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Maureen O'Gara investigates Intel dual-core demo

http://www.linuxworld.com/story/46296.htm

Intel Shows Mystery Dual-Core Desktop Chip
September 13, 2004

Summary
Intel, which has repeatedly twisted its ankle trying to meet its schedules, has announced it will deliver dual-core desktop, server and mobile chips next year, a sea change from the single-core roadmap it abandoned earlier this year. It was not more precise about the timetable.

Well, Intel did say - dismissively of course - that wasn't going to try to match AMD's little dual-core Opteron demo coup of last week and show off a dual-core Xeon at the Intel Developer Forum this week and - as good as its word - it didn't.

Instead, it trotted out a surprise mystery chip, provenance unknown, described only as a "dual-core desktop chip" and an "engineering prototype."

Intel wouldn't give it a code name although there was some vague mumble about it maybe sometimes being called "Smithfield."

No other details were provided but Lehman Brothers found out Intel used a 915 Grantsdale motherboard. Grantsdale is currently used with Prescott.

The thing was demoed running a three-way videophone conference with people sharing documents.

Intel claimed it was real silicon and that the demo wasn't a "simulation." It also said that "It's not hard to do these demos. It's not like it was creating new silicon; it's merely putting two processors in one package. So to light it up so fast is not a difficult thing."

Hmmm. One wonders then if this is a case of brute force versus elegance.

Lehman thought it looked like it approached roughly twice the performance of a single non-HyperThreaded core. It couldn't tell whether Intel was using HyperThreading or not.

Anyway, Intel, which has repeatedly twisted its ankle trying to meet its schedules, said it would deliver dual-core desktop, server and mobile chips next year, a sea change from the single-core roadmap it abandoned earlier this year. It was not more precise about the timetable.

Having stumbled so often into product delays, cancellations and a recall, Intel is supposed to be getting more conservative and setting its goals by the light of its capabilities but Intel president Paul Otellini nonetheless predicted that by 2006 83% of Intel's server chip shipments, 70% of its mobile chip shipments and 40% of its desktop chip shipments would be dual-cores.

However, Intel doesn't want to talk about when it might demonstrate a dual-core Xeon like the dual-core 64-bit Opteron that AMD says it will start delivering the middle of next year, followed by dual-core AMD64 desktops later in the second half.

Intel said it couldn't commit itself yet and is supposedly still juggling a bunch of variables about how to package up dual-core Xeons. Like what frequencies they'll be and how much cache they'll have.

Meanwhile, AMD was ferrying people from IDF down the street to see its dual-core demonstration.

As expected, Intel also showed the dual-core Montecito Itanium chip for the first time. Each of Montecito's cores can execute two instruction threads simultaneously and the four-processor Montecito box Intel demonstrated was running 16 independent jobs at the same time.

Intel says Montecito could increase performance 1.5-2 times previous generations. It contains 1.7 billion transistors and 24MB of cache.