Intel's Dual Core Strategy Investigated
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 22, 2004 3:09 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
The best way to evaluate the impact of dual core CPUs on the desktop is to look at the impact by moving to a multiprocessor setup on the desktop. The vast majority of applications on the desktop are still single threaded, thus garnering no real performance benefit from moving to dual core. The areas that we saw improvements in thanks to Hyper Threading will see further performance improvements due to dual core on both AMD and Intel platforms, but in most cases buying a single processor running at a higher clock speed will end up yielding higher overall performance.
For the most part, it would seem that the dual core releases of 2005 are mostly to establish a foundation for future dual core CPU releases that will provide functionality such as power and thermal balancing across multiple cores. Next year Intel will be releasing a number of new processors, including the new 2MB L2 Prescott parts as well as the dual core x-series, but despite all of the new product launches, clock speeds will only increase by 200MHz in the next 14 months. If anything, the release of larger cache and dual core desktop processors is a way to continue to promote the "newer, faster, better" upgrades without necessarily improving performance all that much.
Today the slowest Prescott based Pentium 4s run at 2.8GHz and 3.0GHz - and a full year from now the slowest Prescott based Pentium 4s will run at 3GHz. This is the first time in recent history that the predicted roadmap for CPUs will remain relatively flat. It will take continued maturity in 90nm manufacturing, a smooth transition to 65nm as well as improvements in multi core designs to truly make the migration worth it.
The future of dual core doesn't lie in taking two identical cores and throwing them on the same die. The future and true potential is in the use of multiple cores with different abilities to help improve performance while keeping power consumption and thermal density at a minimum. The idea of putting two cores, one fast and one slow, in a CPU has already been proposed numerous times as a method of keeping power consumption low while continuing to improve performance.
Right now dual core is more of a manufacturing hurdle than anything else. Putting that many logic transistors on a single die without reducing yield is a tough goal. Intel will have a slightly harder time with the migration to dual core since their chips simply put our more heat, but in theory Intel has the superior manufacturing (although it's been very difficult to compare success at 90nm between AMD and Intel thanks to all of the variables Prescott introduced). Needless to say that we'd be very surprised if both companies met the current ship dates for dual core desktop chips simply based on how things have progressed in the past.
That being said, despite the end of 2005 being the time for dual core, the desktop world will be largely unchanged by its introduction. It will take application support more than anything to truly bring about performance improvements, but with an aggressive CPU ramp developers may be more inclined to invest in making their applications multithreaded as more users have dual core systems. The more we look at roadmaps, the more it seems like while 2005 will be the year of anticipation for dual core, 2006 may be when dual core actually gets interesting. Until then, we view dual core on the desktop as a nice way of getting attention away the fact that clock speeds aren't rising. It's a necessary move in order to gain more traction and support for multithreaded desktop applications but its immediate benefit to the end user will be limited. But then again, so has every other major architectural shift.
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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...