“Two weeks ago, Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, publicly acknowledged that it had hit a ‘thermal wall’ on its microprocessor line. As a result, the company is changing its product strategy and disbanding one of its most advanced design groups. Intel also said that it would abandon two advanced chip development projects, code-named Tejas and Jayhawk,” John Markoff reports for The New York Times.
“Now, Intel is embarked on a course already adopted by some of its major rivals: obtaining more computing power by stamping multiple processors on a single chip rather than straining to increase the speed of a single processor,” Markoff reports. “‘This is a very hard toggle of our product line,’ said Paul S. Otellini, Intel’s president at the company’s meeting with Wall Street analysts in New York on Thursday.”
Markoff reports, “In recent years, I.B.M. has announced a succession of technologies – including copper, strained silicon, high capacitance materials and a new insulation approach known as silicon-on-insulator. At the same time, it has focused less on pure clock speed to improve computer performance than Intel has. I.B.M.’s approach may be paying off. Its most recent processor for a top-of-the-line Apple Macintosh computer – also made with 90 nanometer manufacturing techniques – is lower in power demands than similar Intel chips.”
“During the 1980’s many computer makers thought that design approach would be displaced by a simpler approach known as reduced instruction set computing, or RISC. But Intel was able to drive down the costs of its CISC-based manufacturing process, forcing rivals using the competing approach to fall by the wayside,” Markoff reports. “The failure of the Tejas project, however, signals that Intel may have wrung all of the performance possible from its approach.”
Full article here.
Joe, Joe, Joe. 3.06 GHz vs 3.2 on an EOL’d processor? Who cares! The only advantage that the 3.2 really has is in cache… and in the marketing literature. Puh-lease.
And who mentioned P4s? Not me.
Hyperthreading is a mask. If im not mistaken, when people run speed tests, they turn off hyperthreading cause it slows down the processor. You see, the G5 has seperate busses and seperate chips, where as hyperthreading is a trick, it only helps with a couple of small tasks happening simultaniously, where as one huge job cant take advantage of it. Its the problem that dual G4s always have, its helps in speed to a point, but the single bus limits the processor.
BTW, what new marketing key phrase will SpIntel use on their new Dual core processors to say how much faster they are than every other processor, especially when they get a couple hundred mhz behind? As of the WWDC they will have long the speed lead for marketing sake.
The article was a bit confused in some points, conflating IBM’s temporary (we hope) “yield” problems in manufacturing its new chips with the far more serious underlying design problems that Intel is now facing. The end of the article, however, appears to acknowledge that IBM may have solved the problem Intel is now struggling with. Seems like the technical aspects of this issue were a too much for this author.
Tejas! I loved that album! (ZZ Top)
I think Intel is focusing on processors for cell phones and other wireless devices. The desktop race is about to be lost. No wonder their stock is in the garbage and they’re “re-deploying” like crazy. Go Apple.
“Why do G5’s have 9 fans inside the case?” -L4-L5
To keep the computer quiet. It’s not hard to reduce the number of fans to cool down the computer, but you’ll have to produce more airflow, which means the fans spin faster and make more noise. That is what Apple is good at… engineering design. Sure it costs more with 9 fans, but you get a quiet computer. Of course, if you don’t give a damn, you can go with a Dell and hear the computer humming from across the room (and probably get hearing problems too).
*sigh* People do need to look beyond numbers. They don’t tell anything without a proper interpretation.
“Well, we all knew it would have to happen eventually… I thought it would be 10 years ago, but Intel is an engineering juggernaut and has made CISC work for far longer than it should have. “ – John
But Pentium is no longer CISC since Pentium Pro. It has a RISC core with a layer to translate CISC instructions to RISC instructions.
What Do You Want to Know About CPU’s
Quote:
… In time, the CISC/RISC debate may become irrelevant. Intel’s new Pentium Pro incorporates both architectures; they take CISC instructions and break them down into RISC-like instructions. …
” Quote:
… In time, the CISC/RISC debate may become irrelevant. Intel’s new Pentium Pro incorporates both architectures; they take CISC instructions and break them down into RISC-like instructions…”
So, is doing so not an inefficiency, like emulation? and if so, how much?
I left before I could read your retort abomb, and you are welcome for my bringing you absolutely up to date. You know, as I do, that the cache size is hugely important. They sell a shitload of these things, and that is the only thing crappy about them.
That being said, no smart peeceer wraps a system around intel. AMD has the edge in every regard now, and this fierce competition between intel and AMD as they bang into the eol brick wall has made very nice processors, like the mobile athlon 2600, really cheap. I love competition. Had apple some, there might be something worth buying from them.
Not so fast. They didn’t say Intel marketing hit a wall, just their technology. For the Wintel crowd, that’s good enough.
Well…. the solution is obvious. Due to the fact that our computers don’t use superconductors, energy usage is not 100% efficient. In an intel chip, this extra energy is all converted into heat, but in an apple computer, 50% is converted to heat, and 50% is sent to the ninth dimention using a sixth dimention portal. All of the energy from all of the mac users is piled up in the ninth dimention, apple then collects this energy at the corporate office, and sells it to utility companies to pay their engineers and programmers. Its a pretty ingenious system really.
Heh…. for a *long* time I have supported AMD for being faster and less expensive (much like how I prefer my women…. j/k).
No seriously, for a *long* time I have felt that Intel had the marketing push of designer clothes. I’ve talked to many Intel fans about why they like an Intel more than they like AMD. About 75% never gave me an answer. The other 25% could only spout a few facts about Hyperthreading(tm). Now, don’t get me wrong, but if your going to be a fan of a product, you’ll do your research. Which tells me these Intel fans are merely doing what the “blue men”, “green martians”, and the “Intel Inside suit guys” are telling them to do on TV.
Amd has had nothing but hardcore documentation about every bit of micro-architecture (Barton Expansion, Expanded L1 and L2 cache, the separated memory busses to the Opteron processors, ect.). And they have succeded with barely any advertisement whatsoever. And if Intel’s main survival depends upon advertising, overpriced CPU’s, and contracts that haven’t ran out yet, then I want no part of it.
AMD forever!
And even though I use a PC… I would use a Mac…. it would just have Gentoo Linux on it instead of Mac OS-X.
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