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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phantom505 - Thursday, January 27, 2005 - link
Whoppee, the paper launch king launches a lot more paper.I'll believe it when I see it.
BTW, where is that 4GHz CPU? SOI anyone? They need 65nm to keep from cooking. AMD has PLENTY of headroom on frequancy, something Intel doesn't (obviously). Now how about more cache, it will fix it, right?
Any word on Intel figuring out how to make a good FPU yet? Who needs that? The rest of world minus the internet... because it takes a monster machine to crunch full screen video?
How about a bus that can handle the data? 1066FSB? Isn't there something about AMD going 1.4GHz plus with HyperTransport II?
How about that slapped together dual P4? Wasn't the K9 being considered even during the design of the K8?
How about that DDR2 junk? Rambus part deux? At least AMD is going to watch Intel sink or float before you jump on that boat. I'd bet they would prefer to go to DDR3 directly.
Folks, I see a desperate company trying to fend off from something that is 1/8th of its size. And you think that's happens by chance? It's called screwing up.
AMD fanboy am I? Sure, at least they are going somewhere, other than down. (look at the Intel stock prices for 5 years).
Peter - Thursday, January 27, 2005 - link
EIST maturity? *laughs to tears*If one of the two contenders does have maturity and experience with processors capable of scaling their clock speeds and supply voltage on the fly, then it's AMD. Remember K6-2+? First one to do this on the x86 stage, even before Transmeta iirc. Mobile Athlons had it, all Athlon-64 have it, Opterons will get it soon.
Intel? They had nothing but the clunky original SpeedStep (which required a high latency sleep-wake cycle to change speed, and had only two steps, slow and fast) before the Pentium-M showed up. Now that technology is getting retrofitted to P4 core. Good move, but the innovation was invented elsewhere ...
Live - Thursday, January 27, 2005 - link
As for the release date and availability I don’t know, but you could always speculate a bit :)The article mentions an NDA coming up and launch next month. So launch in February it is, which coincides with CeBIT Hanover 10-16 March. So we can expect launch in conjunction with that. Then we know Intel will release its new 64 bit ready CPUs to be ready for the launch of Windows 64 that is supposed to be in April. So at the latest by May we should have it all in retail.
So if February is launch then I guess March would be the optimistic and April the pessimistic and May if Intel or M$ stumbles and summer if they screw up.
danidentity - Thursday, January 27, 2005 - link
Is there any more detail on a release time frame for the 945/955 chipsets, other than Q2?footballfan - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
I forget...how big of a gap was there between the official announcement of 915/925 chipsets and being able to actually buy a motherboard based on those chipsets?I'm putting together an Intel system and I don't know if I should get an 925XE motherboard or wait it out for a 955.
Hmmmm
JarredWalton - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
28 - The comment in regards to AMD vs. Intel is that AMD is keeping dual-core backwards compatible while Intel is not. From a performance standpoint, that means Intel can potentially improve aspects of the chipset. AMD is in a sense more limited in that they're constrained to the original S939 specifications. Neither approach is *better*, per se, although a lot of people like the AMD approach simply because it doesn't require a new motherboard. As far as we're aware, *all* S939 motherboards will be capable of running Toledo.When will we see all the new hardware? That's the big question. :) AMD and Intel both tend to be a bit better about avoiding the "paper launch syndrome", but there have been instances in the past where availability lagged far behind the official launch.
Live - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
Always a real treat to read these top insider stories, good work!This makes buying/upgrading decisions at least a little bit easier. I want more ;D
One question tough. You mention that AMD plans "to enable existing hardware (nForce4, K8T890, 8xxx) to run multiple cores."
Those this exclude earlier s939 chipsets? I was under the impression that both nForce3 and K8T800 Pro would be compatible with dual core Toledo.
If you read here (Registration required): http://www2.amd.com/us-en/protected/Weblets/1,,783...
"AMD’s dual-core processors are being designed with today’s infrastructure in mind. System integrators will have no problem incorporating AMD Opteron processors into existing platforms and any desktop motherboard supporting a 90nm AMD Athlon 64 processor will accommodate dual-core descendants of the chip as well."
Toledo is a dual-core descendant of the current crop of 90nm AMD CPUs is it not?
I’m contemplating either nForce3 or nForce4 and I believe future Toledo support would tip the scale.
RockHydra11 - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
I'm quite interested in what kind of response nVIDIA will have to the barrage of new chipsets.footballfan - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
How long from launch to being able to actually buy a motherboard with one of those new chipsets will it be?JarredWalton - Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - link
945 and 955 are scheduled to launch in Q2'05, right along with Smithfield. Smithfield will *not* work on 915 or 925 chipsets - it may also have a new socket, although that wasn't indicated on the roadmaps.As far as what the Prescott 2M will bring, I expect more than a 5% performance increase in most applications, but probably less than 15%. It's difficult to say where it will actually land relative to the P4EE Gallatin cores, since it uses L2 instead of L3 cache, but it also has the longer pipeline. Certain applications perform better on Prescott than Northwood already, so in those instances the lead will increase. Will it catch up to AMD in gaming? Not likely, but it will close the gap. 2MB of cache might also improve HyperThreading performance a bit - that will be interesting to see.