nehalem

AMD said Monday it is set to roll out its next-generation "Shanghai" chip--minus the mistakes of the last generation.

The No. 2 processor maker wants to make one thing crystal clear: Shanghai is not Barcelona. The latter chip was rolled out in September 2007 to great fanfare only to be delayed a whopping eight months (or more, depending how the delay is calculated) due to production glitches and bugs. The chip was also hampered by speed (core clock frequency) limitations. This gave Intel an opportunity to regain ground it had lost to AMD in the server chip market.

"We had some mis-starts in getting Barcelona to market and wanted to bring as much velocity to Shanghai as possible. Learn from our mistakes and, as a company, never do that again," said Pat Patla, general manager of AMD's server and workstation chip business.

Shanghai--a quad-core product targeted at servers--will be AMD's first 45-nanometer processor. (Barcelona is 65-nanometer.) Typically, the smaller the geometries, the faster and more power efficient the chip. Intel has been shipping 45-nanometer processors since last year and these processors now make up most of Intel's offerings.

AMD needs Shanghai to succeed. It is reeling from a string of losses and is on the verge of announcing a major restructuring. "To bring it back to profitability the execution of the server product line is absolutely critical," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at investment bank Collins Stewart. "That is really their only profit pool."… Read more

I miss the old SGI. Silicon Graphics was widely regarded as the greatest computer company in Silicon Valley back in the 1990s. Sometimes forgotten--but not gone--SGI was one of our greatest success stories and one of our greatest tragedies.

Apple may have had more revenue by virtue of shipping millions of small systems, but SGI's hardware spanned the range from video-game consoles (the Nintendo 64) to workstations to supercomputers. SGI's Unix-based operating system, IRIX, was one of the most sophisticated in the industry.

I used to lust over SGI machines. I'd obsess over lists of used SGI gear, looking for a great deal that would let me have my own IRIX box at home. In 2004, I finally bought an Octane with MXI graphics... but that was years after these machines were effectively obsolete, and I paid less than 0.5% (1/200th!) of the original retail price of the machine.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, SGI was not well managed, losing huge amounts of money because its leaders would not… Read more

Update with Dunnington and Core i7 photos, text.

The latest and greatest silicon and derivative products is what the Intel Developer Forum is all about. Moorestown, Tolapai, and Canmore are just a few of the chips detailed at IDF this week, while UrbanMax, new netbooks, and the first laptops based on the quad-core mobile processor were among showcased products.

Intel Chairman Barrett brought out Carnegie Mellon University's Johnny Chung Lee, who demonstrated how cheap, off-the-shelf technology--in this case a makeshift whiteboard--can go a long way. "To be interesting today, technology has to be the fastest, the best, the brightest, the lightest, but here you can see if you sacrifice a little bit of capability and performance for dramatic savings in cost, you can have a pretty dramatic impact," Chung said.

One of the more novel devices demonstrated was the 10-inch Intel UrbanMax a computer that can switch between a laptop and tablet. This by itself isn't groundbreaking because tablet PCs from Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba already do this. The novelty is the size and design: it is smaller than an ultraportable--like the Toshiba Portege--yet is designed like an oversize mobile Internet device such as Compal JAX 10. When configured as a tablet, the keyboard is hidden but can morph into a laptop by sliding out the keyboard, which tilts the screen.

An Intel official demonstrating the device said that "UrbanMax is an innovation platform from Intel. This is a product-ready concept." UrbanMax uses "Montevina" Centrino 2 small form-factor (SSF) silicon. SSF chip packaging is used in the MacBook Air and results in lower voltage and smaller size than typical Intel low-power mobile processors.

It is interesting to note that major PC makers have adopted Intel concept designs in the past. Last year, Intel offered a ultra-thin laptop concept design that was eventually adopted by HP for its Voodoo Envy 133 notebook. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel plans to bring its first dual-core Atom to market next month, it was revealed here Monday during the Intel Developer Forum. The chipmaker also disclosed more details of the Nehalem processor.

The power-efficient processor will be targeted at Atom-based desktops called nettops. Currently, Intel offers the Atom N230 processor for nettops. This chip has a slightly higher power envelope than the Atom processors built exclusively for mobile devices.

That news was revealed to this reporter by an Intel employee as senior vice president Pat Gelsinger was delivering his IDF keynote, which included more specifics about Nehalem, the family … Read more

When the Intel Developer Forum kicks off Tuesday in San Francisco, the theme of low power will be high on the agenda of topics.

The headliner at IDF this year is indisputably the upcoming "Nehalem" Core i7 processor. Though the new microarchitecture is replete with esoteric technologies like QuickPath (for faster chip-to-chip communication) and on-chip memory controllers--things that end users can't readily relate to--better power efficiency is something every consumer gets because it results in better battery life.

"(Nehalem) is pretty subtle because it's a change in microarchitecture. A lot of the changes aren't … Read more

Intel's next-generation desktop processors will be branded "Intel Core" with an "i7" identifier for the first wave of products.

The i7 identifier will apply to the first crop of high-end desktop processors, according to George Alfs, an Intel spokesperson. Other identifiers will come later that will "complement" the i7, said Alfs.

There will be a separate black logo for the highest-end offering called the Extreme Edition. Model numbers will differentiate each chip.

"The Core name is and will be our flagship PC processor brand going forward," Sean Maloney, Intel executive vice … Read more

Intel has revealed some details about its next-generation processor platform, which it has developed under the code name Nehalem.

According to an article on Expreview.com, the processors based on Nehalem architecture will be called Core i7, and Intel will introduce the Core i7 name next Monday. The significance of the i7 moniker is lost on me. Care to posit any theories, Crave readers?

Let's quickly recap Intel's tick-tock cadence model of shrinking the size of its chips with one release followed by the introduction of new chip architecture with the next release.

Tick: The latest Core 2 … Read more

Intel has scores of futuristic, potentially game-changing research projects but Nehalem is bet-the-farm reality. The first Nehalem chips--and the first drops of what should become a giant revenue stream--will arrive later this year. So, it is not surprising that real silicon and real systems are starting to appear.

What is Nehalem exactly? The architecture will scale from two to eight processor cores, have faster chip-to-chip communication (Intel calls this technology QuickPath), do a better job of adjusting performance levels to suit power needs, and have a higher level of integration (more logic will be built directly onto the processor die). … Read more

Intel announced on Monday that it will be presenting a paper at Siggraph 2008 about its "many-core" Larrabee architecture, which will be the basis of future Intel graphics processors.

The paper itself, however, has already been published, and I was able to get a copy of it. (Unfortunately, as you'll see at that link, the paper is normally available only to members of the Association for Computing Machinery.)

The paper is a pretty thorough summary of Intel's motives for developing Larrabee and the major features of the new architecture. Basically, Larrabee is about using many simple x86 cores--more than you'd see in the central processor (CPU) of the system--to implement a graphics processor (GPU). This concept has received a lot of attention since Intel first started talking about it last year.

… Read more