The Consequence of Waking Up a Sleeping Giant: Intel Roadmaps Inside
by Kristopher Kubicki on January 25, 2005 7:44 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Anand and I got particularly antsy this month to get an Intel roadmap up - this month's changes look nothing short of spectacular. When we look at some of our other Intel roadmaps in retrospect, there are very few new developments outside of the Smithfield and Yonah announcements. This month looks completely different however; new processor announcements and details in Q1'06, chipset information and - for the first time in a very long time - most of Intel's processor roadmap has moved up, ahead of schedule.
It takes time to realign a huge corporation such as Intel, and we can guess that the recent roadmaps have been the proverbial "calm before the storm". Intel doesn't normally make a lot of noise about major changes in the public as that can lead to reduced sales of current products. However, with AMD making some inroads against Intel and the lackluster retail reception of current 915/925 chipsets, that may not be as much of concern right now. Another possibility is that Intel was working feverishly on some new products and they are now confident enough of their release dates to add them to their roadmaps.
The recent corporate shuffles in Intel must have made the company more aware of their consumer position or more lean to deal with it. Either way Intel is still the 800 pound gorilla; we don't need to look much past their last quarters earnings in relation to AMD's to verify that. If you thought Intel was aggressive before their regrouping last year this year ought to be impressive - to say the least.
Chipsets
First let's take a look at the chipset side of things. It was no surprise that the first generation Socket 775, DDR2, PCIe chipsets Alderwood and Grantsdale faced delays, production problems and poor saturation. Unfortunately such is the life of a first generation chipset. The second generation usually does better, and it looks like Lakeport and Glenwood should be no exception. Actually we no longer need to refer to the next generation DDR2 chipsets by their code names as Intel has cheerfully dubbed the two core logics as 945P and 955X respectively. Even though the launch is yet another month away i945 and i955 news will flood headlines in the upcoming weeks without question.
Before we go under NDA for the launch, here are a few tidbits about 945 that we already know:
- First platforms for dual core support (915, 925 won't support dual core)
- Both platforms support 1066MHz FSB
- 945G will have Intel GMA 950 graphics
- Both platforms support 667MHz DDR2
- 955X will support 8GB of ECC DDR2
For much further details you will probably have to wait for the launch next month.
We also have the upcoming launch of the 915PL and 915GL chipsets, but there's nothing exciting there. 915PL is the new budget 915P, and it drops HD Audio and DDR2 support, as well as limiting the chipset to 1 DIMM per channel with a maximum of 2GB of RAM. The 915GL is similar and falls roughly between the 915GV and 910GL in terms of features. DDR2 support is dropped, but both 533 and 800 FSB support remains. Performance enthusiasts will want to stay away from any of the GL/GV platforms, as usual.
The latest iteration of the roadmap also paid a peculiar amount of attention on Vanderpool Technology or VT. Intel simply refers to this first generation of VT as "the first step in Intel's long term Virtualization roadmap." VT is supposed to take virtual machine applications and allow them to run simultaneously on the same hardware with the same processor - if we are to believe Intel's IDF keynote. Rather than setup two different machines for Linux and Windows, VT aims to unify them both in the same computer. However, the catch seems to be that the processor, chipset, BIOS and software all have to be aware of this process and it isn't a transparent, free upgrade.
Vanderpool won't show up right away however. Intel claims the technology will start showing up in Itanium configurations by the second half of this year, with the mass production server launch date by Q1'06. This almost implies that we will not see any steps forward with this technology until the next processor launch for Xeon, but that's another story in itself. Desktop processors, starting with the Prescott 2M, will get the feature sometime in 2H'05.
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jiulemoigt - Friday, January 28, 2005 - link
#42 the problem with Rambus was the company tried to make the entire industry pay them for DDR2 because of tech they suggested to the Industry standards comision without telling them they patented it already when the Standards comminty was tring to find open standards. That and it is like P4 a long pipe when forced to branch wastes clock cycles{way to often}.Zebo - Friday, January 28, 2005 - link
Unless they get 2-2-2 DDR2 out AMD is wasting it's time (and performance) with DDR2. Negitivty twards Intel? Probably because they keep pimping that marketing gimmick called netburst. And heaters called prescott, but worse this time with two. EVERY, I mean every CPU in history has worked twards more effecientcy. Not intel.You can read about it all here.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/pentium...
That article includes the excellent Dothan too, which they should have done in the first place instead of raising our power bills and room temps.
JarredWalton - Thursday, January 27, 2005 - link
#34 and #35 - Why all the negativity towards Intel? I certainly don't think this is all the greatest thing ever, but it's a welcome change from the last 3 months of Intel roadmaps where chips were canceled and release dates were postponed. AMD is still way back in terms of revenue, and that isn't going to change over night. I hope they continue to make improvements in their design, but anyone that thinks Intel is just sitting still is loco, plain and simple.As for the technologies you "poo-poo" above, DDR2 is an industry standard. AMD is avoiding it initially because they don't really need it yet, so when they do need it they can just join the club. That's fine, but at the same time it's good to have one company pushing things forward. AMD pushed 64-bit and forced Intel to join them, and Intel is pushing DDR2 and FB-DIMM technologies, which will benefit everyone in the long run.
In retrospect, do you REALLY think Rambus memory was that bad? It wasn't necessary on the Pentium 3, and it was more expensive than DDR at the time, but economies of scale come into play. If the public had not had a huge backlash against RDRAM, it would probably still outperform equivalent DDR on Intel platforms. The only real problem with RDRAM was that it was a closed standard, so you had to pay royalties.
If you look at the big picture, none of these companies are really out there trying to make the world a better place just for altruistic purposes. They all want to make money. If AMD gets bigger, it will be because they're making more money, and generally speaking that means that they'll be acting more like Intel. To #39, I would say that it *IS* a competition, and we want it to stay that way. If it just becomes another ho hum update each year, we'll end up just like the car industry.
danidentity - Thursday, January 27, 2005 - link
One more question, is there any confirmation to the rumors that the 6xx series of P4's will have downward unlocked multipliers because of EIST?Anemone - Thursday, January 27, 2005 - link
From what I"ve seen a 600 series @ 3.6-3.8ghz should keep up with the FX55 in a lot more games than you'd think. That's based partly on results of EE's clocked @ 3.7-3.8... Of course we will see soon, but of course AMD might easily find another 200 speed bump somewhere too.If you all remember the performance bump from the 845 to the 875, I think you might want to give some thought as to just what "could" be provided by the 955.
I'm also rather sad the 925XE 'may' not accept the dual core. Oh well. If they'd get rid of that idiotic oc lock, I'd spring for the 955. Would be nice to get back to 875 days or better imo.
I'm mostly glad the two are so tightly in competition. I bet that doesn't make Intel happy but it is sure doing nice things for customers. Again, with the exception of the OC lock which was a stupid mistake...
Quanticles - Thursday, January 27, 2005 - link
#8, AMD partners with IBM for their fabricationAll of this is the same old inefficient core slapped together with a little bit more cache, a faster FSB, blah blah blah. Their dual-core setup with have an amazing 10% performance increase I'm sure, maybe that extra cache will make up the last 5%. Now if only this stuff wasnt being released a year from now, cause I'm sure AMD will have better than this in the next 6 months - they just keep their cards to themselves.
Anandtech - tnx for hyping this for Intel. Every page had even "better" news, although I'm not sure who the news was better for. You make it sound almost like a competition.
KristopherKubicki - Thursday, January 27, 2005 - link
Peter: Surely you jest. The predecessor to PowerNow! technology showed up in spring 2000. The first real production processor with PowerNow was the mobile Athlon4 line in May 2001 - which had 5 frequency stages and 6 core voltage stages.Not to split hairs or anything, but the first P3 to show up with speedstep was the 600MHz variant which showed up 3 months before K6-2+ in Jan 2000. In Q2'01 SpeedStep improved and which allowed dynamic clocking, but also allowed voltage adjustment with deepsleep.
Concerning latency: EIST today requires a 30microsecond delay to transition frequency, 100microseconds for voltage. Last I checked the AMD driver for CNQ had a 0.03 second hard delay on frequency/voltage adjustment.
OK fine - things are even up until 2003. Then something called Pentium M showed up in Q1 with EIST. EIST goes beyond changing the clock speed and voltage and will actually switch processor logic on and off when it isnt needed. On the Yonah processor EIST will actually disable portions of the cache it isnt using.
CNQ just isn't doing this yet, but Intel already has 2 years of experience doing that with Banias/Dothan. If we want to talk about innovation, what has AMD been doing for the last 2 years with PowerNow other than renaming it to Cool N Quiet for the K8?
Kristopher
KristopherKubicki - Thursday, January 27, 2005 - link
Live: there are two launches - one of the 6xx line, another a little bit later for 945/955. I dont know if the dual core launch falls at the same time as the 945/955 launch but there will be more data available then at least.Kristopher
Live - Thursday, January 27, 2005 - link
O I whish we could edit our comments. CeBIT is of course in February not March. My whole guessing game kind of falls a part if it would be in March.“So launch in February it is, which coincides with CeBIT Hanover 10-16 February.”
miketheidiot - Thursday, January 27, 2005 - link
First of all I see nothing on here that will allow intel to take back the performance crown. Of course I already see that intel probably will win the dual core publicity/prestige/etc, even though I think their design will probably be garbage.#8, amd has had 90nm out for 3 months and it has worked much better than intel's 90 IMHO. Second they are well into the construction of another fab, so I highly doubt they will go fabless any time soon. On top of that intel was, and still is, getting its ass handed to it by AMD 130nm
#34 there was some news about AMD unfortunately going to ddr2 in '06. This will require a new socket, so if there is to be a Hypertranport2, which I do remember hearing, it probably accompany that change.
I do hope that Intels accelerated dualcore will get AMD to start moving a bit quicker. They demoed dual core quite a while ago, I would suspect that it could go into production very soon if they really needed it to.