Rambus in Cell Processors and Intel's Dual Core Announcements
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 7, 2005 3:09 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Intel’s Happy about Dual Core
While AMD has been touting dual core for quite some time, it’s looking like Intel will beat them to the punch - at least on the desktop. Intel had a couple of interesting announcements this morning as well.
The first thing they sent out to us was an interesting fact - that Intel has 11 multi-core projects that they’re working on for the 2005 - 2006 time period. Doing a quick number check we’re left with the following breakdown:
3 - “Smithfield” based Pentium 4 8xx series CPUs
1 - dual core Pentium 4 Extreme Edition
3 - “Yonah” based Pentium M CPUs (in 2006)
That leaves us with four unaccounted for chips - we’d expect Xeon and Itanium to fill in those blanks nicely.
Intel confirmed what we wrote about in our most recent roadmaps - the first dual core desktop CPUs will be arriving next quarter. Intel is going to be releasing two CPUs, one 90nm Extreme Edition and one 90nm Pentium 4 8xx model.
What’s interesting is that the 90nm dual core Pentium 4 Extreme Edition will feature Hyper Threading support, something that is left out of the regular Pentium 4 8xx series. A Hyper Threading enabled dual core Pentium 4 EE would mean 4 logical processors, capable of executing 4 simultaneous threads across the two physical cores. It looks like the EE chip will be launched with the new 955X chipset (Glenwood), with support for the 1066MHz FSB and DDR2-667 support. We often wondered why Intel wasn’t using the 1066MHz FSB with their Smithfield dual core processors, now we know - Intel’s saving the faster FSB for their price premium Extreme Edition part.
The Pentium 4 8xx CPU, which we’ve already talked about in great detail, won’t have Hyper Threading support and will use the 800MHz FSB. The 8xx series will run on either the 955X or on upcoming 945 based motherboards, but not on present 925/915 solutions.
The 90nm dual core solutions have just completed initial production runs and they should be ready to go by Q2.
Intel also announced that they have production samples of their first dual core 65nm CPUs - none other than Yonah (Jonah). Given the diligence of Intel’s Pentium M team in Israel, it’s no surprise to see a chip that’s supposed to be released at the beginning of next year already up and running in labs.
More info as we get it....
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
38 Comments
View All Comments
Viditor - Wednesday, February 9, 2005 - link
"I mean is there ANYONE in the tech world they HAVEN'T sued yet?"Yup...SCO :-)
Desslok - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
How long before RAMBUS starts to sue everyone in this agreement? I mean is there ANYONE in the tech world they HAVEN'T sued yet?Viditor - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
The bottom line is that both AMD and Intel will have multicore, 64bit, and virtualization available across all their lines by the time it's needed for Longhorn. The big question will be performance, and on this I have quite a bit more faith in AMD's offering because they have been designed for it since day 1. That said, I'm looking forward to Intel's next generation after Prescott (probably late 2006), Conroe. Prescott and all of it's derivations have been less than impressive (to say the least), but Conroe will be based on the quite impressive Dothan core.I'm also looking forward to AMD's K10 (also due out in 2006)! 2006 should be a VERY interesting year (especially if MS gets off the dime on Longhorn!).
erikvanvelzen - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
Hmm i forgot the Xeon MP's which are coming. So it's more like 1 Xeon more. But again, the point is clear.erikvanvelzen - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
uhm the sceme i tried to make above doesn't really make sense but yours is even worse.I forgot yonah. maybe i have 1 itanium too much and a xeon. but the point is clear. 11 projects means 11 codenames.
erikvanvelzen - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
I quote:The first thing they sent out to us was an interesting fact - that Intel has 11 multi-core projects that they’re working on for the 2005 - 2006 time period. Doing a quick number check we’re left with the following breakdown:
3 - “Smithfield” based Pentium 4 8xx series CPUs
1 - dual core Pentium 4 Extreme Edition
3 - “Yonah” based Pentium M CPUs (in 2006)
That leaves us with four unaccounted for chips - we’d expect Xeon and Itanium to fill in those blanks nicely.
(end of quote)
Sorry I must disagree with you on that. I think every code name has only ONE project. I think the list is more like this:
DESKTOP (5):
smithfield
presler
conroe (desktop merom)
merom (mobile conroe)
allendale (maybe moved to 2007)
Then we have 4 Xeon products related to the desktop parts and 2 Itanium products (I'm too lazy to look for the code names).
That makes 11!
benk - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
It's a shame that Intel is basically crippling the consumer-level parts compared to the EEs. I wonder if it's to maintain the price premium, or if it has more to do with getting an acceptable yield. I can't imagine that it's a big enough percentage of sales to justify any additional engineer, so I would guess it's the latter.Viditor - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
Jarred - "That is the heart of the whole Rambus problem. The Pentium 3 was not designed AT ALL to make use of Rambus"I disagree somewhat...the real problem that Rambus had was "bang for the buck". They had some good engineering, but the only parts worth anything were the high-clocked ones, and they were WAY overpriced for the boost (if any) you received.
The royalty problem isn't so much that they charge one (as you say, many do), it's that it's so nose-bleedingly high (many times what others charge)! Also, since they are an IP-only company, there can be none of the usual cross-licensing deals which help keep costs down for the manufacturers...
They also have a nasty habit of litigating at the drop of a hat!
JMHO
Viditor - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
Call me cynical (if you must), but I'm reminded strongly of the old 1 GHz race...AMD and Intel came out within a few days of one another (AMD sure snuck THAT one in!), but actually finding shipping chips was another matter (biggest paper launch Intel has ever done IIRC). Of course this time, they are both releasing low demand parts...Opteron and EE (though I think Opteron will have a much greater demand than EE).
It will be interesting to see when the parts are really available this time...
retrospooty - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
Bah... With Rambus, the best thing to do is ignore them... All the specs and hype mean absolutley nothing.Wait until there is a shipping product, and judge it by price and performance. Until then, everything they say or do means nothing.