Next Generation Microarchitecture

Pat was kind enough to reveal some more details about Conroe and Woodcrest during his keynote.

There will be two Conroe (desktop) offerings, one with a shared 2MB L2 cache and one with a shared 4MB L2 cache.

Woodcrest, the next-generation server CPU, will feature a 4MB shared L2 cache. Its successor, Whitefield, will feature 4 cores and a 16MB shared L2 cache.

Pat also talked about the improvements in performance per watt, sharing with us the slide below that compared rack-level performance per watt:


Sossamn: Yonah in Servers

Being all about Enterprise, Pat talked about Sossaman - an Intel Xeon processor based on the 65nm Yonah core.

Sossaman will be made available at two separate power envelopes: 15W and 30W, both of which are extremely low for what will essentially be a high performance dual core server.

Intel will be making Sossaman available in 1U racks as well as other small form factor enterprise offerings.

Tulsa: 1.3 billion transistors in a Xeon A bit on Itanium
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  • Guspaz - Thursday, August 25, 2005 - link

    A big deal was made over Microsoft Virtual Server's ability to move a virtual server to another physical box with no downtime. This is nothing new. Xen can alreay do this WITHOUT any special instruction extensions. As in, it can do it now, on any hardware.

    In addition, VMware's bluescreen demonstration is impressive until you realize that it too is nothing new; you can do the exact same thing on pretty much any virtualization solution, including older versions of VMware running on older hardware.
  • nullpointerus - Thursday, August 25, 2005 - link

    Intel's virtualization technology is impressive because it is done at the hardware level, not because it was never done before. Read the last three paragraphs of this:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor

    So Vanderpool and Pacifica can efficiently run multiple, unmodified operating systems at the same time.

    The blue screen thingy was a proof-of-concept showing that the Intel chip was working.
  • islandtechengineers - Sunday, August 28, 2005 - link

    There’s a good point. It could be an attempt to help get the word out with multi OS server machines. I’ve witnessed a group load of server machines that aren’t cost efficient as a multi server setup. If I remember correctly (I haven’t checked out VMWARE lately), vmware required a host platform to operate properly and this appears to be their step up. I think it’s a great idea to run their setup without an initial host / parent.
  • tanekaha - Thursday, August 25, 2005 - link

    Hmm
    Changing processors improved the good hole hit rate from 20 to 70%
    Why ??
    Were the old processors getting the sums wrong?
    I can`t get my head round this.
    You`d think all ya needed was more time on old processors
    I`d appreciate enlightenment on this
    Tanekaha
  • Calin - Thursday, August 25, 2005 - link

    Yes, they were using the old Pentiums with error in FPU... (end sarcasm)
    I don't know for sure, but I think using processors that have more horsepower they can use more samples from previous holes. Some of these wells must be holed at a kilometer or more deep, and if one uses more sampling points in calculation, the results can be spectaculary better (or just as good, as this depends of lots of other factors).
    However, doubling the points might increase the computing load ten times or maybe more. So, the need for better computers.
  • ceefka - Saturday, August 27, 2005 - link

    Nice, if you still have to exploit Iraq (end sarcasm).
  • jamawass - Wednesday, August 24, 2005 - link

    Will they have on chip memory controllers?
  • ceefka - Saturday, August 27, 2005 - link

    All I saw on my quick read were massive on die L2/3 memory: 4 - 16MB and they are holding on to Hyperthreading.
  • knitecrow - Wednesday, August 24, 2005 - link

    All these Code names are making my heard hurt
  • Leper Messiah - Wednesday, August 24, 2005 - link

    so true...i'm confused as all hell when I read about sossaman, and tulsa and whichmacallit...

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