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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GhandiInstinct - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
So why not test this technology and leave it in the labs instead of wasting consumers times. Obviously it's a waste of money if we don't have any software utilizing it. So, oh wow! KUDOS to the company to release it first, but remember the Prescott? First 90nm.... crossing the finish line first doesn't mean you earn that place.dak - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
Good points :) Glad we don't use single cpu's at work lolBrian23 - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
#25 There are several reasons why games aren't written multithreaded:1. multithreaded apps have more overhead so they run slower on single CPU systems.
2. most gaming systems are single CPU.
3. the threads need to communicate with each other to get the frames drawn. Since the threads have critical sections, running them on a single CPU will make the critical sections que up causing major lag and drop in framerate.
Once multi CPU systems are the norm, I'm sure there will be games released for multi CPU systems.
dak - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
Hmm, I never really saw the big deal about thread creation. Who really cares if it takes a freaking tenth of a second to spawn a thread, if you're only doing 20 or so threads at the startup of a game? I can't think of the last time I used a temporary thread. I usually spawn 'em at startup for a pre-defined role. Can't be the overhead of thread creation, they could split one off for texture loading in the background, and obviously the network clients. Personally I think it would be harder to NOT thread games, but I guess I'm too used to threading...stephenbrooks - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
Windows thread creation has a bigger overhead than Linux threading, but you can still shuffle them about quite a bit and still get benefits. I'd imagine if they could keep it at one fork per tick or frame, it'd be pretty good.No reason I can think of why video games aren't being designed for multi-processors. Apart from the fact someone should take their shiny FX-55s away and give them quad-2.0GHz things to work on instead - _then_ they'd take advantage of it.
dak - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
Strange, I'm kinda surprised that video games are single threaded. We write flight sims at work (*nix only), and we thread/fork all over the place. Flight sims are really just really big video games :)I would think with AI, physics engines, network clients for multiplayer, and oh yeah, that rendering loop thingy, that they'd be all over threading. I don't know about winders programming really, is the scheduler too borked for that? I can't imagine it would be, and I'm not one to give anything to microsoft....
stephenbrooks - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
#19, I assume you mean XP Home. I'm running XP Pro on dual hyperthreaded Xeons and get 4 showing up in task manager.stephenbrooks - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
I was looking around some presentations on Intel's site - it seems that we're in a dead zone before some fundamental changes are made to their transistors in the 2007-08 time frame (metal gate, tri-gate and high-K something-or-other), which might give real performance and clock speed improvements again (mention is made of reducing leakage 100x, for example). All the weird stuff happens in the 45nm and 32nm processes, with the 65nm one being another "boring" one like 90nm, hence the focus on dual-core for the next few years, I guess.HardwareD00d - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
Overclocking a dual core would be a waste because until software developers start to write games in a way that uses multiple cores, you're just going to have one OC'd core sitting there looking dumb (and probably putting out a shedload of heat).HardwareD00d - Friday, October 22, 2004 - link
er I mean #15 sorry