Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"AMD showed off a new platform at CES called Yukon that featured a new single-core Athlon Neo processor. The HP machine featuring the platform was very thin (think MacBook Air) and looked fantastic. HP is set to begin shipping the notebook in 2009. EWeek reports that AMD will also be fielding a dual-core version of its Neo processor that will be part of the Congo platform. Congo and the dual-core Neo are reportedly set to launch later in 2009. Congo will be a platform for new types of ultraportable laptops. AMD was very clear in meetings at CES that the Neo was not for the netbook market."

I haven't had a chance to benchmark the Neo CPU, but coming in at 15 watts, it's a power-hungry beast compared to the Intel Atom chip (which sips a dainty 2.4 watts under load) - yet even though it runs at the same 1.6 Ghz as the current Atom, it's said to offer more performance. The biggest difference between the Neo CPU and the Intel Atom is that the Neo CPU is paired with a nice ATI graphics solution on the HP dv2, whereas all Intel Atom-based systems I've seen are paired with the entirely useless Intel graphics solution. I like seeing Intel having competition, so I wish AMD well with this line of CPUs.

"Regardless of what internal opinion of the Atom processor is at Intel, the roadmap for the processor is moving forward and the next stop is the dual core Atom 330 desktop processor. Like its Atom 230 sibling, the Atom 330 is based on Intel's 45nm fab process and will incorporate HyperThreading technology -- in the case of the Atom 330, the processor will appear to have four cores within the operating system. According to Register Hardware, the dual core Atom 330 processors will be soldered onto Intel's upcoming 945GX-based D945GCLF2 motherboard which supports up to 2GB of DDR2 memory."

Normally I'd be excited about this, but just last week I placed a pre-order for the MSI Wind with a 6-cell battery...and now this new dual-core CPU looks like it would be pretty sweet. Although it's hard to say what would happen to the power consumption and pricing of the MSI Wind if it came with one of these CPUs. My personal circumstances aside, it's great to see more performance coming in these ultra-low power processors.

"The impending launch of Intel's Nehalem processor in Q4 2008 already has the hardware community buzzing. Nehalem has already shaped up to appear quite the performance beast. With the power of eight logical cores (four physical, doubled by hyper-threading) built on a 45 nm process to leverage, it's shaping up to be a strong offering. The new processor will feature QuickPath, Intel's answer to AMD's HyperTransport, an on-chip memory controller, SSE4 instruction support, and an 8 MB cache pool. Chips have already been demoed running at 3.2 GHz, so early indications are that Intel has had relatively little process problems."

These new processors look great, but the hard truth is that even with four hyper-threaded cores rocking eight threads, unless software breaks through the current barrier of being coded for a single core (or maybe two if you're lucky), performance isn't going to go up by very much. Leveraging multiples cores matters the most when it comes to media encoding, and the problem is that most developers don't seem to be able to code their applications to take advantage of multiple cores. I've read that it's difficult to code applications to encode in parallel, but software developers have had a few years to figure this out - and I'm consistently disappointed with almost every piece of software I try. If Intel wants people be excited about their muti-core CPUs, they might need to take a few million dollars and develop a truly kick-ass multi-threaded encoder - then give it away for free so it can be adopted by all of the companies who make video editing software.

"Intel has disclosed details on a chip that will compete directly with Nvidia and ATI and may take it into unchartered technological and market-segment waters. Larrabee will be a stand-alone chip, meaning it will be very different than the low-end--but widely used--integrated graphics that Intel now offers as part of the silicon that accompanies its processors. And Larrabee will be based on the universal Intel x86 architecture."

I was wondering what Intel was up to, and it seems they're doing what Intel does best: CPU stuff. Larrabee is really going to be a bunch of CPUs on a card, and not a GPU-based solution that early speculation thought it was going to be. CPU's tend to be vastly less efficient at 3D graphics than dedicated GPUs, which is why we've seen the industry adopt dedicated GPUs as the solution of choice for 3D gaming. Intel's approach is quite interesting - one the one hand, it seems foolish to ask a CPU to do a GPU's job. Having eight CPUs on a card might be an expensive, power-hungry approach. Read more...

"Two years ago in Taiwan at Computex 2006 Gary Key and I stayed up all night benchmarking the Core 2 Extreme X6800, the first Core micro-architecture (Conroe core) CPU we had laid our hands on. While Intel retroactively applied its tick-tock model to previous CPU generations, it was the Core micro-architecture and the Core 2 Duo in particular that kicked it all off. At the end of last year we saw the first update to Core, the first post-Conroe "tick" if you will: Penryn. Penryn proved to be a nice upgrade to Conroe, reducing power consumption even further and giving a slight boost to performance. What Penryn didn't do however was shake the world the way Conroe did upon its launch in 2006."



Intel has had a "tick tock" strategy for years: the "tick" is a relatively minor, but still important improvement in their CPU (such as moving from 65nm down to 45nm), and the "tock" is a big leap forward (such as a new microarchitecture). Nehalem is a big step forward, and based on AnandTech's early preview, we're going to be seeing 30% to 40% improvements in a variety of areas such as media encoding. I can't wait!

"Intel says it will ship quad-core chips designed specifically for laptops later this year. The quad-core chips, most likely for desktop replacement laptops, will be based on the Core 2 Duo microarchitecture and will ship in the third quarter, Intel officials said. Intel declined comment on chip details, though enthusiast Web sites reported the chip is Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX9300. The chips will be manufactured using the new 45-nanometer process. The chip will be released after Intel's Centrino 2 platform, code-named Montevina, is launched in the second quarter. Montevina is an upgrade to the current Centrino mobile platform that puts WiMax and Wi-Fi networking capabilities on a single chip. Montevina will include processors based on the Core 2 microarchitecture and the quad-core notebook processor could be included in the platform."

Quad-core CPUs in a laptop? Hell yeah! It would be great to have that kind of power for media editing - as long as the software you're using takes full advantage of all four cores. It's great to see Intel pushing forward with their Quad Core CPUs - it amazes me that you can get an Intel Core 2 Quad for under $250.