Intel: Quad core to turbocharge chips

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I would rather wait for the real quad-core and not the 2 slapped together

The companies are employing very different strategies in their move to quad-core. AMD's models, due to arrive in mid-2007, will have four processing cores on a single slice of silicon.

AMD's chip will have FOUR independent cores.



In comparison, Intel combines two dual-core chips in a single package that plugs into a single chip socket. Kentsfield uses two Conroe chips, and Clovertown uses two Woodcrest chips, for example.

Intel is simply puting two copies of woddcrest in the same chip, owing to feature size reduction. This is a quick & dirty fix. The problem of four cores sharing the memory bandwidth that is sufficient for TWO cores only has not been addressed. Hopefully this problem will be taken up sooner than later. Intel has to come up with a sufficiently beefed up memory/system controller hub to comfortably support the four cores.


"The advantage we have by the approach we have is being first," Smith said. "We expect to ship very large volumes of quad-core in servers before we expect our competitors to ship any."

This is the current focus of Intel: just be there with anything that cane be called quad-core, even though it is really two dual-cores slapped together, but Intel has a presence.

The flaw is that people who are looking for the quad-cores are usially in the HPC or the high-end market and know what they need. This is not the crowd that selects technology based on PR, but on what lies under the hood. And currently under the hood you do not see an eight cylinder engine but two four cylinder ones....

Posted by: Dr_T   Posted on: 09/28/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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