IDF: Intel’s new products uphold Moore’s Law

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 17 April 2007 17:02

Your IT - Entertainment

 

For those who live in a world of servers and high-end workstations, you can also get access to a speed boost, with Intel’s Pat Gelsinger saying we should expect gains up to an estimated 45 per cent for bandwidth intensive applications; and a 25 per cent increase for servers using Java. Intel’s release says that “These indicators were derived from pre-production 45nm Hi-k Intel Xeon processors with 1600 MHz front side bus for workstation and HPC, and a 1333 MHz front side bus for servers versus today’s quad-core Intel Xeon X5355 processors”.

Gelsinger also spoke of a new ‘highly parallel, IA-based programmable architecture codenamed Larrabee. Intel says that “It will be easily programmable using many existing software tools, and designed to scale to trillions of floating point operations per second (Teraflops) of performance. The Larrabee architecture will include enhancements to accelerate applications such as scientific computing, recognition, mining, synthesis, visualisation, financial analytics and health applications”.

Servers also get the magic acceleration juice thanks to “Intel QuickAssist Technology”. Intel’s release says this is “a comprehensive initiative to optimise the use of accelerators in servers. Accelerators increase the performance of a single function, like security encryption or financial computation, while reducing power consumption.  This initiative includes support for acceleration using IA-based multi-core processors and third party accelerators working together in Intel-based servers, and developing new integrated accelerators inside the IA-based processor itself”.

Next up to be unveiled was a “family of enterprise-class ‘system-on-chip’ (Soc)’ products
 that integrate several key system components into a single Intel architecture-based processor”. Called “Tolapai” and due in 2008, it’s to reduce the chip sizes by up to 45 per cent and power consumption by approximately 20 per cent compared to a standard four-chip design, while improving throughput performance and processor efficiency. Tolapai will include the new Intel QuickAssist Integrated Accelerator technology.

More good news for server lovers revolves around Intel’s high-end multi-processor servers (codenamed “Caneland”). Intel’s release says that “the quad- and dual-core Intel Xeon processor 7300 series will arrive in the third quarter in 80- and 50-watt versions for blades. The new servers will complete [Intel’s transition to their] Intel Core microarchitecture for Xeon processors. Sun Microsystems demonstrated its Solaris operating system running on an Intel Xeon 5100 series processor based system using Intel Dynamic Power technology, a new capability focused on reducing the power required for a memory subsystem”. 

Intel also spoke about their goals for “processor performance and energy efficiency”, with Justin Rattner, Intel’s CTO, noting that “Intel will be able to drive down power consumption by a factor of 10 for the ultra mobile computing segment by 2010”.

They also want to create future processors at Teraflops speeds, with Rattner urging the industry to “work together to take advantage of this raw processing power”. They also talked about the demonstration 80-core processor seen earlier this year, around which the next stage of Intel’s tera-scale research will be based around.

All in all, for day one of Intel’s IDF, it’s clear that technology isn’t standing still, and is doing everything they can do out-do AMD. No doubt AMD have a few more surprises up their sleeve to keep Intel on their toes, but for now, Intel’s future is looking very bright. I just hope that all of these fabulous sounding technologies come down to consumer level ever faster at affordable price points, ensuring that as many people as possible get access to the technologies that let us do more and be more productive.

Alex Zaharov-Reutt travelled to the Beijing Spring IDF as a guest of Intel.