Intel's new chips extend Moore's Law, or do they?

Stuart Corner
Monday, 12 November 2007 05:28

Your IT - Home IT

According to Intel, "The move from 65nm to 45nm involves more than just a shrink of current chip designs. The processors include such additional features as new Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions 4 (SSE4), which are 47 new instructions that speed up workloads including video encoding for high-definition and photo manipulation, as well as key HPC and enterprise applications. Software vendors supporting the new SSE4 instruction set include Adobe, Microsoft and Symantec

The new processors also provide better virtualisation: virtual machine transition (entry/exit) times are improved by an average of 25 to 75 percent through hardware with no changes to software required.
A fast divider roughly doubles the speed over previous generations for computations used in nearly all applications through a technique called Radix 16. The ability to divide instructions and commands faster increases a computer's performance.

Intel has released a total of 16 new processors:
•    The Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 quad core desktop processor, is designed for games support. It features a larger L2 cache and support for new Intel SSE4 media instructions to "help bring desktop performance to 'extreme' new levels."
•    There are 15 server dual-core and quad-core 45nm Hi-k Intel Xeon processors. The 12 new quad-core chips boast clock speeds ranging from 2GHz up to 3.20GHz, with front side bus speeds (FSB) up to 1600MHz, and cache sizes of 12MB. The three new dual-core chips feature clock speeds of up to 3.40GHz, an FSB of up to 1600MHz, and cache sizes of 6MB.

The 45nm Hi-k Intel Xeon processors are compatible with server platforms using the Intel 5000 chipset family. In addition, Intel is launching three platform solutions to support 45nm processors, including: - The Intel 5400 chipset-based platform (previously codenamed Stoakley) optimised for high-bandwidth applications such as high-performance computing;
•    The Intel 5100 memory controller hub chipset and Intel ICH-9R I/O controller (previously codenamed 'Cranberry Lake'). These are cost-optimised solutions that support either one or two processors and also provide reduced power consumption using native DDR2 memory.
•    The Intel 3200 chipset-based platform (previously codenamed 'Garlow') that is specifically designed for single-processor entry servers.