X-bit labs

News Glance: The Essential Commentary on the Week’s Hottest News (page 4)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 06/14/2004 | 08:04 AM ]

Dual-Core Pentium 4 "Prescott" Chips – Something Apple Has Now?

We will never know how Intel saw the future of the microprocessor world when it designed the Pentium 4 processor some 5-7 years ago, but we know for sure that loads of Intel’s plans have been strongly connected with the Pentium 4’s NetBurst micro-architecture for some time now. With aborting of the Tejas and Jayhawk processors earlier this year the question emerged whether Intel will be able to deliver the LaGrande, Vanderpool and other advertised technologies, especially keeping in mind that unofficial sources said Intel canned the Tejas in favour of something Pentium M-like.

On Thursday a web-site reported about dual-core processors with two Prescott dies inside. Such solution eliminates nearly all possible problems with adding additional functionality into the chips, but creates greater issue that is called tremendous amount of heat.

Water-Cool the Future?

The week is also marked with the introduction of Apple’s new Power Mac G5 computers featuring 2.50GHz processors and water-cooling. Apple finally manages to get the speed of its chips to a very high level, however, the company runs into ultimate heat problems that could not be solved using traditional methods. Water-cooling is not considered as cost-effective and mainstream way of cooling chips down, though, with the current trend lead by Intel the situation may change.

Apple’s liquid--cooled Power Mac G5

“Dual-core microprocessors is a very promising technology that could deliver a totally new level of performance into desktops and laptops, even though, quite a lot of depends on software developers who should optimize their titles to take advantage of two physical central processing units,” said X-bit labs’ platform analyst Ilya Gavrichenkov.

Apple’s liquid-cooling device 

“However, I doubt that dual-core Prescott processors may become a widely-available product even if is made using 65nm fabrication process. Right now heat dissipation of the latest Pentium 4 core is so excessive that a couple of such cores are most probably likely to drive the heat dissipation to an unacceptable level. Well, we have already seen Apple computers with water cooling, Intel may do something like this too, but in that case dual-core Prescott would be something for enthusiasts because of the cost,” continued Ilya Gavrichenkov.

Die-Size – Something Chipmakers Must be Scary About

Another possible issue with dual-core Prescott is that the processor’s die is pretty large itself. Produced using 90nm fabrication process the die’s size is 112 square millimeters, which is larger than the company’s previous-generation processor made using 130nm process technology. Intel’s Prescott product with 2MB cache due late this year will have even bigger die and it is likely that the Prescott 2M will eventually make it to dual-core design yielding even larger size of the chip.

Even though Advanced Micro Devices definitely should not be very happy with the size of the AMD Athlon 64 for Socket 939 – 144 square millimeters, even made using 130nm, is pretty large. When transitioned to 90nm, AMD’s chips are likely to have 102 square millimeters die size, nice for single-core chips, but once they get an additional processing engine, the size will be higher than today’s AMD Opteron made using 130nm process technology.

Higher the size of the die is, lower is the yield, higher the final cost for end-users may be.

Intel Pentium M processors are fairly more silicon economical compared to the Pentium 4 and the Athlon 64 chips – with 2MB of L2 cache, the Pentium M “Dothan” chips have only 83.6 millimeters die size. Dual-core Pentium M “Dothan” processors can be the best way out for Intel – even with two processing engines and large level-two cache the chips could be pretty small.

Intel Considers Pros and Cons

Unlike Advanced Micro Devices, who has to stick to AMD Athlon 64 design, Intel really has options to choose from – Pentium M or Pentium 4. In the first case the company may have difficulties with implementing additional functionality into the processors and achieve high scalability, but in the second case the firm runs into thermal and die-size issues it needs to solve, but, on the other hand, has greater scalability in terms of clock-speeds and “no-hassle” adding of functionality. Which route will be chosen by Intel – it remains to see.

Some companies leak certain pieces of information in order to learn feedback of the industry before making certain decisions. Well, with discussions going around the future of the Pentium M and the Pentium 4 chips at this time Intel definitely has a great chance to find out what is better from customers’ standpoint.