Two weeks ago, we saw AMD's big announcement of its "Barcelona" quad-core chip. This week, it was mostly Intel's turn. Although its new chips won't ship until November 12, the Intel Developer Forum was filled with news of the upcoming Penryn server and desktop chips, next year's "Nehalem" chips and the move to the 32nm process. And Intel provided chips to several enthusiasts sites for review, so we have a pretty good idea of how the server chips, at least, will stack up against AMD's new offering.
Others have written more details about the IDF announcements, but here's what I found most interesting:
Penryn is on track for November 12 delivery of Xeon ("Harpertown") workstation and server parts, at 3GHz (80W), along with a 3GHz Core 2 Extreme quad-core desktop part ("Yorkfield"). (Some sites also say Intel will be releasing a 120 watt 3.16GHz Harpertown as well.) A total of 20 different microprocessors will be released with this architecture, with mains! tream desktop and notebook parts slated for release in early 2008.
Nehalem is on track to follow in 2008, with an integrated memory controller and a new interconnect (QuickPath, formerly CSI), which replaces the front side bus; up to 8 cores, each of which can execute two threads ("hyperthreading"). Intel's Pat Gelsinger said it taped out three weeks ago, and that it already runs both Windows and Mac OS - very good for first silicon. Intel demoed a system running 16 threads.
* Intel has 45nm working well. Intel says they have two fabs already producing 45nm (Oregon D1D and Arizona Fab 32) and two more (in Israel and Albuquerque) will be coming online on 2008. Each fab costs in excess of $4B.
* 32nm is on track for 2009. Intel showed a SRAM wafer built on its 32nm process that has a total of 1.9 billion transistors.
Much of the focus was on Harpertown, a 45nm quad-core version of Xeon with 12MB of cache, running in conjunct! ion with Stokley, which support a 1600 MHz front side bus. Int! el will also be releasing Wolfdale, a dual-core version with 6MB of cache. Although Penryn is primary a shrink of the existing architecture, rather than a complete new architecture, the new chips do s have some new features, notably including more cache and support for the faster bus; as well as a new divider that is supposed to be faster, and new SSE4 instructions.
Intel showed a number of benchmarks, including one showing that the Harpertown Xeon 5400 running at 3.20GHz would edge out AMD's unreleased 2.5GHz Quad-Core Opteron on SPECfp_rate2006. I'm always a little skeptical of such numbers - especially given the impact of different compilers, and noting AMD's general advantage in floating point applications.
Source Extremetech
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