RSSIntel readies the world for 'generation 7' of its CPUs
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published August 11, 2008, 12:22 PM
In 1993, Intel blanketed the world with advertising that stopped just short of placing a "TM" in front of the number "5" in the public conscience. This morning, the company has sent out an advance warning: Prepare for an onslaught of "7."
In advance of its annual US Developers' Forum next week, Intel today formally announced its branding for the generation of processors we've been calling by its code-name, "Nehalem." Rather than stay the current course of emphasizing the number of cores -- in which case, it might have been "Core 4" -- Intel will formally christen its desktop version of Nehalem with the new brand nomenclature "Core i7."
It's an indication that Nehalem represents the seventh generation of Intel architecture, as "Pentium" clearly constituted its fifth. But exactly what constitutes a "generation" has changed several times over Intel's history. And as a result, as Intel spokesperson George Alfs told BetaNews this morning, the "7" may be just a number.
"'i7' in itself has no meaning," Alfs told us. "However, it will be one of many future identifiers, and as products roll out through 2009 you will see how it fits in with other identifiers. Right now, it signifies the future performance and capabilities of high-end desktop Nehalem, and we needed to get the info to our OEMs so they could begin creating their marketing materials."
Up until 1993, Intel had been using numbers only as its CPU designations, with what was first called the 80486 eventually being "truncated" (albeit in reverse) to "i486" in company literature, and then just "486" in common parlance. After having touted the eventual coming of the "i586" to the technology press for about two years, the company surprised everyone in '92 by announcing the advent of a name brand, "Pentium," to represent what leading journalists were still insisting was really the seventh generation of the processor, though Intel maintained it was only #5.
Intel's Core Microarchitecture processors, released only two summers ago and given the brand name "Core 2" (to emphasize its new dual-core standard), were what some at Intel considered its sixth generation. If you follow that logic (and not everyone does), Nehalem will be its seventh, as the new design -- to be officially unveiled next week -- is expected to completely erase two of rival AMD's main architectural claims against Intel:
First, Core i7 will very likely be a "true quad-core" processor. The company's current "Penryn" architecture, quad-core Core 2 and Xeon processors, are actually "double-dual-core" units that package two dual-core processors onto one die. While AMD tried to characterize this approach as a kind of cheat at first, Penryn's performance effectively narrowed to next-to-nothing any advantage AMD's Opterons could claim.
In an online conversation attached to his blog post in April 2007, Intel engineer Dileep Bhandarkar said there wasn't really an reason not to go with the double-dual-core methodology. "It seemed like the right tradeoff for our first quad core and since Penryn is a enhanced compaction of the previous core, we continued the same approach."
Second, the separate memory controller and the front side bus will become historical remnants, as Nehalem will integrate its memory controller onto the CPU, and adjust its caching methodology to compensate. AMD has been touting this development as a clear indication that Intel is following its lead, at least architecturally; though we've already seen what happens when Intel cruises along behind AMD's slipstream, to borrow a racing metaphor.
As the company confirmed once again this morning, each Nehalem core will employ hyperthreading, which Intel originally introduced as a stop-gap measure to enable dual-core-like operation while AMD was going forth with true dual-core. At any rate, expect Intel to talk about "eight virtual cores" next week, as each core should have the ability to simulate two for the sake of software.
Alfs reminded BetaNews this morning that the Core i7 trademark will apply to the company's "high-end desktop" products only, which is a clear indication that its current 45 nm generation should continue, probably under the current Core 2 brand, for some time to come. Future Nehalem brands for the mobile and server segments have yet to be announced.
IMHO we are going to see more and more cores (manycore) and then we will see some new OS designed to work better with Many Cores.
MS have a R&D OS called singularity, if you watch the vid (on channel 9) the kernel developers to talk about it being highly threaded and ready for many core. ( I think this has been renamed and will be the next thing after windows 7 or 8 (Vista is 6))
I think current kernels don’t really work that well with more than 4 CPU's for doing pure kernel things.
Off course, software that runs on top of these kernels can work on more than one CPU and can work well, but its when you get into 'locks' and things its get interesting with lots of threads.
I don’t like the idea of HT thought, the running apps should not be ‘tricked’ into thinking they have more CPU / Cores, I remember when HT first came out, it did cause a few problems with servers spinning more threads as they thought they had more CPUS to work with, this was fixed quickly but once you have 4 cores do you really need to double it to 8 with HT? I think this may slow things down due to more threads, more lock overhead. Apps have to be written VERY well to take advantage of anything more than 2 cores.
Some web servers like IIS running ASP.NET don’t work well with more than 4 cores as you are lead to using web gardens and you don’t have any sort of session affinity to the worker process so things like caching don’t work well, SQL works very well with lots off cores but that has taken a huge amount off dev effort. The 2 examples are not desktop apps off course.
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|hope this drives down core2 prices
otherwise I could care less!
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|"in any case, this is only the seventh generation if you're willing to forget that NetBurst ever happened. :)"
I think we should. The whole thing was just to try to get clock speeds as high as possible because that's what idiot buyers were interested in. I kept a 1.4ghz PIII-S Tualatin (on which the Pentium M was based, and subsequently Core) at home all the way through the P4 era, and it always out-responded any P4 I used at work.
Cool chips good. Hot chips bad.
Sauce good too.
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|I just got a new computer with a Core 2 Quad (ahead of it's time) and they're already talking about something to replace that next year?
Hummmm...
OK, programmers, get cracking!
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|i guess there's little to no software that will use 4 cores so it really shouldn't change much performance-wise for most people but the real advantage is that it will drive core2 prices down which is awesome for all of us :)
(i used to be an AMD zealot until i decided to trade my desktop for a laptop and saw core2 vs turion x2 comparisons. say no more.)
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|why pay ?
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|zenrahim,
Yeh, why pay, maybe we could only break into shops and steal!!!
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|Seems Intel is going to confuse things further.
They are already using i7 for Itanium code.
Quoting Intel:
In Intel® IPP, there are various CPU Optimized codes used for different platforms, the following are the processor codes used for each platform:
IA-32 Intel® architecture
px - C-optimized for all IA-32 processors
a6 - Optimized for Pentium III processors
w7 - Optimized for Pentium 4 processors
t7 - Optimized for Pentium 4 processors with Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (SSE3)
v8 - New Optimizations for 32-bit applications on Intel® Core™2 and Intel® Xeon® 5100 processors
p8 - New Optimizations for 32-bit applications on 45nm Intel® Core™2 Duo (Penryn) family processors
For example, in the \ia32\bin directory, ippiv8-5.x.dll reflects the optimized imaging processing libraries for Intel Core 2 Duo processors.
Intel® 64 (Intel® EM64T) architecture
mx - C-optimized for all Intel® EM64T-based platforms
m7 - Optimized for Intel EM64T-based platforms
u8 - New Optimizations for 64-bit applications on Intel Core 2 and Intel Xeon 5100 processors
y8 - New Optimizations for 64-bit applications on 45nm Intel® Core™2 Duo (Penryn) family processors
Intel® Itanium® architecture
i7 - Optimized for Intel® Itanium® processor family
Intel® IXP4XX Network processors
sx - C-optimized for the IXP4XX product line
s2 - Optimized for the IXP4XX product line
-----------------------------------------------
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|I am going to be very interested in seeing how the Nehalem / i7 chips do over the course of the break-in period. I have not found many consumer programs that benefit from the four cores of my X9300, nor has there been a dearth of games or other commoner-level applications that will make your average Joe SixPack want to go out and upgrade when the mid and lower range chips appear. I know there are plenty of enthusiast and professional applications that will quickly be modified to make use of multiple cores, but for the rest of the world this doesn't mean much for now.
That said, I remember sitting back with my jaw on the floor when AMD moved the memory controller onto the CPU. The memory bandwidth benchmarks were astounding, and AMD held onto those for several years while Intel bashed them in the floating point operation benchmarks. The new triple-channel memory bus and on-die memory controller is going to do more than simply level the playing field; I can't wait to see the reviews.
I don't see AMD having anything at CPU level that is going to have the potential to counter this, although I do like the evolution of the Spider full-system concept. This is going to be a fun couple years.
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|Agreed.
This, VIA's exit from the market, and AMD's Spider are going to make the next few years very interesting.
As you said, I can't wait to see some real-world benchmarks/reviews.
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|Yes, there is definitely a generation-counting problem here, which is why I would just believe Intel when they say that the seven has no meaning. ;)
Let's start with the original Pentium as 5 (since following the previous convention it would have been the 586, except they made up a brand name because they can't trademark numbers). The Pentium Pro, on which the Pentium II was based, however, changed the architecture again, so that would really be the sixth generation. The Pentium III was quite similar, until the Pentium 4 ushered in the seventh-generation architecture (also known as NetBurst).
Pentium M processors (for mobile devices) were based on the Pentium II/III architecture. (You'll recall that P4s had problems with heat and excessive power use, especially as clock speeds increased). Intel Core was based on this architecture, so you may even say that we went from generation seven back to six with the first Core processors.
Core 2 processors are based on Core, although they adopted the x86-64 instruction set as well as some other changes. You could still consider this generation six (while keeping in mind that seven has already happened), or maybe you could call it eight. It is also worth noting that this article seems to confuse "Core" and "Core 2". They are different sets of processors (Core was only 32-bit, Core 2 added 64-bit instructions). Both come in single, dual, and more cores, but the "2" is not simply to emphasize the dual core (witness Core 2 Solo or Core 2 Quad). This confusion could even be why Intel is looking to another naming scheme for what they could have easily called "Core 3."
In any case, this is only the seventh generation if you're willing to forget that NetBurst ever happened. :) (As well as ignore other attempts, like the Itanium, which I am doing...)
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|...my head hurts now. :)
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|Who cares about names, lets see performance and energy reduction. In addition developers need the tools to take advantage of the technology. Overall good news. We should see news from AMD and Nvidia soon as well :)
Cheap iPods at http://www.iphonevortex.com
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|Hmm...
I think Adblock Plus needs updating. It doesn't seem to work on your post.
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|*laughs*
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|Good to see the article puts heavy focus on important parts, such as in-depth analysis of the numbering... It is funny though that Intel used 'iXXX' over a decade before Apple who almost own it as a trademark, never noticed.
Otherwise, let's hope development tools, OS and coding practices start living up to multi core, given it is almost impossible to buy otherwise these days.
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|When will this absurd trend of putting an "i" in front of everything come to an end??!?!
Can't wait for this to hit stores. Prices should drop quite nicely on the chips I'd actually buy. ;)
Things are getting even more interesting in the chipset market now that VIA has bowed out to focus on sub-notebook/maxi-Portables, w/e...
The latest ATi/AMD 790 chipsets are getting great performance/stability marks. With two fully integrated CPU/chipset contenders out there now, the competition should get frenetic.
Well, one can dream ... Right?
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|I'm not really impressed with the performance of these chips. I do R&D at IBM, and these things (for the price) don't really perform *that* much better than Xeon Quad Cores. Sad, but true.
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|I don't imagine they would. Your next lineup of chips is only going to be so much better than the ultra high end line of the previous generation of chips. Taking baby steps in performance is where the money is to be had. Why make a great performing product that will be the last chip you need for 3 years, when you can sell upgrades 2 or 3 times in that same 3 years?
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|I was literally about to write the same thing.
I will go on a murdering spree if any more companies decide to begin their product name with a lowercase I.
Marketing types have no ****ing brains of their own, and it seems they rely on Apple to think up their marketing strategy. It sickens me.
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|Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop are screaming for higher performance. This isn't a race for the fastest chip but gaining productivity for working photographers and videographers. They both have massive bandwidth and CPU demands.
I agree with some of the comments above; you average user simply doesn't need this monster horse power.
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|Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop are screaming for higher performance.
On older systems, perhaps. The dual-quad-core Dell workstation we've got runs CS3 beautifully. I've never seen it start up so quickly or operate so smoothly.
I can see the need for prices to come down, and faster speed are always welcome, but as for your example anyway, the speeds are already very usable.
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