Intel expands core concept for chips

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of the new processor architectures," said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. "The manufacturing challenge is not all that great. It is easier to do this than to do a complex single processor that's twice the size."

As some companies start making dual-core chips by merging two of their single cores into one piece of silicon, they will begin to differentiate their products by adding different types of input-output mechanisms and other features, McCarron added.

The first dual-core Intel chip for desktops, code-named Smithfield, will come out in desktops in 2005. Its first dual-core notebook chip, code-named Yonah, will begin shipping late in 2005 and likely won't appear in notebooks in any great numbers until 2006. A dual-core version of Itanium, called Montecito, will also debut in 2005 while Tulsa, a two-headed Xeon for servers, is set to come out in the first quarter of 2006.

Smithfield will also be paired with a feature called Active Management Technology, which will allow an IT manager to control a PC remotely. If a PC is spitting out viruses, for example, an IT manager can shut it off with the management technology. "If you are going to curtail an outbreak, you want to contain it in a matter of minutes," said Justin Rattner, an Intel fellow.

While volumes of dual-core chips will likely be small in 2005, they are expected to represent 70 percent of notebook and desktop of the chips produced by Intel by the end of 2006 and 85 percent of the server chips.

Because of the additional core, Smithfield will initially be larger than its single-core predecessors and hence more expensive to manufacture, Smith said, but the chip will decrease in size over time. This pattern is typical in processors.

Smithfield will be made on the current 90-nanometer manufacturing process, which means that the average size of features on the chip will measure 90 nanometers. Yonah will be made on the 65-nanometer process coming next year. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

Smith also acknowledged that Intel's desktop and notebook chips, now quite distinct architecturally, will begin to converge.

"Over time, these will look increasingly similar from a feature and capability perceptive--more so than they do now," Smith said. Among other things, "it makes for consistent software development."

Software compatibility will not be a problem, Smith said. Microsoft's Windows XP is already designed to run on two processors. Many desktop applications have also already been tweaked to take advantage of hyperthreading, a technology in current Pentium 4s that lets a single chip do two actions at once, almost like a dual-core chip.

Hyperthreading, in fact, will make dual-core chips seem like four-core chips. Servers will be able to take advantage of this feature, and hyperthreading will be a feature of dual-core Xeons and Itaniums. By contrast, hyperthreading may not be manifest in the early dual-core notebook and desktop chips, other Intel execs have said, because client applications haven't been tweaked to run on four processors yet.

Still, while software development may be fairly straightforward, software licensing for dual-core and multicore processors has proven trickier, especially in servers. Despite Intel and AMD recommending that companies charge fees by the number of processors each server contains, regardless of how many cores each processor includes, some companies' policies dictate charging by the number of cores each processor in a given server contains.

CNET News.com's John Spooner contributed to this report.

[Andrew J Glina]

Moore's Law

I am so sick of Moore's Law. CNET love to treat it like it is a fact, instead of just a projection, and I really don't understand why.

I will get back in my box now.

[shreeg]

Sun's pioneering effort

Long before Intel abandoned its clock speed based marketing machine, Sun Micro had figured out both how to design and deliver performant 64-bit processors with low clock speeds AND the ideas of multiple core processors.
The article seems to present Intel as a pioneer on the multicore processors is misleading. And the fixation with Moore's law is a bane impacting the quality of processors that get dished out mainly for marketing reasons.

[juser_bogus]

bias for intel

Of course, news.com has always shown a bias for Intel.

Sun has been shipping dual core most of 2004

Your article failed to mention the dual-core UltraSPARC (tm) processor, which Sun Microsystems
has been shipping in systems since early this year (2004).