Date: April 16, 2007 - Author: Rob Williams
IDF Beijing is now underway and there are countless announcements to cover. These include new Penryn performance reports, updated information on their 80-Core processor, a new teraflops technology called Larrabee, new power consumption goals and more.
The latest Intel Developer Forum is happening right now in Beijing and there are many new announcements to talk about. Though we are not in Beijing ourselves, we had a quick rundown about what's being discussed there, so we will be relaying that information to you guys.
Intel has a few different accomplishments and new goals that they are stressing. First is that they are very proud of their new High-K MG transistors, which will allow exceptional efficiency and less voltage leakage. Because of this groundbreaking accomplishment, Intel notes that much more will be accomplished with their processors. We noted the potential of Nehalem a few weeks ago, primarily in regards to it's potential for on-die additions, such as an integrated memory controller and even a GPU.
High-K, according to Intel, should not be taken lightly. It was said that this was the largest transistor accomplishment in the last forty years, and it's effects should be felt by everyone. How this will affect anyone will be seen when our processors take advantage of the extra capabilities and on-die additions. Thanks to the much added efficiency, we will be seeing far better power consumption/usage.
This lead Intel to point out a few goals they have in mind. The first is for 10x power reduction, which they want to see happen by the end of this decade. That's a large goal, and no doubt everyone wants to see it happen. We are on the road to see better power consumption as is, so to imagine a staggering decrease like 10x is amazing. There is little doubt that Intel is capable of this, since they've already produced very lightweight chips that have a lower than 10W TDP. Still, it will have to be seen.
Another goal has to do with their ongoing teraflops research. News spread like wildfire in February when they announced their 80-Core chip, for good reason. On day two, Intel will be showing off the chip and what it can do, although they will still not be giving away that much info at this point and time. You can expect them to hit at least 2 teraflops however, thanks to revisions of the chip.
On the topic of teraflops, Intel also announced Project Larrabee, which at this point is difficult to decipher. They did not disclose much information about it at all, but from what we could gather it will be marketed towards agencies that would benefit from teraflop operations without devoting an entire room to it. This could include medical, scientific, visualization, recognition and other applications that require unlimited power for quick computation time.
Whatever Larrabee turns out to be, its based on the IA programmable architecture to deploy applications, though current software tools can be used. The goal is to allow programs to exploit Larrabee to scale trillions of floating-point operations per second. As I said, not too much is really known about Larrabee at this point in time, but it will be one to watch.
Building on the success of their recently launched QX6800 processor, Intel also unveiled Skulltrail. Does anyone care what the technology is when the codename is that cool? Everyone? Ok then! Think AMD QuadFX, but for Intel Quad-Core processors. Yes, 8-Cores in your own personal rig, without it being a Xeon!
Current Q6600/Q6700 processor are not dual-socket capable, like high-end Xeons. Intel hasn't confirmed that the QX6800 processor is at this point, but it's assumed to be since they directly wrapped it into their announcement. This is bad for those who want to "low-end" Quad-Core processors to throw in their machines, but it's the same way with AMD and their FX-74 processors. Be prepared to open your wallet should you want an 8-core system.
Intel touched on Penryn performance again, although the results are still very early. For their personal tests, they compared a current 2.93GHz Core QX6800 to a 45nm-based Penryn at 3.33GHz with 1333FSB with 12MB of cache. Right off the bat, this doesn't seem to be much of a fair comparison given the fact there is a CPU frequency bump as well as FSB. However what it does tell us though, is that thanks to 45nm, we will indeed be seeing higher stock clock speeds over what Conroe currently offers.
At any rate, the results given are as follows:
Like most scenarios today, we can see that Penryn won't offer large performance increases for all applications, but can make huge differences for a select few. Video encoding and gaming showcased quite large differences. Applications they used included Half-Life 2 build 2707, Cinbench R9.5, MainConcept H.264 Encoder v2.1 and Photoshop CS2.
On the server side of things, you can expect up to 45% gains on bandwidth intensive applications (1333FSB Xeon) and 25% speed increases on Java-based servers (1600FSB Xeon).
That aside, I still find that a rather interesting comparison. It would have been more fair to compare two processors with equal frequencies, as I'm sure 3.33GHz will not be the lowest clocked Quad-Core in their Penryn line-up. Irregardless, it's still too early to speculate that much, but these results give hope of undeniable gains.
As far as Intel's high-end server line-up goes, we will be seeing Caneland based systems in Q3 with Xeon 7300 series processors. These will come in both 80 and 50W versions for blades, which will complete the transition to it's Core microarchitecture for Xeon-based servers.
Though it wasn't touched on today, at IDF will be ongoing demonstrations of Longhorns Windows Server Core and it's Windows Server virtualization. The demo will showcase the ability to run up to 8 core virtual machines.
Tolapai is a new codename being thrown around, and it is said to be the first enterprise-SoC that will integrate multiple key system components onto a single processor. This is expected to reduce the chip footprint by 45% and power consumption by 20% compared to a standard four-chip design.
It's "enterprise" because the goals behind it are to optimize efficiency in servers. QuickAssist is another technology used in conjunction with Tolapai used to optimized accelerators in servers. These accelerators will be based right into the processor itself which will collaborate with a software abstraction layer.
Intel wants in your house, figuratively speaking. They announced that new SoC (system-on-chip) products are on their way for use in internet capable CE devices, such as digital set top boxes, TVs and networked media players. What this should result in, according to their press materials, is faster deployment of applications which prove more cost-effective.
They have also announced a new media processor, the CE 2110 which moves away from their IA instructions set and implements an XScale processing core. This processor is designed to have powerful audio/video capabilities.
Other home networking related products/technologies were discussed, although not that much information was disclosed at this time. Of most interest was the initiative for improved device connectivity. They are showing off an Ultra Wide Band mini-card solution, although that's all that's known at this point.
As you may have been able to tell, Intel is not going light at this IDF. They are making so many announcements, it's difficult to track them all. This could be a good thing, but at this time it's difficult to tell which technologies will affect us the most.
Intels High-K transistor type will be one technology worthy of getting excited over. Due to the increased efficiency, we should be seeing Penryn, Nehalem and future processors with far more capabilities than what we are used to, such as an on-die GPU and also an IMC, although AMD has utilized that for a while. With the current leakage vastly improved and also power efficiency, it should prove beneficial to every single person who has one. If not just for the fact that it should affect our power bills in our favor. Coupled with low voltage DDR3, it is clearly our GPUs that will force us into megawatt power supplies, if you are an enthusiast.
Skulltrail is another technology that enthusiasts (with large wallets) will be anticipating. Sadly, we will not see this come into fruition until later this year. The motherboards will include dual sockets in addition to four PCI-E slots, although it was not mentioned the bandwidth of each.
There are many additions to their CE/Home Media line-up as well, although we will not see releases until later this year and even 2008. Their standards for home networking initiative is an interesting one, although it's hard to have a stand given the amount of information available.
Even with all that was announced today, there is still a lot more information to be delivered on day two. Should there be enough interesting (or important) information given, we will follow-up to this article with a part two. As it stands, Intel is on a roll and are not interested in slowing down. Penryn is still the one to get excited for, but their other technologies are well worth being on the lookout for as well.
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