Ganesh Ramamoorthy, Principal Research Analyst, global IT research and advisory firm Gartner, thinks otherwise. He feels 45nm processor is likely to bring in more efficiency to existing functionalities.
“Even the much spoken about HDTV is an enhancement on conventional television and video,” Ramamoorthy said. “The idea of
Intel and AMD want 45 nm processors to inspire slicker and smarter devices. However their vision for 45 nm underlines the difference in approach. R Ravichandran, Director-Sales, Intel South Asia, asserts the approach of his company has been towards alternating with new micro-architecture and shrinkage each year.
“The trend is doubtless towards multimedia applications,” says Karthikeyan Muthusamy, head of AMD’s India R&D division. “With duel and quad core chips, we are going to see processors matching the expectations. Therefore, we have designed chips with emphasis on graphic processing, which goes with eagerness amongst application developers to create graphically rich applications and the increasing hunger for such contents on mobile devices.”
Industry observers remain divided about the impact 45nm based devices would create. Ganesh Ramamoorthy feels 90nm would dominate mass-consumption electronic devices while leading edge technologies would cater to users in the Western countries.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
However, does “Compelling user experience” mean 45 nm chips are going to usher in newer applications
Getting the apps right on 45nm chips
This would mean 65 nm processors, the most powerful processors available in the market currently, will gradually give way for 45 nm chips, allowing for smaller form-factor, greater compute power and lower energy consumption.
The new chip provides the kind of hardware requirement to run applications with heavier footprints such as High Definition Videos on smaller devices.
“We are packing around 10 to 15 million transistors on a 45nm chip,” says Rajeev Mehtani, managing director, NXP semiconductors, one of the companies to have started work on the new process node. “This makes the process of designing the chip and adding new features an expensive one. To give an idea, designing SoC (System on Chip) would cost something like $30 to $50 million. So, those building hardware and those building applications on this chips will have to think of newer and more innovative functionalities that would lure more consumers and make it viable.”
Jaswinder Ahuja, CEO of Cadence Design Systems, another leading chip designer says 45nm chips also pose enormous design challenges, as they try to consolidate multiple functions into a single chip. that it is norm for designs to feature multiple general-purpose Central Processing Units (CPUs) with special-purpose Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) cores, hardware accelerators and peripherals.
Intel's Next Processor Details Leaked?
A Taiwanese publication is reporting that Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) plans to release three Nehalem quad-core processors at the end of the fourth quarter, complete with specs on the new chips. DigiTimes, based in
The official model names have not been set, but the specs list the three CPUs ? with the codenames XE, P1 and MS3 ? at clock speeds of 3.2GHz, 2.93GHz and 2.66GHz, respectively. All three have a thermal design power (TDP) envelope of 130W, 8MB L3 cache and come with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) technology, which will allow for two threads per core, the report said.
In addition to the chips, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) will also launch the X58 and ICH10 chipset combination to support these processors. These will use the Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) architecture, replacing the venerable front side bus design.
"For all I know, that could be a maximum rating just so you could design a heat sink for worst case scenario," said Tony Massimini, chief of technology for Semico Research. "It was probably something on a spec sheet, but right now I would guess those spec sheets are a boiler plate and will be the maxed on the top end. I would think when these [processors] are announced they will put out more precise spec sheets."
Nathan Brookwood, research fellow with Insight 64, was of the same mind. "This is the max they can put into a desktop, air cooled platform. Clearly over time that number will get better," he told InternetNews.com.
Intel declined to comment on the DigiTimes story, saying only that it was on track to release Nehalem in the fourth quarter of this year.
Nehalem is a major new architecture from Intel, one that finally puts the venerable frontside bus and external memory controller out to pasture for good. It adds a memory controller to the CPU and a high-speed interconnects, meaning the architecture will be very similar to AMD's Athlon, Opteron and Phenom designs.
Nehalem will scale from two to eight cores and features the return of multithreading, allowing each core to run two threads at once. Its design will be used in commercial desktops, laptops and server processors, so it will cover the range of Intel designs.
The clock speeds are pretty much in line with what's available today, but the on-chip memory controller and Quickpath will make it much faster. "While it's going at roughly the same clock rates as today, because they have much more memory bandwidth and much less memory latency, they should get some substantial improvements in performance," said Brookwood.
The specs DigiTimes cited also listed support for up to four PCI Express 8x slots and support AMD's Quad CrossFireX technology for running multiple GPU cards. However, there was no word on whether Intel will or wants to license nVidia's SLI technology, which does the same ting.
It seemed odd that Intel would work with the company that's suing it for antitrust over the company that's just kicking at its ankles. Massimini thinks a deal will eventually be made.
"Everybody's out to make money," he said. "They can argue and sic each other's lawyers on each other but ultimately, they have to sell parts, and it's kind of a tug of war, love/hate relationship in this business. But it's in Intel's interests to show they are willing to work with companies and not shut anybody out."
AMD's Radeon HD 4870 graphics processor
Not much good has happened for either party since AMD purchased ATI. New chips from both sides of the fence have been late, run hot, and underperformed compared to the competition. Meanwhile, the combined company has posted staggering financial losses, causing many folks to wonder whether AMD could continue to hold up its end of the bargain as junior partner in the PC market's twin duopolies, for CPUs and graphics chips.
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AMD certainly has its fair share of well-wishers, as underdogs often do. And a great many of them have been waiting with anticipation—you can almost hear them vibrating with excitement—for the Radeon HD 4800 series. The buzz has been building for weeks now. For the first time in quite a while, AMD would seem to have an unequivocal winner on its hands in this new GPU.
Our first peek at Radeon HD 4850 performance surely did nothing to quell the excitement. As I said then, the Radeon HD 4850 kicks more ass than a pair of donkeys in an MMA cage match. But that was only half of the story. What the Radeon HD 4870 tells us is that those donkeys are all out of bubble gum.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
AMD's Latest Opteron Is Quad-Core and Versatile
AMD announced the Quad-Core Opteron 1000 Series, a.k.a.
Somewhat overlooked but none the less important to AMD's product strategy, the 1000 Series goes into smaller servers, such as light load file and print servers or e-mail/Web servers.
Other than its placement, it's largely identical to the Quad-Core Opteron line for two or more sockets, known as "
It uses the AM2 socket, the same as the desktop phenom Athlon Series, rather than the Opteron's Socket F. Steve Demsky, Opteron product manager for AMD, notes you are better off with a Quad-Core Phenom if you want pure performance.
Power controller for Intel VR processors
The IR3502 provides overall system control and interfaces with any number of IR's XPhase ICs, each driving and monitoring a single phase. The device's key features include 0,5% overall system set point accuracy and daisy-chain digital phase timing for accurate phase interleaving without the need for external components. Combined with the IR3507 phase IC, the IR3502 and IR3507 chipset provides the power state indicator (PSI) capability to improve voltage regulator module (VRM) light load efficiency.
The IR3502 includes a host of protection features and a high level of programmability including programmable 250 kHz to 9 MHz clock oscillator frequency to provide per-phase switching frequency of 250 kHz to 1.5 MHz, programmable dynamic VID slew rate and programmable VID offset or no offset, in addition to high speed error amplifier with wide bandwidth of 30 MHz and fast slew rate of 10 V/μs. It also features improved droop capability that reduces the potential need for an external thermistor.
AMD's Latest Opteron Is Quad-Core and Versatile
Budapest
AMD announced the Quad-Core Opteron 1000 Series, a.k.a.
Somewhat overlooked but none the less important to AMD's product strategy, the 1000 Series goes into smaller servers, such as light load file and print servers or e-mail/Web servers.
Other than its placement, it's largely identical to the Quad-Core Opteron line for two or more sockets, known as "
It uses the AM2 socket, the same as the desktop phenom Athlon Series, rather than the Opteron's Socket F. Steve Demsky, Opteron product manager for AMD, notes you are better off with a Quad-Core Phenom if you want pure performance.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
AMD releases quad-core Opterons for single-socket systems
Advanced Micro Deviceshas three new quad-core processors for single-socket systems, the Opteron 1300 series, code-named Budapest.
Global OEMs including Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc. plan to incorporate the new processors into upcoming platforms, and the Seattle-based supercomputer maker Cray In has begun shipping the quad-core AMD Opteron 1300 Series processor in its Cray XT4 systems.
The new quad-core processors include all he features in AMD's recently released Barcelona processor, except that Budapest is of the socket AM2 line, as are all of AMD's one-socket system chips. Barcelona, meanwhile, is socket F and scales up to eight sockets. Also, Barcelona uses registered memory, but the Budapest uses unbuffered memory, which costs about 15% less, said Steve Demski, an Opteron product manager.
"The primary difference between the registered memory used by Barcelona and the unbuffered memory used in Budapest is the memory density. You can do eight stacked memory sticks and up to 32 gig ram of RAM with Barcelona, and with Budapest, the max is four memory sticks, which is about eight gigabytes in unbuffered memory," Demski said.The new quad-core AMD Opteron models 1352 (2.1 GHz at $209), 1354 (2.2 GHz at $255), and 1356 (2.3 GHz at $377) processors include the same power management and virtualization features, such as enhanced AMD now power technology and Rapid virtulization Indexing, as Barcelona.
As late as 2006, AMD had virtually no share in the one-socket server market, and began to focus more attention there, Demski said. Based on the 2008 first-quarter numbers from Framingham, Mass.-based research firm IDC, the AMD Opteron processor now powers 14.3% of the one-socket x86 server systems worldwide.
With Budapest, AMD is targeting small- and mid sized businesses that don't need the scalability of Barcelona, Demski said. "The single-socket server space is looking for something reliable at a low cost," he said.
Cray's pick for supercomputing:
Though it was designed for less intensive applications than that of Barcelona, Budapest has won the favor of Cray, which uses the processor in its heavy-hitting systems.
Cray recently upgraded its XT4 system, codenamed Jaguar, from 119 teraflops (1 trillion floating-point operations per second) to more than 260 teraflops using the new quad-core AMD Opteron processor.
All of the Cray XT4 system's dual-core compute sockets were upgraded to quad-core AMD Opteron processors and the memory in each socket was doubled.
"It is a great example of how AMD designs processors for upgradeability, and there is some exciting engineering here," said Peter Ungaro, Cray's CEO and president.
Cray began building its XT line around 2005 and has always chosen AMD over the competition because of hyper transport technology and the use of integrated memory controllers, which maximizes chip performance, Ungaro said.
Cray's XT3 and current XT4 both use AMD's Budapest and can scale to thousands and thousands of processors; there are 31,000 processors in Jaguar, Ungaro said. Later this year, the XT5 system will ship with Barcelona processors, and Cray is building systems that have hundreds of thousands of AMD processors, he said.
The XT3 and XT4 are designed for applications that require a lot of data transfer between processors. The XT5 with Barcelona is best for applications that require additional memory or perform more computing functions rather than communications.
Once a duo, now a quartet: What quad-core processors can do
- It's no longer quite right to speak of a processor in terms of a single chip. The heart of a computer has long been composed of several chips and other elements on a circuit board, collectively called a processor.
To underscore the point, processors with two cores have now become common. And the evolution to the next level is well under way. Quad core processors are increasingly commonplace for private desktop PCs.
Why would a computer need four processing cores? Multiple core processing did not, in fact, develop as a way to pump up the speed of the machine, but rather in response to simple physics. Up until just a few years ago, the only way to boost processing power was to increase the tact frequency. The higher the tact frequency, however, the greater the power consumption and heat, explains Christ of Windeck from the Hanover-based magazine c't.
At some point the manufacturers came upon the idea of putting multiple cores onto one processor. The result was less consumption with the same performance.
Most people probably won't notice a big difference in their power bill after switching to a desktop PC with multiple cores. What they will notice is how much quicker multi-core processors work compared with their single core brethren. The big advantage of multi-core computers is their ability to handle multiple tasks at once. That's needed primarily when multiple programs are running simultaneously. There are also individual programs that make good use of multiple cores.
"Sound plays a big role for games, for example," Windeck says.
Almost all computers currently on the market offer dual core processors, since few buyers have interest in the single core versions any more. "By the end of this year there won't be any single core processors left on the market," says Intel's Mike H. Cato. And because in the IT industry tends to make its leaps of progress in factors of two, the quad core is the logical continuation.
That doesn't necessarily mean that consumers should be in a hurry to acquire the new technology, however. The real-world performance improvement when moving from a dual to quad core processor is not that great, Windeck notes. That's because there are few programs at present that can use quad core processors efficiently, excepting a few specific professional applications.
Tests have also shown that when dual and quad core processors are offered at the same price, the dual core solutions are generally better, Windeck notes. The argument that a quad core processor is better prepared for the future is also specious: processor prices are falling so quickly that it makes more sense to buy the technology at the point in time when it's needed, not earlier.
Both Intel and AMD, the big processor makers, have quad cores at the top of their lineup. At Intel this includes the models of the Core 2 Quad series as well as the Core 2 Extreme. While the cheapest Quad (2.4 Gigahertz of processing speed) is available for a bit over 200 dollars, an Extreme model that runs at 3.2 G Hz of processing speed runs 1300 dollars. For all the difference in those prices, the meagreness of the performance bump may disappoint some.
"In the high end area, you're paying a lot of money for a relatively small amount of extra performance," Windeck notes.
At AMD, the quad core processors for desktop PCs are named Phenom X4. They are available in speeds of 2.2 and 2.3 G Hz and cost around 190 and 220 dollars respectively. AMD has also bridged the gap between the dual and quad. The Phenom X3 8400, with 2.1 G Hz, and the 8600, with 2.3 G Hz, each possess three cores.
The Triple Cores are primarily of interest for gaming and multimedia fans who want more performance than the eual cores but lower prices than for the quad cores. Windeck is skeptical, given that practical testing remains to be done: "The same holds true here: If it has more than two cores, you should have at least one application which can use more than one core for itself," he says.
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