Intel Larrabee to Support Both DirectX and OpenGL

Intel has been showing presentations on Larrabee for sometime now, but hasn’t openly talked about what instructions it will understand, clock speeds or even a hard launch date. For people who do not know, Larrabee is Intel’s attempt to integrate GPU with CPU and create GPGPU (General Purpose GPU) or computing through the use of graphics processing units. Intel today made it clear at Siggraph 2008 that Larrabee will support both DirectX and OpenGL for graphics processing.

Intel already has the highest market share in the GPU world, thanks to integrated graphics processors (IGP) in its chipset's sold with motherboards. But due to the dismal performance over the years of these IGP chipsets, no one ever considers these capable enough for mainstream gaming. Benchmarks have shown time and again that even the most basic discrete graphic cards can perform better than IGPs. With Larrabee, Intel has intentions to bring more computing/graphics power with lesser power requirements.

Larry Seiler, senior engineer in Intel's Visual Computing Group said that, Larrabee's consists of cores derived from Pentium processors and have added multithreading and 64-bit instructions. Each core consists of 256kb L2 cache and the first release of Larrabee will have 8 to 48 cores depending on the market segment. Larrabee also has advanced multi-core capabilities and uses a 1024 bits-wide, bi-directional ring network for fast, low latency communication between the cores.

The programming paradigm doesn’t change with Larrabee because it uses the same x86 instructions used by Intel’s current generation microprocessors. Also with DirectX and OpenGL support inside Larrabee it confirms that current generation games will also work fine. But without any mention of the performance improvement in graphics capabilities over current generation IGPs, I still have doubts whether Intel is actually competing with its own processors or with the GPU vendors like ATI (now AMD) and  NVidia. Larrabee does look solid on paper, but as we know papers do create a lot more hype than they can perform and Intel marketing does know how to play that game.

AMD also has been working on Fusion processor which will integrate AMD CPUs and ATI GPUs into one chip. NVidia on the other hand has create a new programming paradigm with CuDA, which tries to enable normal computer processing to NVidia’s GPU. Whichever company wins this GPGPU battle, we would like to see all of them fight on the same grounds and support existing standards. Today’s Larrabee announcement confirms that both the DirectX and OpenGL standards are followed and will allow current breed of games to run on the Larrabee.

Wimax Missed the Intel Centrino 2 Boat Again

Wimax has been Intel’s big push to wireless broadband for some years now. Intel has promised Wimax as the solution to fast wireless internet time and again, but has constantly failed to deliver real working chips for operation. Today, when Intel launched Centrino 2, it didn’t have much of a mention about the Wimax adapters 5150 and 5350, which was supposedly the main talking point of Centrino 2.

Centrino was probably one of the most talked about technology by Intel when it was first released. It standardized wireless access through Wifi and most people synonymously used Centrino for Wireless-capable laptops. That was back in 2003. After that Intel refreshed the platform with a lot of new processors/platforms, codenamed Yonah, Napa and Santa Rosa. Lots of new motherboards/chipsets came and went and few integrated graphics just changed. Centrino 2 after much delay was launched today and the platform was earlier known by codename Montevina.

The Montevina platform announced today covers new 45nm Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors, the GM45 chipset and the WiFi Link 5300 adapter. You can look at all the information about Centrino 2 platform from the wide press coverage its got from all hardware sites. Look here, here and here for examples. But what most of the sites are not complaining about is the lack of Wimax at the launch. I mean what is special about Centrino 2, if its not got a new fast wireless medium, atleast that’s what the original Centrino was all about.

But like I have heard before, the Wimax adapters for laptops 5150 and 5350 are still not ready for release. The adapters have an issue with power consumption and if Intel would have today launched the adapters with Centrino 2 platform, all the promises about improved battery life would have gone down the drains. Intel says we have to wait till the end of the year to get one of those Wimax adapters, but didn’t mention any specific reason for the delay and also didn’t mention that it was due to these (and Atom’s marketing) that Intel has been delaying Centrino 2 for sometime. Lets hope by fall we do see a battery efficient Wimax adapter for my new laptop. For a change, this time the ISPs are not late!!

 

Few presentation slides from Centrino 2 launch:

 

 

The Car came, but Wimax didn’t want a ride!!

Processor Errata to be Next Big Virus Exploit

Writing cross-platform viruses were nearly impossible earlier and hence a virus would mostly affect only Windows or Linux or OSX, but not all of these together. Most Linux/*nix/Mac users felt viruses were only for Windows users, because of underlying OS protection in Unix user access model was good enough. But all of it could change if malware was written for common hardware platform such as Microprocessors or BIOS or Hardware Firmware. Well known author and security researcher, Kris Kaspersky is going to demonstrate how to create malware for processor bugs at the Hack-In-The-Box Security Conference (HITB) to be held from 27th-30th Oct, 2008 at Malaysia.

Processors from Intel and AMD often contain bugs known as errata and generally the way to fix these bugs is by updating the BIOS or Firmware in motherboards. Nearly every generation of processor has these bugs and if these aren’t any major bug, then no one even knows of them in normal computer functioning. But in some special cases these bugs affect some computers or software being used, and that’s when these bugs come into the light. Like the recent TLB Errata in 1st generation Opteron (Barcelona) processors from AMD would corrupt data in certain situations.

Currently, there isn’t a truly generalized way to exploit processor bugs and requires some detailed understanding of hardware and software combination. Most processor manufacturers don’t even mention deep details on the bugs and hence exploring them is a little more tough. Kris Kaspersky has claims to have found some way using JavaScript to exploit these bugs. Also, JIT compilers from Java Virtual Machines may be used to uncover and exploit the bugs, according to the Abstract of the Presentation at HITB.

If Kris Kaspersky’s “Hacker Disassembling Uncovered: Powerful Techniques To Safeguard Your Programming” book is anything to go by, we may have excellent and easy example by which he demonstrates the exploits. It could easily be replicated and understood by hackers and worked upon for other bugs. Stopping such exploits would be tough not just for anti-virus makers, but also for Operating system patches. And even if some fix is released on the motherboard BIOS, it is generally not implemented by all motherboard manufacturers... And user ignorance towards these BIOS updates is not even worth mentioning! This could easily be one of the tough and complex security problems to have come up!

Power 7 Will Be IBM’s Supercomputing King

This weekend I heard a few guys from IBM India getting really excited about the next-generation microprocessor called Power 7 which will be released in H1 2010. The Power 7 processor is still not a final design but nonetheless, it is turning out to be an awesome processor. IBM’s latest plans show that Power 7 will be a 8-core processor, clocked at anywhere between 3.6Ghz-4.0Ghz.

Power 7 is a completely new architecture and is being developed at Austin, Böblingen, Rochester Research Centers. There are rumors that Opteron and Power 7 may share a common socket, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in the current design of the processor. But I got hints that things on the socket front could be changed during the final few weeks.

Power 7 is also a multi-thread per core CPU and current designs suggest it can execute about 4 threads per core. It still isn’t running optimally at the moment, but the target is to achieve full performance on all the 4 threads. This still makes Sun’s Rock the multi-threading king in the next-generation of processors. But IBM is high on the number crunching game. Each Power 7 core will be 32GFlops and that means on a 8-cores it going to output at 256GFlops. That’s no mean achievement!

Unlike the Power 6, which had its main aim towards improving single-core performance and max clocked at 6Ghz in prototypes, the Power 7 is working towards a multi-core, multi-threaded processor. From Intel to Sun, everyone has realized the potential efficiency of multi-core design and IBM hopes to lead the pack with Power 7. And to become the winner of the lot, Power 7 will compete against Sun’s Rock (UltraSPARC T2 Processors), Intel’s Itanium and Xeon (Nehelam-based) to some extent as well as its friendly technology partner AMD’s Opteron. IBM’s main goal with Power 7 is at the High-Performance Computing markets and supercomputers, where IBM already rules the roost.

If you look for stats at Top500 Supercomputers from around the world, you’ll realize what I mean by IBM ruling the roost. IBM has lots of BlueGene machines that use the old PowerPC processors, but not many newer generation processors. The reason to this is two-fold. IBM’s last generation processor Power 6 and to some extent Power 5 isn’t very power efficient. Power 6 heats up quite a bit and would require massive engineering skills to bring 1000s of these chips together inside a supercomputer. On the other hand, IBM has plans to mix-match Power 7 and Cell microprocessors in future supercomputers. Cell processors are known to be good specialized FP units and matching it with Power 7, IBM hopes to reach more than 10 petaflop from a supercomputer.

AMD Working on Intel’s Physics Havok

AMD and Intel are rarely to be found in friendly talk. But this time, AMD is in talks with Intel to integrate “Havok FX” physics in its ATI graphics chips which is meant to improve realism in games and physics calculations in scientific applications. Intel last year acquired physics technology company Havok, and AMD plans to use its API inside GPUs.

AMD, like Intel has plans to have integrated CPU+GPU processors, but plans to use Havok physics in discrete graphics. The main competitor in the physics processing technology is Ageia, which was acquired by Nvidia. With two different technologies for physics, AMD decision to use Havok has important implications for game developers as well as scientific application developers. Nvidia has been pushing Ageia’s Physx technology to game developers and AMD was starting to feel lost. Today’s discussion about AMD using Havok gives AMD an advantage and its called Intel marketing. Intel will be using Havok inside its CPU+GPU Larabee and developers will be magically tilted towards using Havok because of Intel’s large market share.

The official announcement about how much AMD has to give Intel for the technology is still not out, but surely good money will change hand. Physics will definitely play an important role in the future of GPUs, either in games or general purpose computing. Along with ray-tracing, Intel is betting a lot on physics for the future of advanced computing and HPC. AMD has lots of room to maneuver, since it can switch between GPUs and CPUs with good ease. Lets wait and see how everything falls into place!!

Intel Steals AMD's Supercomputer Shopper

Cray and Intel announced today that they have established an R&D deal for research on next generation supercomputers. Cray Inc is one of the best supercomputer and high-performance computing manufacturer and mainly has been using AMD processors in its machines. Cray and Intel will be researching on the use of Larabee accelerators in supercomputers.

Larabee is Intel's next-generation GPGPU initiative, which is the cunning plan to use graphic cards to do other computing tasks than just showing graphics. GPU are known to have high-floating point processing capabilities and the industry has decided its time to use it for some math. AMD's ATI acquisition was on similar grounds and AMD today manufactures AMD Stream Processors that do the same thing. Nvidia with its CUDA is also doing a same thing.

AMD must be pretty sad that it hasn't been able to pull something similar with its Stream Processors. AMD Opteron has been pretty popular among supercomputer manufacturers due to scalability brought through HyperTransport architecture. Cray shares seem to have risen due to some excitement with AMD's chip availability, but I suspect its more to do with the Intel partnership.

Stream Processing are going to be the future of high-performance computing. Even on desktops, it'll be either be processors doing GPU work or GPU doing processors work sometime in the future.

AMD Launches New Processerr... GoHome'on

AMD has been struggling and much of it is because of bad execution and sitting on the laurels when it was winning in the CPU race. AMD's financial woes featuring huge debt after ATI buy continues and in this hard time they do like corporates always do. But in AMD style of bad names, they released a new processerr called GoHome'on and like 'Athlon and Duron', its not going to be met well by the markets. Its basically a product to ask employees to leave the job and "Go Home!!"

AMD expects revenues for the quarter ending March 29 to drop approximately 15 per cent drop from previous quarter but up 22 per cent over 1Q 2007. Generally Q1 is not the best time for microprocessor business, but this story is longer than that... AMD has been struggling with the performance and Intel has been executing better than ever.

AMD announced that it will layoff about 10% of its current workforce starting mid-April and finish the entire procedure by Q3. This means after the exercise finishes, 1,650 AMD employees will be doing something else. The markets haven't taken the news well and AMD is down by more than 4%. In the meanwhile, Hector is still on the hotseat trying to convince it'll be good someday and his expected successor Dirk Mayer is optimistic.

AMD just a week ago was saying that the layoffs are rumours. And today it confirms that there will be layoffs. The financial results will be out on the 17th of April and probably the layoffs are to promise some expenditure cuts on AMD's part... Hopefully, we aren't loosing some good chip designer who would have created something to fight Intel... Or else we will see AMD just limping around behind Intel!!

Phenom Black Edition For Christmas

AMD will be launching the Phenom Black Edition processors just in time for Christmas and these unlocked beasts will be on the shelves for the overclockers sometime next week. After the retail success of the Athlon Black Edition processors, AMD has realized that it can sell these processors and make some bucks on these not-so-fast processors. The Phenom Black Edition Processors will have a clock speed of 2.3Ghz and it'll be interesting to see how much they can be overclocked.

With AMD already struggling to get enough speeds on the Phenom processors, it'll be interesting to see if they can be overclocked to great extent. And if these processors are overclocked, it'll be a good indication of how AMD's next-year Phenoms will perform. AMD already has talked a lot to its investors and people at the Wall Street and has promised it'll be doing good in 2008. All those promises will be on display if we can overclock and determine the performance of upcoming faster clocked Phenoms

Lets see how it goes with these Black Phenoms... and will they be an indicator of when AMD gets back from red to black!!

Complete Nehalem Details Leaked

True to the earlier reports about Intel's next chips having HT (Hyper-Threading) and integrated-GPU, some more details about Nehalem appeared on the web, courtesy of Japan's PC Watch.

The architecture diagrams mention about 2 threads per core, which was what I had heard from James Reinders earlier. The PCWatch page also has pictures of the updated Intel roadmaps. It also has features of all the different variations of Nehalem that Intel is going to release. The code names of these are Beckton (Oct-core MP), Gainestown (Quad-core DP), Bloomfield (Quad-core, EE-Desktop), Lynnfield (Mainstream Quad-core) and Havendale (Mainstream Dualcore)

 

If you can understand Japanese, then go here and read all about it or use a translator and try to figure out what it means!!

AMD's Overclocking App: Overdrive Demo (VIDEOS)

Found these exciting videos on YouTube about demo of the Overdrive, AMD's upcoming overclocking and performance monitoring utility. Overdrive brings the same technology of overclocking and performance enhancing using drivers, that have been in use by ATI and nVidia graphics cards.

Overdrive seems to be a very exciting application and will be released with the "Spider Platform", consisting of PhenomFX / Phenom (CPU), AMD 790FX/790X (Chipset) and the RV670 (GPU-graphics). The entire Spider Platform is expected to be released tomorrow (19th Nov, 2007), and hopefully will be available in quantities before the shopping season starts this year.

The videos have exciting presentation and editing, with nice before and after performance preview. Watch the videos and get excited for the release...

AMD OverDrive - Performance Tuning Utility

AMD OverDrive Utility - Before and After Demo

Intel Releases Peryn To Make Life Tougher For AMD

Guest Blogger: Steven Parker
12th Nov, New York

Its been tough time for AMD already, since Core2 Duo was launched. Intel then stuck two of these together and created Quad Cores. These Quad Cores have  been selling like hot cakes, and Intel's making lots of profit. Intel today released its 45nm Peryn processors which are smaller in size and cheaper for Intel to manufacture. This means Intel can earn bigger margins on the same quad core processors. On the other hand, when AMD releases the Phenom its margins will go down because of the large size and competitive pricing as Sunny observed here...

The Intel Peryn is basically the same quad-core but built using a completing new process as well as substrate and gate transistors. Intel manufactures the Peryn using Hafnium-Based High-k Metal Gate Transistors, which seems to be reduce current leakages through gates. Infact, Intel's founder Gordon Moore called the technology "the biggest transistor advancements in 40 years". This technology would allow Intel to make faster processors in the short-term.

From Intel: (click here to read the press released)

New to the Intel line-up of server processors are 15 server dual-core and quad-core 45nm Hi-k Intel Xeon processors. The 12 new quad-core chips boast clock speeds ranging from 2GHz up to 3.20GHz, with front side bus speeds (FSB) up to 1600MHz, and cache sizes of 12MB. The three new dual-core chips feature clock speeds of up to 3.40GHz, an FSB of up to 1600MHz, and cache sizes of 6MB.

The 45nm Hi-k Intel Xeon processors are compatible with server platforms using the Intel® 5000 chipset family. In addition, Intel is launching three platform solutions to support 45nm processors, including:
   The Intel® 5400 chipset-based platform (previously codenamed "Stoakley") that is optimized for high-bandwidth applications such as high-performance computing (HPC).
   The Intel 5100 Memory Controller Hub chipset and Intel ICH-9R I/O controller (previously codenamed "Cranberry Lake"). These are cost-optimized solutions that support either one or two processors and also provide reduced power consumption using native DDR2 memory.
   The Intel 3200 chipset-based platform (previously codenamed "Garlow") that is specifically designed for single-processor entry servers.

Supercomputer On A Graphics Card (1 TFlops)

Not so long ago, who would have thought that a desktop computer would be able to process "trillion floating point operations per second (TeraFlops or TFlops). Most people not up-to-date with technology would say its impossible for a normal desktop computer to do it, but it isn't anymore!! Really..and I'm not marketing for any company...

Today AMD announced the FireStream 9170, a General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) running at 775Mhz and performs 497 GFlops. That's about 0.5 TFlops!! The FireStream is based on the RV670 chip and has 320 double-precision floating-point (FP) units. The RV670 will also be available in desktop variants for gamers and will be known as the HD 3850 and 3870 as mentioned by me here.

But it is still just 0.5TFlops... right?? Yes, but in about a few months time, AMD (actually ATI) will be releasing R680 which will have 2 of these chips working together. Add a few more clocks to the chip and we'll have a chip that can perform 1TFlops!! Aint that great??

Consider this: The world's fastest supercomputer i.e. IBM's BluGene/L scores 280.6 TFlops and costs a few billion dollars to build whereas one GPGPU will cost some thousand dollars. Do the math and you'll know its some million times cheaper with the GPGPU!! But the entire comparison I did is comparing apple to oranges. And the reason is because BlueGene/L uses general purpose CPUs which are easily programmed, whereas GPUs require special programming. I don't say that programming GPU is tough, it's just that we are habituated to program CPUs and hence we currently don't have the same type of tools that are used to program CPUs. But as the tools come up and mature GPGPUs are going to be the next milestone in supercomputing.

Intel also about a year back showed a 80 core processor do some networking to process as much as 1.81TFlops at 5.7Ghz... But its still got a lot more tweaking to do and the yield I think won't be very good at the moment!!

All of this means that in the very near future, by the use of GPGPUs, each one of us may be having a supercomputer built into our computers. But where is the work that these fast mean machines would be doing??

Intel Wants Developers To Program For MultiCore

Intel Organizes Seminar On Multi-Core Programming In Mumbai

I have just come back from an Intel Software Seminar Series held in Mumbai at Leela. Intel organized this seminar for developers, so that they could make a paradigm shift towards programming for Multi-Core processors. India is a major hub of software developers and Intel thinks they need to help programmers make the shift!!

A while back I had read this article on "Multi-Core Crisis" and found it as an interesting representation. Today, at the seminar, the first speaker, Vivek Venkatesh showed few slides on why there is a need for multi-core processors and how the future is going to be multi-core processors. How Intel plans to move by increasing the number of cores in the future. He made a statement that, "Youtube and multimedia require multi-core processors"... Im wondering how I watch youtube videos on my single core AthlonXP machine?? :-)) He also stressed on, "the free lunch is over" statement made by Herb Sutter.



After the session was over, the Q&A session started and I put a question of how RapidMind would help realize this goal. James Reinders dismissed RapidMind's innovation as being too tough to implement in the current state, but mentioned that the idea has some promise!!

Next to come on stage, James Reinders was the main speaker at the Seminar. James has been working with Intel for 19yrs and he has been a multi-core evangelist for sometime now! It was great listening to his insights and made some very interesting points on what software developers and architects need to think when programming multi-core computers.

James mentioned 1-2-3 recommendations that developers can do today to use multi-core processors:
1.) Libraries - James mentioned that use of libraries that are written for multi-core processors are like putting your burden on someone else's shoulders.
2.) openMP - Intel was one of the main contributor to this standard and nearly every C/C++ compiler today uses it. James recommends using modern compilers like MS C Compiler and gcc that use openMP
3.) Threading Building Blocks (TBB) - This is Intel's new software to help multi-core programming by providing abstraction. James said this is an opensource software and should be used by developers who want to program. He showed example codes of how hand-made optimization for multi-core processors to Tacheon (2-D Ray Tracing) was complex and in just 17 lines of code using TBB, the work can be reduced.

He also mentioned challenges for multi-core programming:
1.) Scalability
2.) Correctness
3.) Maintainability

At the end, he talked about the 8-points that any developer must follow for multi-core programming. James wrote this for a Dr. Dobb's Journal, in the October edition. Read here...

In the concluding part before lunch, we had a quiz contest and I won a personally autographed book named "Intel - Threading Building Blocks" from James Reinders.

I also asked James Reinders about HT and Nehalem, since I knew he was one of the minds at Intel who supported Hyper-Threading (HT). He told that Core architecture wasn't benefiting much from HT and hence HT wasn't added to Core. But he told that Nehalem would be with HT enabled and would be processing 2 threads in each core. He also said that in the future Intel may go through Sun's Niagara 2 path of more threads per core, atleast in the server space.

Overall it was a nice insight into what's happening at Intel and what Intel feels about multi-core programming.

Other Photos from the event (2 other colleagues: Mandar & Namrata also attended):

Intel Nehalem Will Be Socket LGA 1366

Intel is known to change sockets and platform approximately every 18 months. But LGA 775 seems to have gone longer than expected. If I'm not making a mistake then, the Pentium4 released in Q4'04 was the first LGA 775 and till date we have the LGA775. To be released next month on 11th November, Intel's new processor-Peryn will also use LGA 775 (may be some extra power requirements). This means that Intel has lasted the LGA 775 for 3 years and that's odd considering Intel's past socket changes.

But Intel's next major change to processor architecture will come in the form of the much-awaited Nehalem line of processors. The Nehalem will be released in Q4 2008 and will use a new socket 1366. That's actually the "number of dots" that connect the processor with the motherboard... The increase in the pin count is actually because of the integrated memory controller. The Integrated Memory Controller from Intel may be a copy of AMD's architecture, but Intel surely will bring lot of enhancements along. Among other things inside Nehalem, Intel also copies a point-to-point interconnect called CSI (now called QuickPath) from AMD (Hypertransport).

Nehalem will also be the first processor to support DDR3 memory and it'll be the first time that the motherboard's northbridge won't decide the memory to be used for an Intel system.

The desktop version of Nehalem will be called "Bloomfield", probably to depict the cash flowers that have bloomed in intel's field. The mobile version "Gilo" and "Becton" for server version... All will be a 45nm fabricated chip and Intel already has a few early samples and has demo'd it to people at IDF a few weeks back.

The Nehalem processor may also be the first native 8-core processor. Integrated GPU may be another reason for the increase in the pin count in Nehalem, but that's another topic altogether. The first generation of Nehalem processors which Intel demo'd at IDF did not have the integrated GPU, so when it releases in Q4 2008 don't expect it to start with an integrated GPU.

2 Million Quad Core CPUs sold by Intel in Q3 '07

I'm wondering if AMD is even in the CPU competition these days? Intel just annaounced at its IDF (Intel Developer Forum) in Taiwan that it has sold 2 million chips with 4 cores!! AMD just launched Barcelona, its 4-core CPU and AMD is having problems producing enough of them. The channel does not have enough of these CPUs and only the tier I manufacturer have some of these.

2 million of these quad-cores does mean a lot of money and margin for Intel. This all goes to show that even if the quad-cores aren't native (as AMD says not real quad cores), people are buying them in numbers and Intel is earning quite a lot of profit. Infact, Intel is so confident that it says in 2008 its going to increase the cost of Core 2 Extreme processors by as much as 50%.

The 2 Million CPUs are not just desktop ones, but includes Xeon, Core 2 Quad and Extreme CPUs. Intel actually has 20 different versions of quad-core CPUs in the market at the moment. But it's still quite an achievement and we need to look at the dollar figures in the Q3 earnings. which is at a 43% increase...

AMD currently doesn't seem to be in the race and as Intel's earning all the bucks, I'm sure its preparing itself to hit the final nail on the AMD's coffin with Nehelam. Good luck AMD, coz it seems you really do need a lot of luck!!

How Intel Got Its Name

Have a friend of mine who's attending the IDF and got some news on Intel history, that I thought I should write down. Intel is a very big brand in itself and the name is synonymous with desktop computing. We all know how popular their "Intel Inside" branding was. But just a small history on how Intel got its name Intel was revealed by the founder Gordon Moore at IDF 2007.
Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce left Fairchild Semiconductor, since Fairchild didn't believe in the future of integrated circuits as much as Noyce or Moore. So, when they started this new company, they named it Moore & Noyce. They did the paper work with this name for the first 8 weeks, but didn't think this name was catchy or it gave an idea about the company. Then, a while later Noyce's daughter, Penny Noyce suggest the name Intel (INtegrated ELectronics). This name was liked by both Noyce and Moore and they changed the name to Intel. And now, as we all know its the biggest manufacturer of x86 processors.

So now you know, how Intel got its name!! Some history lesson ha!!

Does Barcelona / Phenom really help AMD ??

While reading Inq Charlie's post - having lunch with AMD, I got this idea that AMD is in some deep trouble!! AMD launched it's Barcelona processor (3rd generation server CPU - Opteron) on Sep 10th, 2007 with a lot of excitement and with a hope to become competitive with Intel's (Clovertown) Xeon processors. And frankly, it does bring a lot of performance improvement by increasing the IPC, and gives better power usage. An overall 124% improvement compared to the previous generation of Opterons. Clock-vs-Clock AMD beats Intel hands down!! Everything seems to be perfect for AMD... Doesn't it??

But on launch, Barcelona doesn't beat Clovertown in the benchmarks. Know why?? B'Coz the Barcelona is clocked at 2Ghz while the Clovertown is at 3Ghz. But that's truely not the bad news for AMD. By the end of 2007 AMD may have a processor clocked at 2.4Ghz and will then beat or equal Intel's new Xeons at 3.2Ghz. So really the clock-speed is a short-term issue!! So do AMD fanbois start dancing??... No, there is another problem and this one is bigger and a long-term problem. Its not related to the server processor (Opteron), but to the desktop-variant of the Barcelona called Phenom X4.

Since Intel released the Core 2 lineup in 2006, the Athlon64 X2 has failed miserably. The result is that AMD today sells the Athlon64 X2 at very low margins and Intel hasn't helped AMD's cause by creating a regular price war. This means AMD doesn't make profits as much as it should to run the R&D and fab maintainance/upgrade.

AMD's desktop-variant, PhenomX4 will be released by year-end and will have to compete with Intel's Peryn CPU. The Peryn is not much of an upgrade but is a die-shrink of current Core2 Quad to 45nm (basically means smaller processor size i.e. die size). On the other hand, if we look at PhenomX4, its actually quite large compared to the current Athlon64 X2. In the processor world, larger the die-size, its generally accepted that the cost to manufacture is higher. This means that the cost to manufacture PhenomX4 will be higher than the current Athlon64 X2, while the cost to manufacture Peryn will be lesser compared to Core2 Quad. Now ask AMD to get into a price war with Intel!! Let's try to sell PhenomX4 at the price of Peryn!! For AMD, it'll mean even smaller margins than today while Intel can still keep its current margins for selling the CPUs.

The reason why this is a long-term issue for AMD because Intel is moving really fast in upgrading it's fabrication plants (processor manufacturing plants) to a smaller process, while AMD has already mentioned it needs some more time to upgrade. AMD also has a cash crunch, which means for the next upgrade, it needs some more time until its coffers fill again. So AMD is really not helping itself by releasing a larger-sized processor, but it may be the only option to survive the Intel performance assault!! Goodluck AMD!!