Intel's Dual Core Strategy Investigated
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 22, 2004 3:09 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Dual Core Mobility
A while ago I asked Pat Gelsinger what was in store for the future of Pentium M with regards to threading, and he responded with multi-core. Thus it's no surprise to finally see Intel giving more details about Yonah (or Jonah depending on what part of the world you're from), the 65nm dual core successor to Dothan.
Yonah's dual core setup will be much more power optimized than what Smithfield will bring to the desktop, and in an effect, much more efficient. There's little information available about Yonah, other than it will most likely have a power and thermal balancing dual core setup, with the individual cores powering down when they're not needed. The idea here is to switch between cores not based on performance needs, but based on thermal and power needs. If one core happens to be running too hot, it can be powered down and the active workload shifted to a different thread running on the remaining core, thus reducing the problem of thermal density by effectively spreading the thermal load across two cores.
While Dothan was more of a small set of fixes and updates to Banias, Yonah is going to be a significant set of improvements to what we've seen in the past. Yonah has already taped out and Intel is slated to release the chip in 2006. Yonah will begin sampling by the end of 2005 and Intel expects it to ramp up to 50% of the performance notebook segment by the end of 2006.
Yonah's platform is codenamed Napa, which brings support for DDR-2 667 as well as the 667MHz FSB to help keep the dual core Yonah fed with data. Given that Dothan will ramp to 2.26GHz by the end of 2005, we can expect Yonah's clock speeds to be around there upon its launch.
Dual Core Servers
Most recently Intel announced that their only multi core enterprise product shipping in 2005 would be Montecito, the dual core version of Itanium 2. This is where the rumor of Intel not shipping any dual core chips until 2006 came from, as it seems that the first dual core Xeons won't ship until Q1 2006. Now as long as Intel's desktop chips don't face any further delays, there will still be dual core desktop CPUs based on Smithfield available by the end of 2005. Given Intel's track record lately, it would not be surprising to see these chips slip into 2006 as well though.
The first dual core Xeons appear to be nothing more than Xeon versions of Smithfield,
but Intel does list that more power efficient versions of the first dual core
Xeons will appear in the second half of 2006 - potentially including
some of the power management features that will be included in Yonah.
An interesting inclusion on Intel's dual core Enterprise roadmaps is the
mention of a Dual Independent Bus. The term Dual Independent Bus hasn't
been used since the days of the Pentium III to indicate the separation of the
internal L2 cache bus from the external Front Side Bus. However, we wonder if
the dual core Xeon's Dual Independent Bus may in fact be individual 64-bit
datapaths to each socket on a dual socket server. This way a pair of dual core
Xeons would have just as much FSB bandwidth per pair of cores as the present
day dual processor Xeons, which will end up improving performance tremendously.
The platforms that will enable dual core Xeon support will be Blackford and Greencreek for 2S (two Socket) systems, and the next generation Twincastle for 4S systems.
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ViRGE - Saturday, October 23, 2004 - link
#35, all the compilers in the world won't help Intel here with multicore. Threading isn't just an optimization, it's something that has to be explicitly declared and controlled in code in order to make sure that the threads don't work against each other, or assume that the other is/has done something it hasn't. Intel may be able to work in some thread-swapping tricks to speed things up, but for multicore designs to shine, it's up to the developers to do it; Intel can't control that.Anemone - Saturday, October 23, 2004 - link
Actually Intel has confirmed again and again that dual core is coming in Q3 05. Those are netburst cpu's so that's some approximation of dual P4. Those will plug into current LGA775, and run at 2.8, 3.0 and 3.2, with 64 bit ability.Chuckles - Saturday, October 23, 2004 - link
I'm surprised that games haven't been multi-threaded on the PC side. The games for Mac are...michaelpatrick33 - Saturday, October 23, 2004 - link
#35 Intel itself has that the dual core P4's won't be out until Q1 2006. That is 2006. They are delaying the Celeron D 350 and the Pentium 4 670 until Q2 05 and they will be on a 800 FSB. The only dual core Intel is releasing in 2005 is the Itanium. They will release a dualcore P4 chipset in 2005 but have no dualcore P4's to go into it until 2006. These aren't rumors, these are the facts. Intel is only going to take a small hit financially but they are definitely behind AMD on some fronts at this time. This doesn't mean AMD won't shoot itself in the foot but Intel is facing some problems. There have been a number of 64bit beta programs that show tremendous gains in 64bit long mode due more to the 16gpr's than 64bit. The 64bit part of AMD x86-64 is more than just 64bit remember. So is Intel's. Windows XP64 will be out 1st half 05 (supposedly) and we will see 64bit programs along with it. Should be interestingAnemone - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
No no no and no.I'll forgive the bias, but if this is your honest summary opinion of whare Intel is headed, or what problems will be its Achilles heal (memory bandwidth) I can only say that I think the coming year is going to be quite an education for you.
Don't get that entirely wrong. AMD is most definitely doing things very well, but their plan to introduce dual core to servers first is based on technological limitations, the markets they feel they still need to make inroads on (strategic order), and where they will achieve the best margins. They will still have to share a bus, and still have to pass cache duplication over that same bus, so I'd be highly careful on just what you think their chips will do in dual core format. Good design is probable, but AMD can and has let us down more than once.
Heck, so has Intel. Prescott? God, what WERE they thinking? It has improved, but 40 I mean 64 bit is still like mystery soup. I'm positive they just want to sell everyone new "64 bit" Prescotts in 2005, so they're robbing every customer now, imo. But don't think for one minute that they've taken this year as it stands without working behind the scenes. As for forcing dual core and then letting the market make software for it? Well let's see, MMX, SSE, SSE2, doesn't that seem like a trend? And would you say that SSE2 is useless, and unsupported? Intel builds the compilers that make their hardware run. They even make the compilers that make AMD hardware run. That's pretty key, and rather silly to ignore.
I guess when I read this I hadn't expected you to look at every possible Intel rumour and take the "worst possible scenario" route to find your best guess answer. I was wrong.
cosmotic - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
Why no word about Moterola or IBM? Granted they aren't PC chips, it would be nice to see a comparison.AlphaFox - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
#19 - win 2000 doesnt know the difference between a dual processor system and a hyper threaded cpu. win XP and server 03 know that it is just a single CPU with diper threading enabled, thus you can run a dual processor hyperthreaded system on XP pro.ViRGE - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
#31, it's similar to, but not the same as the 64bit transition. At the very least, if you want to get some use out of the 64bit extras, you simply need to recompile your program, and you can work out further optimizations without too much effort. Converting programs to usefully use multicore tech though is going to be far more difficult, since it requires a concept(multithreading) that isn't known very well by most programmers, implemented even less, and no one is really sure what a good way is to multithread some types of applications(i.e. games).xsilver - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
Hang on -- to all those that say dual threads are crap -- what exactly are you running -- AMD 64 maybe? they'res no software that can take advantage of the 64 bit, so its virtually the same thing no?and to those that say the heat requirements will stay the same because of increased die size, in total isn't the while cpu still socket 775..... that's still pretty small and probably too much for air cooling to handle. Some sites report a 30 degree increase at load for 100W of power (on a thermalright heatpipe i think) 200w will be way too high in temp increase?
michaelpatrick33 - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
Intel has said their desktop dual coares won't come out until Q1 2006 and that the only dual cores coming out in 2005 was their Itanium.http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/200410200...