Intel Developer Forum 2005 - Multi-Core Chips

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The slide below is a roadmap of Intel’s multi-core platforms. 2005 sees the introduction of dual-core technology on the desktop PC range as well as in the Itanium chips – with the 90nm Itanium Montecito chip sporting a staggering 1.7 billion transistors!

You’ll notice from the slide that Intel has dropped the “4” numeral from the dual-core chips so now you’ve just got the Pentium Processor Extreme Edition and the Pentium D family. Later in the year comes the introduction of the Napa mobile platform with the Yonah dual-core chip, based on a 65nm process.

Despite the fact that not a single production dual-core chip has shipped into the market yet, Intel predicts that multi-core products will make up the majority of its volume by the end of 2006. As the slide below outlines, Intel thinks that 70 per cent of its desktop and mobile business will be multi-core, while a whopping 85 per cent of server business will be multi-core.

For anyone who was wondering what kind of solution Intel has decided upon for its dual-core design, the answer seems to be that it hasn’t decided. The diagram below shows that Intel is employing at least three different design templates for its dual-core solutions, with the final example being two completely separate dies housed in one package.

Looking at the specs of the Pentium Processor Extreme Edition dual-core, you can see that Intel is relying on the twin cores to produce a significant performance boost and consequently has dropped the clock frequency down to 3.2GHz. Also the L2 cache has been reduced to 1MB per core, and although you’re still getting 2MB on the chip, if the application you’re running is single threaded, you’ll only have 1MB at your disposal.

Both the cores on the Extreme Edition are Hyper Threading enabled, so theoretically you can have four execution threads running simultaneously. Intel has used the Hyper Threading as the differentiator for the Extreme Edition, since the dual core Pentium D chips will not support Hyper Threading. The Extreme Edition is coupled with the 955X chipset while the Pentium D makes do with the 945X.

The first dual-core chips are scheduled for Q2 and there were Dell XPS gaming systems on show already sporting the chips. Intel also assured me that there is a massive amount of work going on in the software development arena to create a new generation of efficiently multi-threaded applications to make use of the new hardware.

We should have a dual-core Pentium in the lab soon, so check back for a hands on assessment.

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