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Intel To Kick Off New Year with Yonah, Viiv

Intel 42 Comments

Yonah, a dual-core notebook chip based on a new design, will be released in January, said Keith Kresslin, director of mobile platforms marketing at Intel. It is expected to provide around 68 percent better performance than current Intel notebook chips, which sport one processing core. Computers with Yonah will also be better than PCs today at running many applications at once, he said.

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42 Comments

  1. 2005-12-14 2:22 pm
    nimble

    So how do you pronounce “Viiv”? And why can’t they pick a name where you don’t have to ask that?

    • 2005-12-14 2:29 pm
      Thom Holwerda

      Vive. It’s French for “Living”.

      • 2005-12-14 3:09 pm
        sanctus

        living is “vivre” with ‘r’

        vive in french is more like; fast, bright(for color), Waked up…

        But, It wont help to find out how to pronounce it.

    • 2005-12-14 2:44 pm
      Anonymous.

      from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viiv :

      “Viiv (pronounced /ˈvaɪv/) is a brand of media center PCs announced by Intel for introduction in early 2006.”

      google isn’t nearly as helpful in answering your second question, tho ;)

      i’m guessing they think having names that no one knows how to pronounce is somehow “cool”…

  • 2005-12-14 4:04 pm
    peejay

    You could pronounce it in Roman as “VI IV”.

    (I guess they thought that this was cooler [or easier to pronounce] than LXIV. ;)

  • 2005-12-14 2:36 pm
    Anonymous

    Will come the MacWorld Conference where Steve Jobs will be hosting the show with possibly the new Mactel machines.

    http://www.macworldexpo.com/live/20/

    I pray for a flash based, cd less 17″ PowerBook with 2-3 days of battery life and a powered Superdrive (eventual BlueRay) DVD dock with Firewire 800/400, etc., ports.

    I also hope it will as thin as a iPod Nano, won’t scratch so easily and be light as a feather with integrated Airport and iSight cam.

    This way when I come home I dock it with all my external devices and on the road it’s a joy to carry and use.

    I will visit my Apple shrine and make the appropriate offerings to my guru in Cupertino on the behalf of the computing world. ;)

    • 2005-12-14 2:44 pm
      nimble

      I pray for a flash based, cd less 17″ PowerBook

      To whom? God? The Steve? Or are they one and the same anyway? ;)

      Seriously though, what do you mean by “flash based”? No harddisk?

      • 2005-12-14 7:50 pm
        DittoBox

        Haha…I can see the counter on a desktop widget:

        You have [i]n<i/> number of writes remaining before your flash hard disk goes kuhput!

    • 2005-12-14 2:57 pm
      Anonymous

      Lol. Com’on, be serious. That’s like a wish for a 2010 computer!

      Flash based??? With flash being at most 8GB in size? You could use flash as an extra cache between the RAM and the HD. But you would still need the HD and that alone is thicker than the iPod Nano.

      And where would they put the superdrive and the isight if it was “as thing as a iPod Nano”. It seems to me you want to have the cake and eat it. (do you say that in English?)

      I doubt there will be any Powerbook updates at MacWorld. But whenever they are, they will be only a slight evolution from the current models. Maybe an iSight camera if those engineers are really good, but I doubt: if they do it will probably hit the iBook much earlier.

      You can count on integrated Airport, but that’s hardly anything new. Firewire 800 ports should also be a pretty good bet. But 2-3 days battery life??? Nah, maybe a 15% increase or so given the low consumption of Yonah (does anyone remember how much Yonah and the G4 in the current PB consume?)

      • 2005-12-14 3:35 pm
        Anonymous

        First of all, you should speak, or type, about things you don’t understand or know about. Flash based hard drives have been made by several companys like this…

        http://www.memtech.com/memtech_3.5-inch-ide-scsi-solid-state-flash-…

        Second, Samsung release a 16 GB flash drive on or around the day the nano was released. Subsuquently, we’ll have flash based notebooks by the the third quarter of 2006. They’ll be 15% lighter and have 30% faster access times.

        • 2005-12-14 3:48 pm
          Apochalypze

          However, as nice as that is…. 16GB for ‘media and design’, their market, is worthless. I could kill that with one project.

        • 2005-12-14 5:04 pm
          Anonymous

          Geez, calm down. I do think I know a lot giving the amount I read about computers. Yes, I may not know everything there is to know about it but if only those who do can speak then nobody would.

          But after having said that I am sorry to tell you your arguments don’t make any sense at all, and that from someone who claims they know.

          1-Great, Samsung has released a 16 GB flash drive. Do you think that’s enough for people’s current need? And remember that PB users are POWER users.

          2-You yourself predict flash based notebook will be releaseed in third quarter 2006. Ergo, as I predicted, that stuff won’t make MacWorld!!! That’s all I am saying and you seem to agree.

          3-Finally I had not heard about mmetech. But at least you who knew could have checked their informations. Their HD is 0.95cm thick, the iPod Nano is 0.69cm thick. So even using your precious flash HD we will never even get close to the iPod thickness!

          I am sure one day we will have flash HD in computers but that day won’t be 6th January! And to even shrink the computers past what they already are and to a thickness of less than a centimeter it will take even longer. If on top of that you want iSight and a superdrive that’s just dreaming, or looking at a very far future.

          Don’t you agree?

          • 2005-12-15 12:15 am
            Anonymous

            Why are you getting so worked up over the initial post and arguing? this isn’t good conversation or debate. Clearly the person was dreaming, or fantasizing… hence them mentioning that they were going to pray to their shrine or whatever they said. Let it rest.. we’re alound to dream aren’t we, no matter how unrealistic it may seam to you.

      • 2005-12-14 4:49 pm
        ZaNkY

        Like someone already mentioned: Flash based drives are not that far away from mass production. A couple month’s ago I read about how Samsung (I THINK, maybe another co that starts with S) developed a 32 Gb flash chip, about one inch squared.

        Can you imagine an array of those? You could EASILY have more HD space than the biggest Magnetic drives today (let’s say 1 TB, for commercially available), in the same space. Samsung said they will be releasing the tech REAL soon ;)

        As someone already mentioned 16 GB is out already.

        My point being, flash based drived is MORE than a possibility, it’s a reality. On a side note, I can’t wait to see what AMD comes out to “challenge” Yonah.

        –ZaNkY

        • 2005-12-14 5:55 pm
          Anonymous

          Flash memory fails after a large number of rewrites (around a 1000). This makes it a very bad choice as a hard drive.

          • 2005-12-14 5:59 pm
            Anonymous

            But not a bad choice for use as a kind of “RAM Disk”– for apps or your OS.

      • 2005-12-14 7:20 pm
        Anonymous

        Access times mean nothing the FLASH memory world.

        THere are 2 main ways to implement FLASH.

        NOR flash = fast read, slow write.

        NAND flash = slow read, fast write.

        Both have a limited # of writes. Both are competely unsuitable in terms of price, performance and reliability as a “cache” drive.

        What you could do is use it as bootable solid state storage, and either have a ton of RAM, or a separate harddrive to use as Virtual Memory. Using a flash drive as virtual memory will render it completely unwriteable within 10s of minutes.

        Also, because something is possible does not make it practical. The 16GB drive comes with a giant pricetag compared to a harddrive. The upside is that as long as you just used it as a boot drive and limited the amount of writing you did to it, it would run FOREVER, unlike a harddrive with a 1 year warranty.

        My future computers will consist of Flashbased drive for booting the OS, and only the OS, then have maxed out RAM, or as is much as is possible, and load all of my programs off of several drives of the next generation high capacity DVD drive (15 or 30GB). We’ll see who makes High capacity DVD-Rs or RW’s.

      • 2005-12-14 8:45 pm
        poundsmack

        8 gigs? try doing some research before you post

        http://www.bitmicro.com/ the future is now!

  • 2005-12-14 2:41 pm
    ZaNkY

    I’ve been hearing a lot of hype about Yonah lately. Can’t wait to see the benchmarks or SOME numbers to see how it performs in the real word. Is Yonah limited to laptops? I heard someplace that it was also going to be a desktop chip, but I don’t know for sure.

    If someone could let me know that would be cool. Thanks

    (looks like it could be a nice cpu for cool/quiet desktop computing)

    –ZaNkY

    • 2005-12-14 2:52 pm
      nimble

      Can’t wait to see the benchmarks or SOME numbers to see how it performs in the real word.

      Have a look here:

      http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2627&p=10

      Main conclusion:

      “At 2.0GHz, Yonah is basically equal to, if not slightly slower than an Athlon 64 X2 running at the same clock speed in virtually all of the tests we ran.”

      Is Yonah limited to laptops?

      Not really, but I don’t think there going to market it as a desktop chip, because there are still plenty of Pentium 4/Ds to sell before the all-new 64-bit Merom/Conroe arrives next summer.

  • 2005-12-14 2:56 pm
    cendrizzi

    Will Linux be able to run on the new laptops using Yonah? I heard the chipsets weren’t changing…

  • 2005-12-14 3:06 pm
    Anonymous

    Yonah is a based off of the Pentium M which is based off of the Pentium III chip. It has great (top of the charts) integer performance, but really stinky floating point performance. So, on most tasks that a laptop will be doing it will work fine. But do somthing like raytracing on this thing and the X2 will win hands down. The X2 is based off of the Athlon64 which is basicly a stripped down Opteron (infact it’s almost exactly the same chip). The outcome is that the Athlon is one powerful chip. Expect the Yonah to trump AMD in the laptop market, but the X2 will still dominate the Desktop/Workstation market.

    And no, the Yonah will make a stinky HPC chip, even though it may be dual core.

    • 2005-12-14 3:20 pm
      nimble

      Yonah is a based off of the Pentium M which is based off of the Pentium III chip. It has great (top of the charts) integer performance, but really stinky floating point performance.

      You might have to update your prejudices. Yonah has got some significant improvements in that area, some details here:

      http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2627&p=2

      While it doesn’t beat the Athlon at the same clock rate it isn’t far behind either.

      Expect the Yonah to trump AMD in the laptop market, but the X2 will still dominate the Desktop/Workstation market.

      Well, d’uh. Yonah was developed and will be marketed mainly as a laptop chip. It’s Merom&Co that AMD should be concerned about in the desktop/workstation market.

  • 2005-12-14 3:16 pm
    test

    if (nb_cores * 2 == cpu_performance * 1.68)

    {

    printf(“Architecture poorly scalable”);

    sleep(next_generation_available);

    }

    Edited 2005-12-14 15:17

    • 2005-12-14 7:45 pm
      klynch

      That only takes advantage of one core though. You need to split it into multiple threads. 😉

    • 2005-12-14 9:45 pm
      Anonymous

      that’s just ridiculous. i wouldn’t expect a 2x speedup in any case, even with multiple threads. some processes just can’t be executed in parallel. i’m guessing you’ve never done any SMP work.

  • 2005-12-14 3:43 pm
    Anonymous

    Yonah is slightly slower than an Athlon 64 X2 running at the same clock speed. To put it into other terms, Intel’s cutting edge chip is slightly slower than AMDs lowest performing X2 chip. Wow. And that makes some people excited about Intel? Reminds me to Windows people who get excited about new feature in Windows which Unix had for ages.

    • 2005-12-14 4:06 pm
      eMagius

      Or to put it yet another way, Intel’s new notebook chip is just slightly slower than AMD’s cutting-edge desktop (not workstation/server) chip.

      And of course Intel has its real next-gen chips coming out later in 2006: Merom and Conroe. Yonah is just an interim release.

    • 2005-12-14 5:03 pm
      Anonymous

      “Intel’s cutting edge chip is slightly slower than AMDs lowest performing X2 chip”

      ok, but:

      “In fact, a 2.0GHz Yonah under 100% load consumes less power than an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ at idle.”

      so, if you want a silent PC or good mobility, you should compare a 100% loaded Yonah to an idling, 0% loaded Athlon… can you guess who is faster in this situation? ;)

      Or you can put it in this way, a PC with the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ at full load would eat power and spread heat as a hipothetic PC with 4 Yonha CPUs… so, for the second time, can you guess who would be faster?

      • 2005-12-14 7:13 pm
        somebody

        AMD. (as in all last years)

        Your Intel setup will be too expensive for sane people to even think about buying:) Now Yonah 2.0 is top of the line at Intel dual core line, 3800+ is going soon out of resale since it is so old.

        Second thing is that you can’t expect 4x power from 4 CPUs. So yes, as much as Yonah is already laging behind 3800+, one would take 2 4800+x2 and there’s no chance 4xYonah would even come near. And 2×4800+x2 would be probably cheaper than 4-way Yonah.

        Checked the prices of 4-way systems recently?

        so, if you want a silent PC

        Then stop, being cheap and buy your self a good cooling system

        [i]<or good mobility/I>

        Have you tested Yonah to be so sure? They said positive things only about 1.8 Centrino setup too. After half hour I just returned to my older notebook.

        • 2005-12-14 7:57 pm
          klynch

          “Checked the prices of 4-way systems recently?”

          And which 4 way systems would you be refering to? Surely not a mass marketed chip like an x86 class processor! Sure the price of such a currently hypothetical processor would be expensive, but like everything after the initial release the price would come down.

          • 2005-12-14 10:04 pm
            rayiner

            And which 4 way systems would you be refering to?

            Four way systems are easy to build these days, with dual core processors. You could easily put together a very good 4-way Opteron system for $3000 ($1500 for CPUs, $500, $1000 for other stuff).

          • 2005-12-14 10:54 pm
            somebody

            Read carefully what original parent said.

            as a hipothetic PC with 4 Yonha CPUs

            Meaning 4 Yonah CPUs, each 2 cores = 8 cores all together. If I think correctly this would still be 4-way with 8 cores (but I might be wrong here, feel free to correct me).

            system with 2-CPUs (not 2 cores) (and whetever number of cores you imagine for each cpu it doesn’t matter) is not so overpriced (just as you said it), more than 2 is.

        • 2005-12-14 10:45 pm
          somebody

          First to clear possible mistakes. I don’t say one core is better than two. Parent specificaly reffered to 4-way dualcore.

          And which 4 way systems

          Any? In any time?

          Just search for lowest price and then say what you said. And start with 4-ways parent mentioned. Cores don’t count here.

          A little history coding fun

          #define FOREVER true

          Multicore != multiway_HW_system;

          while (FOREVER) {

          price_of_multiway_HW_system != cheap;

          multiway_HW_system_price = (money^way);

          }

          multiway system can contain multicore CPUs, not other way around. Their only usage is found in servers mostly (or places where processing power counts, and money doesn’t matter). 2-way system can be still bought at some resonable price, more than 2-way not.

        • 2005-12-15 7:07 am
          Anonymous

          “AMD. (as in all last years) ”

          Ah, ok, if you say, in Watt per Watt comparison, that a 0% loaded CPU may be faster than a 100% CPU, I can expect you to say anything…

  • 2005-12-14 4:05 pm
    anatol

    What about “performance per Watt” ratio ?

    TDP of 49 Watts compared to 27W (Dothan) or 25W Turion MT

    doesnt looks good.

    • 2005-12-14 7:26 pm
      Wes Felter

      Yonah’s TDP is 31W. But I read an article recently where Intel said the average power was lower than Dothan.

  • 2005-12-14 4:52 pm
    Anonymous

    Apple DVR = (new)Mac Mini + Yonah + Viiv + Front Row 2.0 + (new)Video Express + (new)content agreements with movie studios for streaming to the home

    Look for it.

    Tivo watch out. Blockbuster watch out.

  • 2005-12-14 7:33 pm
    Anonymous

    Modern flash drives with logic to spread out writes evenly have a reliability rating comperable to, if not better than mechanical magnetic drives and offer some benefits such as faster, uniform seek times, quick access, and fast sustained writes.

    The real issue against flash is cost. IIRC, the 4gb nano’s flash costs apple ~48$. Lets assume that advances in technology have halved that number. Thats 6$ per gigabyte. 40, 60, and 80 gig drives would cost 240, 360, and 480 USD respectively in flash components alone, tack on another 60 to manufacture a drive based on this and you have 300-540 USD for a drive. Now, thats not exactly rediculously expensive, but a similar magnetic drive would run 50-100 USD or even less.

    A flash drive is also a poor choice for a ram drive, as writes are more frequent than traditional disk use. I said above that flash is as reliable as a magnetic drive, but thats no reason to press your luck either. An ideal “RAM drive” would be exactly that, RAM with an IDE interface. Now, if you meant something more like a system drive (stores OS/Applications, has no swap/ram-drive) then I’d agree with you, but you’d still need a magnetic drive for the bulk of your storage.

    Large, cheap flash drives are coming, but they’re not here yet.

  • 2005-12-14 8:44 pm
    Anonymous

    I guess the notebook with Yonah that will be released in January 2006 will be the new Apple’s iBook. Other companies don’t have any special agreement with Intel, and they will not be ready. It’s always this way.

    • 2005-12-15 2:02 am
      jtrapp

      Is Apple going to set themselves up as de facto beta testers for intel? Maybe Apple will announce something based on Yonah…maybe even demo it…but I can’t imagine Apple trusting this stage of their transition to an untested cpu.