Intel at chip conference: More cores, less power

Intel will have a lot to say at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, spanning the spectrum of silicon from mobile to server processors. Here are a few of the highlights from abstracts of Intel sessions at the ISSCC, which kicks off Sunday in San Francisco.

Nehalem, currently marketed as the Core i7, will scale down to sub-10-watt chips--that's ultraportable notebook (think MacBook Air) territory:

• "A family of next-generation IA processors...The family has a coherent point-to-point link and integrates memory controller, power-management microcontroller and power-gate transistors and scales from sub-10 to 130W in mobile, desktop and server applications."
  

Part of the message will be more brute-force silicon: more processor cores, bigger caches--especially for Intel's high-end Xeon processor line:

• 8-core Xeon processor (aka Nehalem-EX): "An 8-core 16-thread enterprise Xeon processor has 2.3B transistors in 9M 45nm CMOS...operation up to 6.4GT/s...Core and cache shut-off techniques are used to minimize leakage." (Note: '9M" means nine metal layers; "GT/s" is giga-transfers per second.)
  
• 6-core Xeon (aka Dunnington): "A monolithic 6-core Xeon processor has 1.9B transistors in 9M 45nm CMOS with a 9MB L2 and 16MB L3 cache and exceeds 1M transactions/minute TPCC in 8-socket configuration. The FSB (Front-Side Bus) I/O circuits are implemented in the center of the die to reduce I/O latency. A low-leakage process variant with cache-sleep and shut-off modes enables low-power 6-core 65W and 4-core 50W variants."

And let's try not to forget Itanium--Intel's, some would say, ill-fated silicon for very-high-end severs:

• "The clock system for a 700mm2 65nm quad-core Itanium processor has a cascaded PLL (phase locked loop) architecture and enables dynamic frequency switching."

Intel will also present on graphics-related mobile silicon:

• "A 4-way SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) accelerator for power-constrained microprocessors fabricated in 1.1V, 45nm CMOS occupies 0.081mm2...Enables mode-dependent power savings while achieving wide operating range (1.3V to 230mV) with 2.3GHz, 161mW operation at 1.1V and peak SIMD energy efficiency of 494GOPS/W at 300mV, 50 (degrees) C."

[sharmajunior]

Good god......that's a lot of cores.....the sad thing is....most programs available today can't even use 4 cores properly.

[3rdalbum]

Most programs today can't use 4 cores properly, but the Nehalem architecture allows very fast memory access (DDR3 and QuickPath Interconnect) so you can do more things at once - for instance, rather than encode videos one-at-a-time, you could encode multiple videos simultaneously. Think of it like transporting goods. You could hire a cargo jet to transport 1 tonne of goods in a day, or you could hire a fleet of trucks to transport 6 tonnes of goods in two days. It's more scalable too - you can't realistically make a faster cargo jet, but you can add more trucks to your fleet.

Or in more technical terms, you get worse latency but better throughput.

[NProszkow]

3rdalbum, have you encoded video lately? One SD video transcoding on my quad-core is completely limited by my hard disc. I usually only peak processor usage at 75%. Unless you have a seriously fast RAID array I can't see any benefit of transcoding or encoding more than one video at a time. Now, if SSD's become the norm and we can get transfer rates in the 1 GB/s range the CPU will become more important.

[pithenumber]

@3rdalbum
the GPU encodes much faster, and you can more

[7aji88]

Still, you are limited by your hard disc speed as NProszkow. Actually the hard disc is where the bottle neck in most computing situations.

[i_made_this]

Nehalem - at least, as represented by Intel's first to market i7 series - can very well wind up being Intel's Achilles Heel. Cost is exorbitant - not merely high - but absurdly high enough to make i7's prices out of the league of all enterprise, SMB, Home Office and Home users. The mean SRP of all personal computers (that's laptops and desktop computers not just merely those computers' CPU's) in the USA has come down to +/- $ 578 for calender 2008, trending sharply downward in Q4. This price trend - it was predicted - will only continue moving sharply downwards over calenders 2009 at least - perhaps longer.

How is Intel going to fit i7 into this price level? Intel knows Nehalem is strictly for enthusiasts (les than +/- 10% of global market for computers). So we must wait for now to see what direction Intel chooses to take i7 further in the value proposition. Apple - to name one of the major OEM's who has recently updated far more than half their computer product line - chose to avoid the Intel i7's. They haven't yet announced the CPU's they'll use for their top of the line (*enthusiast*) iMac and Mac Pro.

The latter will probably continue to use Intel's server series Xeon chips; the former might offer as an option an Intel i7 chip for their many customers dying to throw, say, ten times the national mean price at Apple's best in class iMac.

But I doubt it will happen anytime soon, anytime during this price trend of computers to 2008's mean $ 578. As a group, the market segment for the i7 to date has tended not to be belong to the "green revolution in computing." Most are professionals who cannot be swayed by slogans and are very practical about their computing reqs. I know this may sound indelicate - forgive me - but they need speed at any cost. They're the market makers in any microprocessor.

Hey, maybe Intel can bully Micrososft (and Apple) into requiring Nehalem in order to run the upcoming operating system? Perhaps Win7 and Snow Leopard customers might break down the doors to buy i7 just like they did with Vista?