[Pc_Support] Whoa! Intel actually re-designed it s CPU for once!

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 07:48 -0400, William Warren wrote:
> So it's not a true redeisgn jsut another tweak to the old pent 3 series?

It's actually the first major redesign since the Pentium Pro itself.
Understand this isn't merely a Centrino/Pentium-M refit to Pentium 3.
Or a simple extension of the pipelines for higher MHz like the Pentium 4
was.

The Intel Core includes major design changes in how it handles branch
prediction (which Intel _never_ took seriously -- especially not in the
IA-64/Itanium), decode (including an approach that might be a little
better than AMD's RISC86), out-of-order execution, register renaming
(although that hasn't been clarified) and many other things.  They also
changed the L1+L2 cache handling a bit -- something they haven't since
the i486.

The Intel Pentium Pro to Intel Core is about the same step forward as
the AMD Nx586/686 was to the AMD Athlon/64.

> Yes the initial number look good..but how long can Intel keep the p3 
> going?

I don't believe AMD or Intel will be radically changing their cores in
the future.  AMD has some optimizations it could make to maintain its
lead over Intel, although the Intel Core does make it a challenge once
again.

Multi-core and multi-threading across cores is the future, using the
existing cores.  Gone are the MHz games as the Intel Core is a far more
efficient processor per MHz than Pentium 4 is.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith            Professional, technical annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org      http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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