Computers & Processors:

Intel's New Tune: More Than Gigahertz

Chip giant to discuss future desktop, notebook, and server chips at Microprocessor Forum.

Douglas F. Gray, Intel continued its recent trend of preaching about "more than gigahertz" at the Microprocessor Forum.

The show's opening keynote address, given by Intel Fellow Justin Rattner, focused on the future of computing systems. "It used to be speed first, everything else second; now designers are starting to prioritize different items together," Intel spokesperson Seth Walker says.

Intel introduced its vision of moving beyond gigahertz in August, when Paul Otellini, executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, said there were other ways to improve chip performance beyond simply increasing clock speed.

Rattner discussed "balancing and prioritizing power and performance, with a focus on power in particular," Walker says. Rattner also discussed some of the new system and chip designs in the industry, including thread-level parallelism, the technology on which Intel's Hyper-Threading technology is based.

Hyper-Threading, introduced at Intel's Developer Forum in August, is essentially the same technology as Simultaneous Multi-Threading, the technology Intel gained for its 64-bit Itanium processor when it agreed to purchase the intellectual property behind Compaq Computer's Alpha family of RISC (reduced instruction set computing) processors.

Hyper-Threading lets a single processor act as two processors and take two sets of instructions in order to increase performance.

Hyper-Threading is expected to be released first on Intel's Xeon chips for servers and workstations in the first half of next year, and Rattner is expected to give more details on those plans as well, Walker said. Rattner will also discuss how similar technologies can be carried over to desktop and mobile products, Walker said.

Mobile P4 a Go

Later in the day, Bob Jackson, principal engineer with Intel's mobile platforms group, gave new details on Intel's upcoming mobile Pentium 4 processors, Walker says.

"Those will include all the technologies of their [desktop] counterparts, but also some new power technology designed specifically for the mobile marketplace," Walker says.

Jackson also gave further technical disclosure on "Banias," another future mobile processor, which Intel expects to launch in 2003. "He'll talk about the difference between Banias and what we have now," Walker says.

A technology that experts expect to appear in Banias will be "micro ops fusion," in which instructions are combined for faster execution.

Future Xeons, XScale On

Dileep Bhandarkar, director of Intel enterprise architecture labs, gave an update on Intel's server and workstation roadmap. He included the first details about Intel's multiprocessor Xeon server chip, which will use Hyper-Threading and is due in 2003, Walker says.

The company will also discuss new benchmarks, showing that its next-generation 64-bit McKinley processor will demonstrate a greater increase in performance over its current 64-bit Itanium processor than Intel had expected, Walker says.

Finally, Intel Fellow Matt Adiletta will disclose plans for its future network processors, Walker says.

"These will be the first technical details for the next-generation processors based on XScale microarchitecture," he says. XScale is Intel's next step in improving its StrongARM architecture, which powers various devices running Microsoft's Pocket PC operating system. Intel has said its XScale chips will appear in everything from storage equipment to routers and cell phones.