August 18th, 2008
Before Intel’s big show, AMD launches an attack
With Intel’s annual conference set to start this week, AMD launched a pre-emptive strike in a press conference on Friday.
AMD executives said the processor innovations you’ll hear about next week are imitations of technology they introduced as much as five years ago, and Intel’s Larrabee graphics architecture remains little more than a PowerPoint slide. For its part, AMD did not announce any new products or changes to its roadmap, but they said the company had gotten its “swagger” back, releasing a string of competitive PC platforms and graphics products this year.
This week Intel will release more details on its Nehalem architecture, the first iteration of which is now known as Core i7. Randy Allen, the senior vice president of AMD’s computing division, said many innovations in Core i7 are really imitations of features such as the integrated memory controller and HyperTransport already in AMD processors.
“I guess on one level it is sort of gratifying. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” Allen said. “But on another level it is somewhat annoying . . . [Nehalem is] not rewriting the book, but rather imitating or photocopying our innovations.”
August 12th, 2008
Review roundup: AMD’s Radeon 4870 X2 delivers
AMD has been on a roll lately with its Radeon 4800 series GPUs, and with the official introduction of the Radeon 4870 X2, it can now claim the world’s fastest 3D gaming card.
The Radeon 4870 X2 combines two of AMD’s fastest GPU, the RV770, each clocked at 750MHz on a single graphics card for a total of 1,600 stream processors. It is also the first card to offer 1GB of GDDR5 graphics memory, which supports higher data rates than GDDR3. Asus, Diamond Multimedia, Gigabyte, MSI, Palit, Sapphire and several other board makers will offer Radeon 4870 X2 graphics cards for around $550. These should be available immediately. AMD also announced a dual-GPU version of the Radeon 4850 (625MHz GPUs, 1,600 stream processors and 2GB GDDR3 memory), which will be available in September at around $400.
The Radeon 4870 X2 competes directly with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 280. When Nvidia launched the GTX 280 and GTX 260 in June, it said the high-end cards would cost about $650, but you can now find them for significantly less.
Given the strong performance of the Radeon 4850 and 4870 (also launched in June), it is little surprise that dual-GPU versions would post impressive scores (several enthusiast sites jumped the gun and posted previews last month). The final reviews confirm that AMD has grabbed the lead in performance–at least for now. The difference is clear, especially on demanding games such as Crysis at high resolutions with high-quality settings.
The Radeon 4870 X2 and 4850 X2 can be used in CrossFireX mode (two cards), but the performance here did not scale as you would expect. In the press release, AMD states CrossFireX will deliver about three times the performance of a single Radeon 4870 graphics card on “some games,” but few games really take advantage of the extra GPUs, and in some cases, a single Radeon 4870 X2 graphics card outperforms three GPUs. Eventually drivers and games will be better-optimized for CrossFireX and Nvidia’s SLI, but since the Radeon 4870 X2 provides plenty of horsepower for nearly all current games, it’s hard to complain too much about CrossFireX.
AMD ATI Radeon 4870 X2 reviews:
August 11th, 2008
Via stops making chipsets for Intel, AMD systems
And then there were three . . .
After months of rumors, Taiwan-based Via Technologies has confirmed that it will stop producing chipsets for PCs that use Intel and AMD processors. A company spokesperson told the hardware site Custom PC that the third-party chipset business was on its way out, and said Via would instead focus on developing entire PC platforms.
Via is best-known for producing the chipsets and low-power processors found in small-form factor desktops. More recently, it has received a lot of press for its work on netbooks. HP uses Via’s C-7 chip in its Mini-Note 2133, and at the Computex tradeshow in June, Via announced a new chip, the Nano, which competes head-to-head with Intel’s Atom.
With chipsets, however, the writing was on the wall. In the second quarter, Via and its S3 Graphics joint venture combined shipped 1.1 million GPUs, or 1% of the total market; in the same quarter last year it shipped 6.26 million, representing nearly 8% of the market, according to Jon Peddie Research. Meanwhile Intel has grown its share to more than 47% of the total GPU market, followed by Nvidia and AMD.
The introduction of new graphics technology, such as SLI/CrossFire and hybrid graphics, as well as the new memory interface in Intel’s upcoming Core i7, have made it more challenging for third parties to license the necessary technology and develop chipsets.
Via said it will continue to develop chipsets for its own Nano chip, following the trend set by Intel, and more recently AMD, of selling entire platforms, rather than individual PC components, which are becoming increasingly commoditized. Earlier this month the newswire DigiTimes reported that Nvidia had told motherboard makers it was preparing to exit the chipset business as well, but the company quickly denied it.
August 11th, 2008
Intel’s Nehalem gets a new name
The next version of Intel’s processor family for high-performance desktops will be known as the Core i7. The China-based hardware site Expreview.com first reported the new name on Friday, and Intel made it official over the weekend.
Core i7 is the name for chips that use a new microarchitecture known as Nehalem. In Intel’s parlance, this is a “tock,” meaning the i7 uses the same 45nm manufacturing process as the current Penryn processors (a “tick”), but it is the first major design change since the Core 2 architecture. New features include two threads per core (the return of Hyper Threading), an on-die memory controller–a feature AMD offers in Phenom desktop and Opteron server chips–and a new cache subsystem. Some enthusiast sites have already posted promising numbers on early, pre-production systems using i7 processors.
The new microarchitecure will be used in desktop processors with up eight processing cores, and eventually in mobile processors as well. Though Intel hasn’t discussed specific products yet, many sites have reported that the initial Core i7 processors in production in the fourth quarter will be at 2.66GHz ($284), 2.93GHz ($562) and 3.2GHz ($999). The latter is an Extreme Edition processor; these will now be distinguished by a black Core i7 logo.
Intel said Core i7 it is the first of several new names that it will roll out over the next year.
August 5th, 2008
The lowdown on Intel’s Larrabee
With Siggraph 2008 starting next week and IDF (Intel Developer Forum) on its heels, Intel is revealing more details of its mysterious Larrabee project. Intel has finally stated unequivocally that its “many-core” architecture will be used in desktop add-in boards for 3D gaming that compete directly with AMD and Nvidia GPUs–at least initially, though there are other applications as well.
The latest presentation has a lot of technical detail on the architecture–which is very different from the typical massively-parallel GPU–but it raises as many questions as it answers. The exact number of cores (8 to 32?), the size of the chip, how much power it will consume, and of course how it will actually perform on 3D games all remain big question marks. In his Speeds and Feeds blog, Peter N.Glaskowsky notes that a Larrabee chip with 32 1GHz cores could theoretically exceed a teraflop–around the performance of today’s fastest GPUs, Nvidia’s GX280 and AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 4870–but it would probably be commercially impractical even for Intel. Curiously there’s little mention of ray-tracing anymore. Larrabee uses the same DirectX and OpenGL APIs as ordinary GPUs to run games, but it goes about it in a very different way; Ars Technica has a nice analysis of how Larrabee renders 3D frames in software, rather than in hardware as in a GPU.
Since Larrabee-based add-in boards won’t be available until early 2010, it is little surprise that product details are still sketchy, and it is too early to tell how it will really stack up to true discrete GPUs , a market completely dominated by AMD and Nvidia. Intel has failed here before, but given its vast resources, you can’t count it out. In a research note, industry analyst Jon Peddie predicted that Intel will ship 46 million Larrabee “GPUs” in 2010. The total market for discrete GPUs was 350 million units last year.
More coverage of Larrabee:
- Larrabee: Intel’s biggest leap since the Pentium Pro [Ars Technica]
- Intel’s Larrabee–more and less than meets the eye [Speeds and Feeds]
- Intel details future ‘Larrabee’ graphics chip [Nanotech: The circuits blog]
- Intel’s Larrabee Graphics To Take On Nvidia, ATI … In 2010 [ChannelWeb]
July 24th, 2008
Intel launches new chip for consumer electronics
In its latest bid to expand beyond PCs and servers into industrial and consumer electronics applications, Intel has announced a new family of embedded processors.
These chips are not based on the Atom processor already used in netbooks and Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs)–those versions won’t arrive until sometime next year. Rather the EP80579 family consists of eight chips all based on the Pentium M core, running at speeds from 600MHz to 1.2GHz. These are System-On-Chip designs (SoCs), meaning that in addition to the core processor a single chip also integrates system-level functions. In this case, that includes the memory controller, I/O controller hub and, on some chips, RISC-based accelerators for specialized tasks such as data encryption.
Initially these SoCs will be used primarily as microcontrollers for industrial applications. Intel is seeking to capitalize on what it sees as a trend toward making everything from ATM machines to VoIP controllers more like PCs with higher performance and more powerful networking capabilities. Though it gave few details, Intel said it has more than 50 customers working on 15 different designs based on its “Smart SoCs.” Eventually Intel hopes to push its SoCs into a wide range of consumer electronics including set-top boxes, TVs and in-car entertainment systems.
By integrating the functions of up to four different chips on a single piece of silicon, Intel said its SoCs are 45 percent smaller and use 34 percent less power. They are still, however, too power hungry at 11 watts to 21 watts to be used in many portable devices. By comparison, the ARM-based chips found in many smartphones typically require less than 2 watts.
That is why future SoCs will be based on the 45nm Atom chip, which will not only use less power but should also cost less. The EP80579 SoCs range from $40 to $95, while the simplest Atom-based SoCs could start around $3. Atom-based SoCs will reportedly include Canmore (later this year) and Sodaville (2009) SoCs for consumer electronics, new embedded processors (2009), and Moorestown for MIDs (2009-2010). Eventually these SoCs will have multi-core processors and contain hundreds of millions of transistors. All told, the versatile Atom will cover three markets: MIDs, netbooks and embedded processing.
Intel is renewing its effort as its main competitor is moving away from consumer electronics. Last week AMD took an $876 million charge to exit the handheld and digital TV businesses, which were part of the company’s $5.4 billion acquisition of ATI in 2006. AMD will release a new processor, code-named Bulldozer, for low-cost PCs, an area where higher-end, Atom-based netbooks and low-end, Celeron M-based laptops are beginning to overlap, but this is a different market.
That’s not to say there aren’t direct competitors in this space; there are plenty of them cranking out ARM-, MIPs- and PowerPC-based embedded processors including Broadcom, Freescale, Samsung, STMicro and Texas Instruments. And Marvell designs and sells processors for storage and networking products using the same ARM-based XScale technology from Intel’s last foray in this area. But Intel believes the time is right, and that an x86-based design that is compatible with existing software and relatively easy to program will finally crack these markets.
More coverage of the EP80579 SoC family announcement:
- Intel marches once again into microcontroller market [EDN]
- Intel starts foray into SoC market [EE Times]
- Intel’s Embedded Processors Destined for New Gadgets [eWeek]
- Intel Revamps Its System-on-Chip Designs [Information Week]
- Intel Welcomes Home Integrated Chips [PC Magazine]
- Intel Takes on Embedded Market With Atom Chip [PC World]
- Intel Smart SoC — The Move to Purpose-Built Chips [Technology@Intel]
- Intel launches chips that will bring Internet to everyday devices [Venture Beat]
- Intel Brings Out Multifunction Chips In Bid to Diversify [WSJ]
- Intel chip launch targets robots, cars and TV [ZDNet UK]
John Morris is a former executive editor at CNET Networks and senior editor at PC Magazine. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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