June 01 2004:

Following on from last months article regarding the End of the Megahertz Myth, it has become increasingly obvious that the megahertz madness of recent times had reached a dead end, and that not only Intel, but all of the chip giants had to find another way to continue ramping future CPU performance, without relying on faster clock speeds. There are many of ways of improving performance of central processing units including larger Caches, FSB, adding media/vector processing extensions such as Altivec and SSE, branch and memory pre-fetch, out of order execution mechanisms, etc. All of these techniques have proven to be of great value in improving performance, but they have always been coupled with increased clock frequencies to deliver the end results. Another way of improving performance is to enable the execution of multiple threads at the same time. Intel’s first implementation was Hyperthreading, which virtually splits the CPU into 2 cores.

Although not as powerful as true Multi processor systems, it did prove an advantage in CPU intensive applications, and hinted at what was to come.
The next logical step is to implement dual CPU cores on a single die. The benefits are two fold. A dual-core chip is basically two separate processors on a single chip. Those two processors can outperform single-core processors on multithreaded applications while running at significantly lower clock speeds, thus consuming far less power. Now from all forecasts the shift to dual core processors was still a good 18-24 months away, but with the woes being suffered by Intel with the recent Prescott core, which in turn lead to the surprise announcement of the cancelling of the Tejas project- (the last Hoorah of the Megahurtz Monster Netburst architecture), dual Core CPU roadmaps have been fast tracked by a good 12 months. This means by this time next year, Intel will have a dual core Desktop CPU based on the Dothan –Pentium M micro architecture. Although this chip will be clocking in around the 2 Ghz region, (Instead of 4Ghz), performance wise it will leave the Netburst based Prescott in the dust, run way cooler, and in general, give the full benefits a true dual processor system. AMD and IBM/Apple are not going to be left out of the Dual Core band Wagon either, with AMD already announcing plans of Dual core Opterons, and IBM, rumour has it, also have Dual core chips in development.

For quite a while now, we have been picking up snippets of information thru the tech channel that Chipzilla (Intel) were planning on shifting to dual core designs for all of their processor families from the Itanium down. Now while all of this was of some interest for the propellor heads amongst us, it really wasn’t causing too many waves due to it not expecting to surface for quite a while. Codenames like Jonah, Conroe, and Merom were popping up on leaked Roadmaps, and were causing quite a bit of speculative chatter, while Intel, as expected, held there official line of not denying or confirming any of the leaked reports. All that changed quite dramatically on the 7th of May when Intel officially announced that they were cancelling the Tejas/Jawhawk line of CPU’s, and instead will deliver Dual core solutions within the allotted time frame that was originally scheduled for the previous netburst based chips. Gone are the funky Codenames, instead the only information that is confirmed now is that the cores will be based on an enhanced Dothan Pentium M Core, they will be 64 bit capable and will most likely be manufactured on a .65 Micron process.