40 Percent More Performance With 40 Percent Less Power
Intel Corp. senior fellow and chief technology officer Justin Rattner kicked off the chipmaker's spring Developer Forum by demonstrating Intel's new microarchitecture in style: showing how the "Conroe" desktop CPU coming later this year provides roughly a 40-percent boost in performance and 40-percent decrease in power consumption compared to today's Pentium D 950 processor.
Scheduled to ship in the third quarter of 2006 with 65-nanometer-process engineering, the new microarchitecture will appear in dual-core CPUs bearing the Intel Core name, although different from the Core Duo platform launched in January: According to Rattner, Intel's new design combines the power-saving philosophy begun with the Pentium M and speed-boosting technologies such as wide data pathways and streaming instructions taken from the Pentium 4.
New technologies in the new microarchitecture include what Intel calls Wide Dynamic Execution, which performs more instructions per clock cycle -- up to four at once using a 14-stage pipeline -- and Advanced Digital Media Boost that executes all 128-bit SSE, SSE2, and SSE3 instructions within a single cycle. Advanced Smart Cache uses a shared Level 2 cache that can be devoted to one core when the other is idle, while Smart Memory Access hides memory latency and optimizes the use of data bandwidth to the memory subsystem. Finally, Intelligent Power Capability yields cooler-running, more energy-efficient CPUs by intelligently powering on individual logic subsystems only when needed.
Intel senior VP Pat Gelsinger added that Conroe will be part of a "professional business platform" with enhanced IT security and manageability plus Intel Virtualization for Directed I/O, which will assign I/O devices to virtual machines. Both VMware and Microsoft execs joined Gelsinger on stage to pledge their support for the latter specification.
Finally, Gelsinger detailed plans to release three new CPUs for dual-processor servers and workstations: Sossaman, an ultra-low-power chip for server blades, will ship next week, with a new Xeon-based platform called Bensley joining it later this month. In the third quarter of 2006, Bensley products -- most drawing fewer than 100 watts -- will step aside for Woodcrest, which will cut power another 35 percent while delivering a performance boost in excess of 80 percent. Quad-core processors dubbed Clovertown (for servers) and Kentsfield (for high-end desktops) are slated for early 2007.
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