Intel Says 80-Core Chip Could Make Second Life Look Sweeeet
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Intel researcher Jerry Bautista defends the practicality of the massively multi-core chips that his company is working on. He makes the case that these chips could help make 3-D worlds like Second Life look far more realistic.
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(InfoWorld) - Intel will ship quad-core processors in November for servers and gaming PCs, accelerating its effort to regain momentum in sales of power-efficient chips. Thirteen vendors have already announced plans to sell quad-core based PCs for the high-end enthusiast market, including Dell and its Alienware division, Gateway, Velocity Micro, and Voodoo, Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said Tuesday at the company's Intel Developer Forum trade show. Adding extra cores to a chip allows the PC to split up heavy workloads. In a demonstration at the San Francisco show, Otellini showed "Alan Wake," a planned video game from Remedy that devotes an entire CPU (central processing unit) core to the physics simulation of action scenes like explosions and tornadoes. The new quad-core gaming chip will deliver a 70 percent performance boost compared to Intel's own current dual-core gaming processor, the company said. Intel will follow that "Core 2 Extreme" chip with the "Core 2 Quad," a four-core chip for mainstream desktops that will ship in the first quarter of 2007, he said. On the server side, Intel will call its new quad-core chip the Xeon 5300, and follow its November launch with a more efficient, 50-watt version in the first quarter of 2007. The launches would be a crucial boost for Intel, which has beenÂ losing market shareÂ to competitor Advanced Micro Devices and missing recent earnings targets, prompting Otellini to sell several corporate divisions and lay off 10,000 people in recent weeks. In the past quarter, the company also accelerated its schedule for shipping a new generation of dual-core, 65-nanometer process chips, featuring the Core 2 Duo chip for notebooks and desktops and the Xeon 5100 for servers. Intel claims to have had great commercial success with the new family, shipping 5 million Core 2 Duo processors since the chips launched 60 days ago. Still, the adoption rate for AMD's dual-core Opteron server chip has continued to grow, since many experts consider it far more power efficient in data centers. Reaching customers first with quad-core chips could help Intel to change that reputation. "Perception doesn't change overnight, but what you're seeing is Intel rebuilding itself, rebuilding its product line and laying a foundation for the future," Otellini said. Industry analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64 agreed, saying "Intel's going to have some really solid performance advantages over the next few months." It is unclear how much revenue these quad-core chips will add to Intel's ailing bottom line, however, since they will appeal mostly to the small pool of high-end users with scientific and video processing jobs. Average users never complain that they feel constrained by the performance of their applications on current chips, Brookwood said. While adding more cores to a PC or server helps it compute faster, users also demand efficiency. So Intel will maintain current power levels in the new family of four-core chips, running the Core 2 Extreme at 130 watts, and the mainstream Core 2 Quad around 100 watts. The company will make three versions of its quad-core server chips, ranging from a high-efficiency 50-watt chip to a standard 80-watt and a high-performance chip above that. Intel is also pushing new technology to market by continuing to shrink the process technology it uses to build the chips. Intel will start producing 45-nm process chips by the second half of 2007 at a $3 billion fab in Oregon, adding another plant in Arizona that year and a third in Israel by the first half of 2008, he said. That will allow Intel to move from its current 65-nm Core microarchitecture to the 45-nm "Nehalem" design by 2008 and the 32-nm "Gesher" family by 2010.
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(InfoWorld) - A mobile version of Intel's Core 2 Extreme chip will hit the market during the third quarter in high-end gaming notebooks equipped with Nvidia's SLI graphics system. "You're going to see an extreme version of Merom on the notebook with Nvidia SLI in the third quarter," said Sean Maloney, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's sales and marketing group, during an interview. Merom is the code name forÂ Intel's current line of mobile chips. Maloney announced the upcoming chip during a keynote presentation at the Computex exhibition, which started today in Taipei. "It's going to be for a hardcore gamer who values performance over anything and my suspicion is that you're going to see them in 17-inch [notebooks] and above, but we'll see," Maloney said. "At the Santa Rosa launch, there were 21-inch notebooks introduced." Combined with Nvidia's SLI technology, which uses two graphics chips instead of one, notebooks based on the chip are intended to replace high-end desktops used by gamers. This is the first time that Intel has developed a high-end mobile chip for gamers. Previously, the company's products for this market where designed for desktops, although that didn't stop Asustek Computer from shoehorning a Core 2 Extreme desktop chip intoÂ its C90 notebook, which was unveiled at Computex. "The notebook business is getting to be a big, big, big business and it's splitting out into multiple segments," Maloney said. Next year, Intel plans to offer mobile chips that often even more performance for gamers. At the Intel Developer Forum held in Beijing during April, the company revealed plans for a quad-core mobile chip to be released next year for gamers. That chip will be based on Penryn, a family of 45-nanometer chips that Intel plans to release later this year. Â
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All-in-one machine at Intel confab bears resemblance to new Apple PC. Also: High-tech sandwich boards?
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com December 17, 2004, 4:00 AM PT. Intel plans to come out with chips containing two processing cores next year, but that&#39;s just the start.
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Advanced Micro Devices plans to demonstrate its version of a new approach to processor design, with a chip that is expected to offer faster computing and relatively less power consumption.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Intel has outlined its vision of the internet of the future, one in which millions of computer servers would analyse and direct network traffic to make the Web safer and more efficient.
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High-end chip likely will stay a step ahead of competitors in the multicore processor race. Also, the chip design could be done this year.
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CEO Paul Otellini reveals plans at IDF to ship a "teraflop" processor around the end of decade with 80 cores.
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Intel exec offers few details about dual-core chips as he talks up new technologies.
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Chipmaker exec describes upcoming launch of its first quad-core chip.
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Intel is readying a line of consumer electronics chips based on the IA-32 architecture, the design underlying the vast majority of Intel&#39;s desktop, notebook and server processors, said Louis Burns, co-general manger of the Desktop Platforms Group at Intel
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Technical details of the new low-power mobile CPU, expected to ship this year, are being released at a chip conference this week.
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Intel will deliver the company's first quad-core processors for high-performance PCs and servers in November, getting the jump on rival AMD in providing the next generation of chips designed to deliver the power needed to handle high-definition video, cutting-edge games, and math-intensive number-crunching.
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InfoWorld - Following their march from standard processors to dual-core and quad-core designs in 2006, Intel researchers have built an 80-core chip that performs more than a teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second) while using less electricity than a modern desktop PC chip.
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Advanced Micro Devices gave further details of its&#160;upcoming Fusion processor, saying it will be based on the design of a microprocessor used in the desktops currently shipping to enthusiast PC users such as gamers.The Fusion chip, which will combine a graphics processing unit and CPU on one chip, will be a redesign of the company&#39;s current&#160;Phenom processor, said Patrick Moorhead, vice president of advanced marketing at AMD, in an interview. However, the Fusion chip will witness significant design changes from the current iteration of Phenom, Moorhead said.The Fusion chip, code-named Swift, will be shrunk from the Phenom core and be optimized for use in a notebook, Moorhead said. The optimization will focus on making the chip more power-efficient while increasing graphics capabilities, Moorhead said.The graphics processing unit on the Fusion chip will include multiple &quot;mini-cores&quot; that breaks down code from a program, like 3-D games, to process data faster, said John Taylor, an AMD spokesman. Fusion&#39;s graphics processor will be based on a graphics card AMD plans to release in the near future, Taylor said, declining to give details.The first Fusion chips will be released as dual-core CPUs for notebooks, followed by quad-core CPUs for notebooks, Moorhead said. The dual-core notebook processors will be available in the second half of 2009, said John Taylor, an AMD spokesman. The company didn&#39;t provide a timeline for the quad-core chips.Fusion chips will also be released eventually for desktops, Taylor said, although he declined to comment on a release date.Originally released as part of the &quot;Spider&quot; multimedia platform last year, the Phenom processor has an integrated memory controller, cache, and four cores on a single chip. Currently available in speeds up to 2.3GHz, AMD earlier this month delayed the shipment of the faster Phenom 9700 and 9900 quad-core processors to the second quarter. The company is due to ship a triple-core Phenom processor later this year.The Fusion CPU is part of Project Shrike, the next-generation platform that will be an upgrade to the company&#39;s upcoming Puma platform. It includes the Turion Ultra processor, code-named Griffin. The Puma platform boosts a system&#39;s graphics performance by running both the integrated graphics processor and a graphics card attached to the motherboard together.Like Puma, additional graphics cards can be attached to boost performance of systems based on Project Shrike, Taylor said.Fusion chips will be made using AMD&#39;s 45-nanometer production technology, said Mario Rivas, executive vice president of the computing products group, during a meeting in December.Fusion isn&#39;t being designed for ultramobile PCs, Moorhead said. &quot;The jury is still out on whether the UMPC market has legs or not. But we&#39;ll see,&quot; Moorhead said.Plans to launch the Fusion chip were announced when AMD bought ATI for US$5.4 billion in 2006. The acquisition of ATI was also viewed as a potent weapon in AMD&#39;s attempt to dent Intel&#39;s domination of the x86 processor market. However, AMD has struggled lately, announcing five straight quarterly losses, delaying processor shipments, and falling behind Intel in chip production.Intel has already rolled out more than 30 Penryn-based chips based on the 45-nanometer process, with AMD still producing chips using the older 65-nm process.
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After its recent delays and missteps, chip maker sets its sights on a dual-core future. Intel will look to a multicore future during the Fall Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco this week as it tries