Intel Archive

"Intel introduced six new chips for notebooks on Tuesday, not long after cutting prices on its mobile processors. The chipmaker, which slashed prices on its mobile Pentium 4 and Celeron chips on Sunday, launched a new flagship 2.4GHz Pentium 4-M chip for notebooks. The chipmaker also boosted the clock speed of its mobile Celeron processor, issuing a new 2GHz mobile Celeron." Read more at ZDNet. On other CPU news, Transmeta is embedding security in its new chips.

The folks at Linux Journal used a time machine to post an article from the future about Intel's compiler for Linux, and specifically about the optimizations they used to beat gcc on benchmarks. The increasing acceptance of Linux among developers and researchers has yet to be matched by a similar increase in the number of available development tools. The recently released Intel C++ and Fortran compilers for Linux aim to bridge this gap by providing application developers with highly optimizable compilers for the Intel IA-32 and Itanium processor families.

HP and Dell, among other workstation manufacturers, have been shipping their systems with the function turned off. Right now, workstation makers say, the broad array of software used in that segment of the market doesn't take advantage of the technology yet. Users, though, can easily turn on the hyperthreading function if they wish (in the BIOS). Although the situation will change, the wrinkle in the workstation market--where Intel said users could see performance benefits of up to 30 percent on select applications--underscores the difficulties in gaining broad acceptance and use for a new technology. Only 30 apps had been fully optimized for the Pentium4 CPU in the first 9 months the chip was on sale.

Too hot to handle: Intel aims to launch the P4 3.6 GHz in mid-2003. For this exclusive report, Tom's Hardware Guide tested CPUs of the future, bringing you benchmarks for P4s in the 3.6 GHz, 3.33 GHz and 3.06 GHz variations. The article also tests against the future AMD AthlonXP 3000+ and 3400+. Update: More information on Intel's plans and technogies for the future.

Intel scientists are putting two chip cores into the same piece of silicon--with promises to improve performance by 'core hopping' and keeping the transistors cooler. Read the report at ZDNews.com. Update: In the meantime, OSNews reader Kelvin Tong tells us that HWExtreme has exclusive pictures and a preview of the AMD "Hammer" Opteron processor.

While the first generation of Itanium left many people dissapointed about its performance (mostly because people were trying to run and benchmark 32-bit code, while the CPU only shines when running native 64-bit code), it seems that Intel is back with a vengeance. The new Itanium2, ready to ship in a few months, scores some very good results in the CPU/compiler intense, industry standard benchmark, SPEC. While its integer capabilities are average to good, its floating point ones is the best thing out there today, scoring even better than the IBM Power4 (which includes a whopping 128 MB of cache). What's very interesting in the results is that both the Power4 and the Itanium2 score poorly on MesaGL, Perl and gzip tests but they are adequate on the gcc test. This is possibly because they're optimized for heavily streaming operations, big matrices. For a short commentary on the results check here. AMD Opteron SPEC results are not available yet.

"Announced last autumn, Intel's Hyper-Threading technology has finally made it to market, courtesy of the latest Xeon processors. Hyper-Threading is a clever way of making a single chip operate like two separate devices without implementing two cores on one die. That, claims Intel, makes for higher performance without having to resort to significantly larger chips or even adding a second processor to the system." The story is at TheRegUS. Alan Cox says that the technology can bring up to 30% more performance than the same CPU running without Hyper-Threading, but special conditions have to be met, for example, the applications need to be programmed as multi-threaded. The right hardware for the right software.

With rival AMD showcasing its Opteron systems and its new 2200+ AthlonXP, Intel Corp. released new details of its Itanium 2 chipsets within the U.S. Read the article at ExtremeTech.

The new Xeons server-oriented CPUs, known by the code name Prestonia, will be offered at 2.2GHz for $615, 2GHz for $417 and 1.8GHz for $251. The Xeons, based on the Pentium 4 architecture, are also the first to incorporate a performance-enhancing technology called hyperthreading. The new feature essentially enables a single Xeon to act like virtual dual processors. When used in conjunction with software designed for multi-CPU systems, hyperthreading can provide up to a 40 percent boost in performance compared with a same-speed Xeon with hyperthreading disabled, Intel officials said. In other hardware news, Seagate demonstrated a Serial ATA-enabled hard drive at the Intel Developer Forum today in San Francisco.

If you are the lucky owner of one of these Intel motherboard chipsets, you can now install the Intel Application Accelerator 2.0, a new performance software package for Intel-based desktop PCs. This new version brings the following enhancements: faster boot time, accelerated disk I/O for games, graphics Applications, disk utilities, and edia authoring applications, performance-enhancing data pre-fetcher for Intel Pentium 4 processor-based systems, support for 137+ GB IDE hard drives. Check a benchmark here. The download supports Windows NT4/2000, Windows 98/SE/Me & WindowsXP Home/Pro.

Rumors abound that Intel is designing 64bit extensions to it's Pentium line, in case Itanium turns out to be a flop: "Intel's decision to back the novel Itanium architecture had upset a small group of Intel engineers in Oregon, who preferred to build on the x86 legacy. When AMD released the specifications of its upcoming 64-bit chips in the summer of 2000, these ``cowboy'' engineers decided that Intel needed to match its rival. They began developing their own 64-bit extensions to the Pentium line, making sure the code was compatible with AMD's design." Update: MercuryCenter has an article about this too.

"Intel will debut the Northwood Pentium 4 chip with 2.0GHz and 2.2GHz models next week. With double the cache and DDR memory, PCs equipped with the smaller and faster new chips promise to give AMD a new level to surpass." Read the story at ZDNews.

From the Press Release: "Intel Corp today announced version 5.0 of the Intel C++ Compiler for Linux and the Intel Fortran Compiler for Linux. The compilers are specifically designed to help developers fully utilize the architectural innovations in the Intel Itanium and Pentium 4 processors, allowing for easy access to all of the performance features of Intel's latest processors." Our Take: The big news is not just to dryily report this release for Linux. The real news here is that Linux can now have an incredibly good compiler. Sharing a house with 4 ex-Be engineers in the past taught me at least one thing: the Intel compilers are many times faster (in generated executable code quality and compilation speed) than GCC 3.X and even VC++. While GCC is free and Intel's Proton costs $399, still, for professional use or for apps where execution speed matters (games or scientific software for example), Proton and VTune seems like the clear choice.