of a shared cache.
Phil
Rigged like the Tucker (Score:3, Funny)
At last week's Developer Forum, Intel demonstrated how its Digital Office vision might enable three workers in different locations to collaborate to solve a complicated problem. One of the workers ("Jason") had to juggle several compute-intensive tasks on his system, but the work flowed easily without the sorts of fits and starts that would plague many contemporary systems.
Ah, a flawless network connection! Proof!
pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Right.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The guy has no data whatsoever to back his crackpot opinion and just likes to hear himself talk and sound knowledgeable.
How ridiculous. I'm hoping Intel's lawyers send this guy a very pointed letter.
Re:Right.. (Score:3, Funny)
If I may flaunt my ignorance... (Score:2)
Re:If I may flaunt my ignorance... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:If I may flaunt my ignorance... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:If I may flaunt my ignorance... (Score:5, Informative)
The more transisters you put in a processor, the farther the signals have to travel, which reduces clock speed. Using 2 cores on one die improves locality of reference, which lets you use a higher clock speed.
Also, dual processor system (whether on the same die or not) perform better for multi-task applications (with both lightweight (threads) and heavyweight (no shared memory) tasks). UNIX like systems tend to see more benefit from this than VMS or Windows NT/2000/XP based systems, because they tend to have more processes.
Designing a more complex CPU is a harder task than simply joining two pre-existing designs, especially if your design has a built-in memory controller (as the Opteron does).
Re:If I may flaunt my ignorance... (Score:5, Informative)
This is quite easy for AMD because of how bus logic works. The Athlon 64 series use an integrated memory controller, and normally, a second CPU uses the same connection to the system RAM that the first one does. (ie, one Hypertransport connection is shared, by design, between two CPUs.) So a dual-core CPU is trivially easy for them to implement, relatively speaking: they have space and heat issues, but all the architectural design work is done already.
Intel, on the other hand, hasn't designed this way. Instead, for years now, they have been totally focused around more and more clock speed. This has left AMD scrambling, becaus their chip designs get more work done per clock tick, so a 1600mhz AthlonXP will keep up quite nicely with a much higher-clocked P4. But consumers, thanks to Intel mostly, don't understand that, and so AMD came up with their numbering system instead. (they were lucky this worked, because at least one prior attempts at this, by Cyrix, failed utterly.)
Well, the worm is turning. Intel's aproach, that of "more megahertz, dammit!" is very rapidly running out of steam. They have been selling people for years on megahertz, and suddenly they're in the position where they can't increase megahertz easily anymore. This is a BIG deal for them; all those billions spent 'educating' consumers on something that wasn't true is coming back to bite them.
A dual-core Prescott will not be an easy thing, and will require substantial motherboard and chipset changes. And they have a fundamental bandwidth problem; P4s need very high memory bandwidth to really get good. The P4 didn't truly hit its stride until it went to a quad-pumped 200mhz bus... 800mhz effective RAM speed. At that point, the P4 architecture finally sits up and really starts singing. But doing a dual-core chip means that both CPUs have to share bandwidth, so to maintain performance, they'll have to go to a 1600mhz bus. That's not likely in the near future.
AMD is doing the exact same thing, but the A64 design is much less clockspeed- and bandwidth-intensive. It gets more work done per clock tick, doesn't hit the RAM as hard, and runs cooler. So it's a natural for dual-core. Forcing the P4 into that same mold, on the other hand, is a move of desperation by Intel. It won't work very well, but their crank-the-megahertz strategy suddenly isn't working AT ALL.
From what I can see, Intel is in trouble.
Re:If I may flaunt my ignorance..Intel's other cpu (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember, Intel has a second P4 compatable CPU. The Pentium-M is much closer to AMD in instructions per clock (e.g. a Pentium-M at 1.5GHz performs close to a P4 at 2.5GHz). And it uses less power to accompolish this feat. Perhaps Intel will use their more efficient processor for dual core applications.
Re:If I may flaunt my ignorance..Intel's other cpu (Score:2)
Re:If I may flaunt my ignorance..Intel's other cpu (Score:2)
Which is exactly why Intel is now going to model numbers to distinguish processors, instead of just referring to them by their clock rates, as they used to do. They are as strongly deemphasizing clock rates now as they once promoted them. They too know that the clock rate wars are over.
Re:If I may flaunt my ignorance..Intel's other cpu (Score:4, Interesting)
It's weird that you can't find Pentium-M motherboards. I looked a whole bunch, not too long ago... I wanted to set up a nearly silent PC in the front room, and figured a Pentium-M was the perfect choice. I only found one, and it was like $450, and impossible to order in singles. It's weird that so few manufacturers make motherboards for this chip... it's exceptionally powerful, and would be just about the best choice for a silent PC I can imagine. The Via Edens are good, but the Pentium-M is far more powerful and only dissipates a little bit more heat.
Definitely a good choice for a multicore CPU, but the marketroids have been in charge of Intel for a long time, and I'm not sure how the Pentium-M, as good as it is, fits into their 'message'.
Re:If I may flaunt my ignorance... (Score:3, Funny)
If it was anything like my Cyrix-base laptop, the "numbers" were probably more of disclaimer than a sales point.
Re:If I may flaunt my ignorance... (Score:4, Informative)
Incidently, all that "sharing bandwidth" stuff is what the 2 cores on a dual-core opteron will do. It's also what ALL the 2-cpu xeons in the world are doing. Again, not the greatest plan ever, but it works well enough today. The shared bus on a dual-core prescott is no different from the shared bus on a dual-chip xeon today.
Intel is in trouble in that they might go from 93% market share to 85%. Look at the market today. Ultrasparc 4's are slower than Itanium, yet ia64 still isn't making real money. The G5 is a really fast processor, but apple has about 2% of the desktop market. Being the fastest processor THIS MONTH doesn't mean the world is going to come knocking. Being close and having a good marketing campaign is more important.
Re:If I may flaunt my ignorance... (Score:2)
Re:If I may flaunt my ignorance... (Score:2)
Probably because:
a) there were massive compatibility and reliability problems with Cyrix-based systems; and
b) Cyrix's numbers were most accurately described as 'deceptive', whereas AMD's are merely 'optimistic'.
Re:If I may flaunt my ignorance... (Score:2)
Re:If I may flaunt my ignorance... (Score:2)
The processor? A Motorola MC68060, which was a 50MHZ, all cmos version of the MC68040 with dual execution units, so theoreticly it should have been as fast as a 100MHZ MC68040. It fell somewhat short of true 4x speeds though since it had a few instructions missing and th
Re:If I may flaunt my ignorance... (Score:3, Informative)
You even heard of Xeons dude? It's quite easy to predict how the Intel dual core chips will work...
Dual socket Xeons get around their limited memory bandwith by loading up on cache. That's going to be much more difficult to with a dual core design since you're trying to get two cores on the same chip while keeping the die size managable.
Re:If I may flaunt my ignorance... (Score:2)
Tin-foil hat? (Score:5, Insightful)
WHY would Intel lie about providing a dual-core processor?
WHY would Intel think it better to showcase a dual processor system and call it a dual-core?
WHY does this person think that Intel would be incapable of producing the demo?
Hm... maybe I should RTFA, and have a good laugh.
Re:Tin-foil hat? (Score:5, Funny)
Must I remind you of the first rule of /.? You *never* RTFA.
Re:Tin-foil hat? (Score:2)
The first rule of slashdot is you don't read the articles.
The second rule of slashdot is YOU DON'T READ THE ARTICLES.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
Re:Tin-foil hat? (Score:2)
Oh shit...
Re:Tin-foil hat? (Score:2)
a.) Intel Investors
b.) Previous open demo by AMD with the same technology.
WHY? (Score:4, Interesting)
Their Pentium4 with NetBurst Architecture has smashed into a brick wall.
Their IA-64, meant to destroy the Clones, never caught on very well, and any plans to penetrate the lower-end (but not low-end) have been cut off at the knees by X86-64.
The Pentium-M is a success, but was apparently meant to be a niche product. Suddenly it's being called on to become mainstream, and they're not ready for that.
They've got to show something to make them worthy of the future. They've reacted and revamped their roadmap, but their hand TODAY is rather weak. They've got to show that they're executing their new roadmap, and will deliver what customers want/need.
I suspect that to uncover the truth, you have to find out *exactly* what Intel said at the demo, and offered for publication. Then you have to analyze that for what they *didn't* say. I suspect that Intel didn't lie, but I also suspect that they were careful to omit some details. Neither of those can be gleaned from the article.
Re:WHY? (Score:2)
Of course, CBS seems to have done this themselves, or at least they're being very sharply criticized over what they've produced to the public...
*NOT* to crack open that big can of worms, but only to point out, that indeed, some companies of very high regard may distort or at least come under some sort of credible scrutiny of the information the present. Neglecting all possiblities of th
Re:WHY? (Score:2)
But lack of evidence or not, CBS is stuck with a crap pile on its hands, because the evidence they've presented lies in a Schroedinger's Cat Box.
Re:fabridations (Score:2)
Rather Fishy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Rather Fishy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Rather Fishy (Score:2)
In truth the "Apple IIe" did not exist ... (Score:2)
Re:Rather Fishy (Score:2)
Re:Rather Fishy (Score:2)
See also, Microsoft Office '71 [sandesk.com].
Article, incase of the /. effect (Score:3, Informative)
Insight 64 Asks Whether Intel Has Desktop Dual-Core x86 Chip
by Anton Shilov
09/15/2004 | 01:55 PM
An analyst expressed doubts about demonstration of a "real" dual-core microprocessor during an Intel's recent demonstration at Intel Developer Forum Fall 2004 in San Francisco, California. Insight 64's Nathan Brookwood believes that Intel was most likely to showcase a dual-processor system instead of a dual-core processor-based system during the show.
At last week's Developer Forum, Intel demonstrated how its Digital Office vision might enable three workers in different locations to collaborate to solve a complicated problem. One of the workers ("Jason") had to juggle several compute-intensive tasks on his system, but the work flowed easily without the sorts of fits and starts that would plague many contemporary systems. At the conclusion of the demo, Bill Siu, the General Manager of Intel's Desktop Platforms Group, casually noted that "Jason was using a dual-core system on a 915 [i.e., Grantsdale] platform." When asked about it later during a Q&A session, Siu smiled coyly, and added only that the system used "an engineering prototype" of a dual core processor with "real silicon." This begs the question of what was really inside the box.
Nathan Brookwood, the principal analyst for Insight 64 believes there are three options of what Intel might demonstrate.
"The least likely scenario is that the demo used the first silicon samples of the dual-core product planned for release next year. Intel did demo the first silicon for its dual-core Itanium, and AMD had just demonstrated the first silicon for its Opteron processor the week prior to IDF. We believe that if Intel actually had achieved this milestone, it would have trumpeted the news far more loudly and widely; their awesome PR machine would have made sure everyone on the planet was aware of this accomplishment. So we discount this theory completely," Nathan Brookwood writes.
"It is a bit more likely that Intel crammed two of its current Pentium chips into a single package that could be plugged into the socket of a 915 motherboard. (This is known as a multi-chip package (MCP), and has been used for years in certain applications.) The standard P4 package measures about 30mm on a side, and could conceivably hold many discrete processors that only measure about 11mm on a side. Intel wouldn't do this just for an IDF demo, but the resulting MCP might be useful for evaluating dual-core platforms, especially if the initial dual-core design follows the scheme we outlined above. The system would certainly be consistent with Siu's claims of "dual core," "915," and "real silicon," Mr. Brookwood claims.
"It is even more likely that Intel merely designed a dual-processor motherboard around its 915 chipset. The 915 is normally used only in uniprocessor designs, but there is no reason why engineers inside Intel could not circumvent the restrictions that prevent Intel's customers from using the 915 in DP configurations. Designing a unique motherboard is clearly less expensive and takes less time than creating a multi-chip package, and the resulting system would come close to replicating the performance of the eventual dual-core product. Like the MCP scenario, this system would fit with Siu's claims of "dual core," "915," and "real silicon," Insight's 64 principal analyst concludes, leaving the readers to decide what exactly did Intel showcase.
The analyst notes that typical Intel-based SMP systems, such as those fuelled by Intel Xeon processors, have processor system bus bottleneck, as all the chips have to share one PSB, be it a 400MHz QPB for 4-way systems or 800MHz PSB for 2-way systems. It is believed that dual-core processors will also have to share the same bus, which may limit their performance, even though by the time dual-core desktop chips are available, Intel will also present 1066MHz infrastructure for such microprocessors.
Intel and AMD both showcased
Re:Article, incase of the /. effect (Score:2)
From the article (Score:5, Interesting)
So... why don't they just do that?
Re:From the article (Score:2)
Re:From the article (Score:4, Informative)
Re:From the article (Score:2, Insightful)
Now that would be retarded. In fact requiring a two cpu license for a hyperthreading chip is also extremely stupid.
Re:From the article (Score:2)
Adding a second core is like throwing in a second engine onto a car while leaving all of the other components the same. Sure it's twice as powerful. But all the extra power is good for is spinning the tires. Towing capacity is a function of what your suspension, brakes, and drive train will
Re:From the article (Score:2)
Yes, They Would (Score:5, Interesting)
Regardless of whether the P4 is good or not, that was a pretty crappy thing to do and when about 20% of the crowd commented on it, the Intel guys merely say "that didn't happen".
Remember when NeXT Had Video? (Score:1)
Re:Remember when NeXT Had Video? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not show it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel did their demo with a closed box, presumably in response to AMD. Only when asked if it was really dual core did they say it contained "real silicon".
I'd say that there was some vapor in that closed box, too.
Re:Why not show it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why not show it? (Score:2, Informative)
AMD did a dual core demo the week before. They opened the boxes, passed around sample chips, showed enlargements of the cores, etc.
Intel did their demo with a closed box, presumably in response to AMD. Only when asked if it was really dual core did they say it contained "real silicon".
Intel showed enlargements of their dual core Itanium [extremetech.com] chip along with their demo.
Re:Why not show it? (Score:2)
Could it have been the processor codename? (Score:1)
I doubt the analyst (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I doubt the analyst (Score:5, Insightful)
Running scared (Score:5, Interesting)
Fortunately, even Intel's second-string is big and fast enough to keep pace with the rest of the industry, but things like this show that they really are having to make a huge effort to do so. I'm sure the dual-core demo was genuine, but as with so many demos of this type, it must have been very carefully scripted to avoid an embarassing crash.
Re:Running scared (Score:2)
Re:Running scared (Score:2)
Itanium was a joint effort with HP, and from my understanding a majority of its developement, promotion, and general market push is coming from HP. I doubt that Intel is being hampered *THAT* bad, by its failure.
Intel's second-string is big and fast enough to keep pace with the rest of the industry, but things like this show that they really are having to make a huge
Hurting? (Score:2)
AMD is not "taking over the world" any time soon. They have been improving because Intel has been too busy competing against their last round of processors by increasing GHz numbers. T
does it matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:does it matter? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well in case you mean like two zebras are "similar" to one two-headed zebra which is the "real" thing, than you are absolutely right
In case you would understand the difference between dual processor systems and a dual-core cpu architecture, you wouldn't say things like you did (no matter what Intel has or has not shown).
Re:does it matter? (Score:3, Insightful)
Depending on how intel is doing the dual-core part there might or might not be a significant difference in performance between the two. Any difference would make the real thing faster so at least intel is not misrepresenting the processor's performance.
If the new architecture is similar to the old one, with a separate piece of logic handling the SMP, then I suspect this will not substantially change performance. In the classic intel SMP model, only one processor can access main memory at a time.
Howev
Re:does it matter? (Score:2)
After reading the article I fail to see what difference it makes. So Intel used something "similar" to a dual core to demonstrate how a dual core CPU would perform. What's the big deal?
Say I wanted to invest in a company that is going to put out dual core chips. Intel says they've got chips so I invest. Later turns out that they don't actually have chips ready and ran into issues that kept them from getting them out. Due to their misrepresentation of what they've accomplished, I invested in them instead o
hehe, wow (Score:5, Interesting)
N64 demo was better. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:N64 demo was better. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:N64 demo was better. (Score:2)
I Saw It (Score:2)
More seriously though, none of this stuff is worth getting all that excited about, until you can actually buy it yourself -- and it works!
Two out of three "dual-cores" were real (Score:4, Interesting)
However, there was a desktop "engineering prototype" that was kind of quiet. No picture was shown. It sounds like they made a multichip module from 2 die to test things. If they had a dual-core Xeon, they would have said so clearly and not just mentioned after a demo that the machine was using an engineering prototype dual-core.
Re:Two out of three "dual-cores" were real (Score:2)
Re:Two out of three "dual-cores" were real (Score:2)
Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Score:2)
Re:Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Score:3, Informative)
Er, don't you mean Clarke [quotationspage.com] , as the AC also pointed out?
One of the many forks of the Jargon File also has an appropriate entry [clueless.com] for this topic which also includes the version of the maxim that you used.
It's called Marketing (Score:2, Informative)
At least in Intel's case, there's the real possibility of actually having the part available when they say it will.
That said, I have an
It's all in the typing (Score:5, Funny)
That was actually typed using a 1974 IBM Correcting Selectric II typewriter on loan from CBS.
What's the difference in this case anyway? (Score:2)
Re:What's the difference in this case anyway? (Score:2)
I don't remember if Intel's supposed multi-core chip has a unified cache architecture or not.
I definitely wouldn't put the faked demo past them, however -- tech companies do this all the
Google the authors name (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Weblets/0,,7832_8366_7
Faked Demo? Happens all the time. (Score:5, Funny)
We were at a show once pitching a new router that simply Did Not Work. To make matters worse, the case for our engineering sample was damaged just before the show.
Truth: We got a block of wood. Painted in black. Attached some LED's with wires on it that blinked randomly. Put it inside a rack with a smoked glass door.
"Demoed" the crap out of it for 16 hours over three days. I had new respect for the ability of our sales people to talk bullshit for so long without opening that freaking rack door.
Analysts: recall what "dog & pony show" means (Score:2)
Like many others here, I'm a little skeptical of this "analyst's" line of reasoning and ultimate conclusions.
I think it's important to remember that this was a freakin' dog & pony show. Everyone knows multi-core is the future. Everyone knows that having a multi-core CPU shipping in some critical timeframe is important.
Does Intel actually have working prototypes? Who cares.
Will Intel ever have working multi-core 64-bit CPUs. They will, or they will no longer be significant.
Re:Dual head? (Score:2)
Re:This guy better be right (Score:3, Insightful)
At no point did he state "Intel lied about this."
I think you're overly paranoid.