Updated at 9:15 a.m. PST with official comment from Intel.
Bit-tech.net tipped us off Wednesday morning that Intel has sued Nvidia over the latter's right to create and sell motherboard chipsets that support Intel's Nehalem (aka Core i7) class of desktop processors.
We haven't heard much about this fight since May 2008, although since that time Nehalem has come to market and Intel remains the only manufacturer with a supporting chipset.
We spoke to Derek Perez, Nvidia's head of public relations, Wednesday morning, and he provided some clarity on the nature of the court filing, as well as Nvidia's take on the filing, which he says is actually a request for an injunction to prevent Nvidia from manufacturing a Nehalem chipset.
"We have a cross-licensing agreement with Intel, entered into about four and a half years ago. Intel is now basically saying the cross-license agreement doesn't apply to future bus interfaces, specifically DMI, (the direct media interface Intel uses to link the Nehalem CPU to a system's memory, a new feature for Nehalem chipsets). Intel has now filed an injunction against us, basically trying to stop us from innovating on DMI.
... Read moreIntel takes the wraps off a brand new desktop CPU family today. Core i7, formerly named Nehalem, will hit stores and desktop vendors' config pages before the end of the month, but reviews with benchmark and pricing information had the greenlight this morning.
Intel's new Core i7 CPU blasts through benchmarks across the Web today.
(Credit: Intel)We ran our own tests and found the flagship $999 Core i7-965 Extreme chip is the new fastest game in town. The usual round of enthusiast sites also found lots to like about both this chip and the other members of the new Core i7 family. A required new motherboard will add $300 to the price of adopting any of these new CPUs for the moment, making Core i7 a decidedly enthusiast platform for the time being, but we expect gamers, digital media editors, heavy multitaskers, and others who demand fast multicore performance will be very interested in this new platform.
In addition to the wealth of reviews emerging today, our coverage will expand throughout the next two weeks with reviews of Core i7 desktops from Falcon Northwest, Gateway, Velocity Micro and Alienware. If you're not a system builder yourself but you still want in on the fast PC action, stay tuned.
Read the full review of Intel's Core i7-965 Extreme Edition CPU.
Enthusiast coverage:
Leaked logos: Intel's upcoming processors based on the Nehalem platform will reportedly be dubbed Core i7.
(Credit: Expreview.com)Intel has revealed some details about its next-generation processor platform, which it has developed under the code name Nehalem.
According to an article on Expreview.com, the processors based on Nehalem architecture will be called Core i7, and Intel will introduce the Core i7 name next Monday. The significance of the i7 moniker is lost on me. Care to posit any theories, Crave readers?
Let's quickly recap Intel's tick-tock cadence model of shrinking the size of its chips with one release followed by the introduction of new chip architecture with the next release.
Tick: The latest Core 2 Duo processors are based on the 45-nanomater Penryn core, which was a die shrink (but using the same architecture) of previous-generation 65-namometer Core 2 Duo chips. Tock: Core i7 processors will introduce new chip architecture based on the same 45nm die and are expected to be released in Q4 of this year. The next tick is expected in 2009, when Intel shrink 45nm Nehalem chips to 32nm, which is currently being developed under the code name Westmere.
Update at July 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT with additional information and corrections concerning the Intel-Nvidia dispute.
Nvidia said Monday that its multichip technology will be architected to work on Intel's upcoming Nehalem chip platform.
Nvidia SLI technology supports multiple graphics boards.
(Credit: Nvidia)This announcement may help Nvidia to work around a standoff with Intel over whether Nvidia can make chipsets that work with Intel's next-generation Nehalem platform, due later this year. And also demonstrates that despite Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang' s rhetoric, Nvidia must cooperate with Intel in order to thrive.
Monday's announcement has no relation to separate licensing negotiations, according to sources familiar with the discussions. In other words, Nvidia is not announcing a chipset for Nehalem--which would require a license. It is simply a statement that Nvidia will support Nehalem with its nForce 200 Scalable Link Interconnect (SLI) chip.
However, some reports say Nvidia has reached an agreement with Intel to license Intel's Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) technology, paving the way for Nvidia to design chipsets for Nehalem.
The nForce 200 chip will work with Intel's "Bloomfield" line of Nehalem processors and the accompanying Intel chipset. SLI allows Nvidia to use multiple graphics boards in one system.
Upcoming SLI motherboards will use Nvidia nForce 200 SLI silicon, Intel Bloomfield processors, and Intel Tylersburg (X58) chipsets, Nvidia said in a statement.
"The nForce 200 SLI processor features patented SLI technology for graphics bandwidth management and multi-GPU peer-to-peer communications, both required to optimize graphics performance," Nvidia said. GPU stands for graphics processing unit.
Future systems "can be powered by one, two, or even three Nvidia GeForce GPUs, including the new...GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 GPUs," according to Nvidia.
Nvidia included statements from system suppliers in the Monday release. "It's great to see that Nvidia opted to enable SLI on the future Intel Bloomfield platform," said Rahul Sood, CTO Voodoo Business Unit, HP. "Make love not war I say...and Nvidia's (enabling) of Intel chipsets to support SLI will make our jobs much easier."
Nvidia claims that nForce 200 SLI silicon with Intel's new Bloomfield processor and Tylersburg chipset core logic chipset will deliver up to a 2.8X performance boost over traditional single graphics card platforms.
Motherboards and PC systems that will use the Nvidia nForce 200 SLI chip, Nvidia GeForce GPUs, and Nvidia SLI technology will be available from companies such as Acer, ASUS, Dell, Falcon Northwest, Legend, and Velocity Micro.
Intel has upstaged Advanced Micro Devices at DreamWorks Animation. The movie studio has decided to drop AMD and go with processors from Intel, citing better performance and a more promising roadmap.
DreamWorks specifically mentioned Intel's upcoming Nehalem processor and Larrabee graphics chip as reasons for the switch.
Intel and DreamWorks announced Tuesday that they had formed a strategic alliance for 3D filmmaking technology. DreamWorks plans to produce all its feature films in stereoscopic 3D--which requires the viewer to wear special glasses for enhanced 3D--beginning next year. Intel will provide DreamWorks with "the latest high-performance processing technologies, including future chips with multiple processing cores," the companies said.
This is a setback for AMD. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker rolled out its quad-core Barcelona last year at George Lucas' Lucasfilm campus in San Francisco to make a point: Barcelona would be big player in the movie industry. But a series of delays related to a processor bug put a damper on the high expectations for Barcelona.
"AMD maintained a long and fruitful relationship with DreamWorks Animation, beginning in early 2005. Earlier this year, AMD and DreamWorks decided not to extend our marketing and technology relationship. However, DreamWorks Animation is still an important and respected AMD customer and we look forward to having the opportunity to work with them again in the future," AMD said in a statement.
Essentially, DreamWorks looked down the road and liked what it saw coming from Intel better. "When we look at the Intel roadmap, it is more closely aligned with our needs," John Batter, president of production at DreamWorks Animations, said during a conversation with Nanotech: The Circuits blog. "The rendering times have been going up because of the complexity and richness of the images. Then you layer on top of that 3D. Something that's already growing--and doubling it."
Intel had the best technology, Batter said. "You need a lot more horsepower. On Intel's upcoming generation, the number of cores is going to help us satiate the big spike in our needs."
DreamWorks had been in a three-year partnership with AMD, Batter said.
He explained that Intel is also helping DreamWorks to redesign its animation tools. "Our animation tools are all proprietary here. Intel is rearchitecting our software tools...to take advantage of multicore and make our renderer highly scalable as well as making our character animation tools highly scalable."
DreamWorks uses rendering farms with as many as 5,000 cores to create animation and its tools need to be adapted to the increasing number of processor cores, Batter said. The Nehalem chip, for example, is expected to integrate as many as eight cores. Currently, Intel offers no more than four cores per chip. Larrabee is expected by many to offer as many as 32 cores.
Intel Nehalem architecture
(Credit: Intel)Batter specifically mentioned both Nehalem and Larrabee as a reason for the switch to Intel. He said that Larrabee would be "complementary" to Intel's general-purpose CPUs.
Nehalem is due in the fourth quarter of this year and Larrabee is expected in the 2009-2010 time frame.
The first Intel-Dreamworks release will be Monsters vs. Aliens, which is slated to hit movie theaters in March 2009.
Intel is telling software developers to start thinking about not just tens but thousands of processing cores.
Intel Tera-scale multicore research
(Credit: Intel)Intel currently offers quad-core processors and is expected to bring out a Nehalem processor in the fourth quarter that uses as many as eight cores.
But the chipmaker is now thinking well beyond the traditional processor in a PC or server. Jerry Bautista, the co-director of the Tera-scale Computing Research Program at Intel, recently said that in a graphics-intensive environment the more cores Intel can build the better. "The more cores we have the better. Provided that we can supply memory bandwidth to the device."
On Monday, an Intel engineer took this a step further. Writing in a blog, Anwar Ghuloum, a principal engineer with Intel's Microprocessor Technology Lab, said: "Ultimately, the advice I'll offer is that...developers should start thinking about tens, hundreds, and thousands of cores now."
He said that Intel faces a challenge in "explaining how to tap into this performance." He continues: "Sometimes, the developers are trying to do the minimal amount of work they need to do to tap dual- and quad-core performance...I suppose this was the branch most discussions took a couple of years ago."
Now, however, Intel is increasingly "discussing how to scale performance to core counts that we aren't yet shipping...Dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of cores are not unusual design points around which the conversations meander," he said.
He says that the more radical programming path to tap into many processing cores "presents the 'opportunity' for a major refactoring of their code base, including changes in languages, libraries, and engineering methodologies and conventions they've adhered to for (often) most of the their software's existence."
"Eventually, developers realize that the end point is on the other side of a mountain of silicon innovations...Program for as many cores as possible, even if it is more cores than are currently in shipping products."
An Intel paper to be released Tuesday offers more details on future Nehalem processors.
Rajesh Kumar, Intel fellow and director of the Circuit & Low Power Technologies Digital Enterprise Group, gave a brief overview of a paper covering "clocking architecture" and some of the major data transfer and power savings goals for Nehalem, Intel's next-generation chip architecture due in the fourth quarter of this year. One of Nehalem's major new features is QuickPath (PDF), a data transfer technology.
He began by explaining why Nehalem integrates more components--including the memory controller--than previous Intel chips. "The reason we are doing this is to get lower latency to memory. And much higher bandwidth to memory," he said.
Kumar said Nehalem will deliver "25 gigabytes per second for socket to socket (chip to chip) communication. And 32 gigabytes per second going to main memory."
"We're about 3X faster than our competition today," he claimed.
Intel paper details Nehalem communication speeds
(Credit: Intel)He also described how Intel is doing more to optimize power saving over previous generations of processors. "The number of cores and most of its features are modular. You can change the number of cores in different segments, for example. But just doing that is not sufficient. Because we're going to emphasize energy efficiency for some cases and high performance for others, we also needed to makes these things scalable," he said.
He went on to describe how the processors can be scaled for different markets. "As a result, we had to make all the main components work in a decoupled fashion. Such that frequencies and voltages can all be set independently. The CPU core, for example, can be running at its own frequency and voltage, while the memory system is running on its own, and the I/O (Input/Output) is running on its own, and each of them can be tuned for a given segment."
Kumar said the technology itself isn't new, but that Intel's technique is different than its competitors. "The idea itself is not new but the implementation is new. So far, most people that have tried this idea have done this using what are called asynchronous interfaces which happen to be fairly slow. So the main idea is how to do all of this in a synchronous fashion with very low latency and high performance," he said.
He also described how Nehalem chips are better tuned to operate based on the level of power delivered. "Chips today run at a given frequency, at a given voltage. But we know that when running different applications the power supply keeps moving around," he said. "What we have introduced is a chip whose frequency keeps adapting every cycle to the dynamic and real time power supply it actually sees."
In related news. Chinese-language Website HKEPC is showing three versions of the Nehalem processor. The "Bloomfield" XE running at 3.2GHz, another running at 2.93GHz, and third at 2.66GHz. All have four processing cores that run eight threads, all have 8MB of level-3 cache memory, and all have a thermal envelope of 130 watts.
The XE has a QuickPath data transfer rate of 6.4 gigatransfers per second (GTs). The other two deliver 4.8GTs.
All are due in the fourth quarter.
This started out as a rumor today, but Intel has since more-or-less confirmed that licensing discussions between Intel and Nvidia for Intel's next-generation processors are not going well and the resulting conflict could have implications for high-end gaming PCs.
We have no official confirmation from Nvidia on this, and Intel's statement from PR manager Dan Snyder is vague, but it lends credence to the story:
"There is a disagreement between Intel and Nvidia as to the scope of Nvidia's license from Intel to make chipsets compatible with Intel microprocessors. Intel is trying to resolve the disagreement privately with Nvidia and therefore we will not provide additional details. It is our hope that this dispute will be resolved amicably and that it will not impact other areas of our companies' working relationship."
Intel has been after SLI support for its chipsets for years, but has thus far only been able to build it into its ultra high-end Skulltrail motherboards, seemingly a one-off. With SLI available across all of its chipset lines, Intel would be able to sell motherboards that support both AMD's and Nvidia's multigraphics card technologies. Right now Intel boards (with the exception of Skulltrail) only support AMD's CrossFire.
Nvidia, on the other hand, has kept SLI close, often citing compatibility and certification concerns as the reason why no other chipset vendor has been able to offer SLI-capability. But if Nvidia loses out on Nehalem for its next-generation chipsets, the high-end desktop market will become more fragmented than it's been in years. Nvidia has been able to offer SLI-supporting chipsets for both AMD and Intel processors, but if this split happens, on one side we'll have Nehalem and CrossFire-based systems, the other will offer SLI (and possibly CrossFire, if hacks used in the past continue to work) and AMD CPUs.
In light of this rumor, Nvidia's recent marketing push encouraging upgraders to pick a graphics card before a quad-core CPU takes on new significance. If Nvidia knows high-end PC gamers will have to make a choice later this year, better to plant the seeds in its favor early. Intel probably has less to worry about, because gamers who demand SLI with a fast Intel processor can still use Nvidia's NForce 790i chipset, which supports the current generation of Intel Core 2 Extreme chips.
UPDATE 5:48pm PT - Intel released an additional statement after this blog was posted. "We are not seeking any SLI concession from Nvidia in exchange for granting any Nehalem license rights to Nvidia," the company said.
Staff writer Tom Krazit contributed to this report.
SAN FRANCISCO--This Nehalem plan better work out for Intel, because the chipmaker set very high expectations for the next-generation processor design Tuesday.
Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, speaks at Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, demonstrated a Nehalem-based system at the Intel Developer Forum here that he said will bring major performance improvements for the company's x86 processor line. The processor family itself is due to arrive in 2008.
The Nehalem demonstration featured a system with two quad-core processors; each processing core can handle two independent instruction sequences called threads, and the demo showed all 16 threads at work on various tasks. The processor was the very first incarnation of Nehalem--the "A0" version--built for the first time three weeks ago, Gelsinger said.
"What you saw today was incredible health," he boasted during a meeting with reporters after the speech. "It really is pretty spectacular, and we're excited by the progress."
Nehalem brings major changes not just to the processor but also to the way in which it communicates with memory and other processors, a technology formerly called CSI, which variously stood for Common System Interconnect or Interface, and now branded as QuickPath Interconnect, or QPI. QuickPath reproduces a technique that rival Advanced Micro Devices used for years to market share against Intel and secure a solid position in all four major server makers' product lines.
The Nehalem processors demonstrated Tuesday each had four cores on a single slice of silicon, the approach AMD uses with its new Barcelona member of the Opteron processor family. In 2009, Intel will sell Nehalem processors with eight cores on a single slice of silicon.
Intel also is expected to sell less expensive Nehalem processors with dual cores per die, a source familiar with the company's plans said.
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