Last week, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) revealed a few key details of its future strategy at the IDF (Intel Developer Forum) held in San Francisco. There have been quite a few changes to Intel's original single-core roadmap, which was abandoned in favor of a plan that calls for the delivery of dual-core desktop, server and mobile chips in 2005. The Q&A session following Paul Otellini's keynote (Paul is Intel's President and COO) was pretty interesting, although it left some questions still to be answered.
Dual-core architecture
When questioned whether the dual-core processing would be based on the Prescott or Dothan architecture, Intel's position was the company is pleased with both architectures in terms of product quality and high yields. Thus, Intel does not see the need for a new dual-core architecture and plans on having more than one dual-core design going forward. Reading between the lines, I believe that for mainstream PC users, the Prescott chips will probably ship initially with higher volumes. This is expected since the Prescott dual cores have been in production since February of this year, as opposed to the Dothan chips, which started being produced in volume three months later (in May 2004). Another key factor is that the 64-bit computing extension makes Prescott attractive with the increased uptake in 64-bit operating systems and software, expected to intensify in 2005. Prescott's thermal and power use for desktops is less stringent than what Dothan required for notebooks. That said, Intel will keep on leveraging some benefits of Dothan's lower power consumption.
Also noteworthy to mention that Intel did showcase a surprise mystery chip (holding to its promise of not trying to match AMD's little dual-core Opteron demo the previous week). [ed. note: A good friend of mine that was at the event told me of AMD's strategy to ferry folks attending IDF down the street to see its own dual-core 64-bit Opteron chip.] Codenamed "Smithfield", the new chip (it was real silicon, not simulation, according to Intel) was demonstrated running a three-way videoconferencing call with document sharing. According to some good Lehman Brothers' detective work, Intel was using a 915 Grantsdale motherboard (this board is currently used with Prescott).
High-end systems are expected to feature multi-core technology, which will feature a dual-core Intel Xeon MP processor named Tulsa, and an Itanium 2 processor codenamed Montecito (containing 1.7 billion transistors and 24MB of cache). During IDF, Intel showcased Montecito for the first time. Each of Montecito's cores is able to run two instruction threads simultaneously. The 4 processor Montecito box used in the demo ran concurrently ran 16 independent jobs. The expectation is for Montecito to yield a performance increase of 1.5 to 2 times the previous generations' performance.
Intel is bullish on the uptake of dual-core processors for servers, desktops and notebooks, starting from mid-2005 and ramping up in 2006. The company believes that by 2006:
- 85% of its server chip shipments will be dual or multi core
- 70% of its mobile chip shipments will be dual core
- 40% of its desktop chip shipments will be dual core
Intel's WiMax plans in a separate post.