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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Ozenmacher - Thursday, February 3, 2005 - link
Naw, I have nothing wrong with writing a positive article for Intel or AMD. I mean, I understand both companies have great chips, so I don't care if a positive article is written. But yeah, I still don't understand where sleazes came from, lol.JarredWalton - Wednesday, February 2, 2005 - link
Learn to type very fast (80 WPM or more) and write a lot of articles. You get all sorts of interesting slips. I would correct the "sleazes" for Kris, but unfortunately I can't. (Not enough access.)As for Kris being an Intel "fanboy", give it a rest. So he writes a relatively positive article on the latest Intel roadmap, what's the big deal? Does a relatively postitive AMD roadmap article make me an AMD fanboy? (Obviously not, since I get accused of being an Intel supporter just as often when I provide my own take on the market.)
We're all just interested in performance - price/performance for many of us. Competition from Intel is great, because AMD needs it just as much as Intel does. Given that the last few Intel roadmaps had little information on Smithfield and it looked like it would slip to late 2005 or 2006 instead of launching earlier, how can this revised roadmap be anything but good news? We'll still give a critical look at the final performance when all the products launch, and hopefully XP-64 will even become a factor some time this decade.
Ozenmacher - Wednesday, February 2, 2005 - link
Very good point #61, how could you "accidentally" type sleazes instead of sleeves? lolRoosterKooster - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link
Kris, "sleazes" can't be a typo. Even it it was, how did it escape the proofing?Perhaps you've been in a daze, but Intel has hardly been napping - just a bit on the back side of the power curve. Put all the vaporware aside and let's see what spring has in the air. Just tell the folks here, you are 100% pro-Intel.
EglsFly - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link
Wow, that article had Intel fanboy written all over it. To sum up: "Intel Better, and it gets better, need to see if AMD has enough up their sleazes ...."Give me a break!
Regs - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link
Good article Zebo. I agree with it.Intel has to slowly adapt the Pentium-M into the market. If they came out with a desk top CPU based on the PM, what would they say? "Look at this amazing CPU with twice the power with less the clock cycle!" While AMD just sits back and goes, "Hey, we've been doing this for years" Wouldn't look good.
Regs - Tuesday, February 1, 2005 - link
The reason why I think Intel won't scrap their Netburst Northwood's is because they sold the market on High Clock Speeds while also selling the mobile market with less power hungry yet more clock efficient processors. If they came out with something like AMD's processor, what would that make them look like? It seems like Intel's marketing department is running the course for Intel in the future other than their engineering department.When 939's come out with strained silicon that could possibly push through the 3.0 GHz barrier with SEE3, Intel's NetBurst processors will be looking pretty desolate.
Intel needs a knight-in-shinning armor and a 4.GHz Prescott with 2MB L2 cache is not going to do it. They would need to bring out a entire new line of CPU's to match performance with all A64's instead of pushing out one new CPU every 6 months that costs over 500 dollars.
Quanticles - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
I liked Anandtech's point that Microsoft was delaying Windows64 until Intel was ready.Peter - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
#38, I wouldn't say things were "even" before the Pentium-M showed up. Before that, Intel's speed step always required a deep-sleep transition and had only max and min states, while AMD's were quicker and more versatile, even the original implementation on K6-2+ (where transition time was even fine tuneable to the voltage regulator's needs).What happened at AMD for the last two years? They kept the power down in general, something Intel quite miserably failed to do on the desktop.
Note that I'm completely with you in that the Pentium-M is a very fine part, and that AMD has some catching up to do in the mobile arena. On the desktop, it's the other way around, and it's exactly this catching up that we see documented in your article.
We're both wrong on who did it first anyway. Guess what, it was Cyrix. Their 5x86 could do live transitions from its native (2x or 3x) multiplier down to 1x and even 1/2x and back up. And it actually worked. In 1995. (Separate voltage regulators for the CPU core were nonexistant back then.)
regards,
Peter
johnsonx - Monday, January 31, 2005 - link
Anytime the socket-754 Sempron has been discussed, I've said it makes little sense for AMD to purposely cripple a 64-bit processor down to 32-bits, as it leaves them no competitive advantage over Intel.With Intel extending EM64T all the way down the Celeron D line, now we see that AMD will now be at a competitive DISADVANTAGE vs. Intel because of their foolish crippling of the 754 Sempron. Dumb, AMD, dumb...
And before anyone comments, no I don't think Semprons are just a way for AMD to sell bad A64 cores that won't do 64-bit, but run 32-bit fine... that just isn't going to be a common enough failure mode. Cores with some bad cache? Sure. Cores with a malfunctioning HT link? Maybe. Cores with one memory channel on the fritz? Perhaps. 64-bit extensions not working? Nope.