Many ills on the premature delivery of Intel dual-core

Intel

At the hot Chips Conference at Stanford University, an Intel engineer confessed that Intel's first dual-core Pentium D processor was a sloppy design, and the company soon launched the product more to get into the dual-core era before rival AMD.

Jonathan Douglas, chief engineer at Intel's digital enterprise, said Intel hastily designed a dual-core Smithfield processor in 2004 after realising that the single core processor was facing development difficulties. Douglas acknowledges that the design team's energies have faced many challenges in moving from high-end single core processors to dual-core processors. Intel cannot design a new memory bus for a dual-core processor in a very short time, so it has to follow the bus architecture of the original Pentium 4. This architecture can handle two separate single core processors, but it performs far less efficiently than the two independent buses of the Paxville processor or the integrated memory controller in the AMD processor.

At the same time, Intel's testing tools and processes have been designed for single core processors, so companies have to rush to prepare a new dual-core processor test process. In addition, engineers have to redesign the Pentium D package, the two chips in a separate package, as in the future Presler, but the design team did not have enough time to do the work, so the two Pentium The 4 cores are tightly integrated into a piece of silicon to form the Pentium D, which leads to problems, such as the logical coordination between the two cores is not balanced and the signal transmission is not ideal. At the same time, Intel had to design a thermal diode within the processor to monitor the temperature of the two high-speed processor cores.

Conclusion: Intel does not seem to have any good solutions to the pressure of the full range of AMD's dual core processors. Not only the dual core Xeon has not appeared, even the desktop version of Pentium D also exposed the dual core release too hasty report.
　　
Intel Executive Chief Engineer for desktop and server processors Jonathan Douglas, at Intel Pentium D 800, said in 2004, when Intel realised that its single core processor was widely criticized for its calorific value, it rashly invested in the design of a dual-core processor code-named Smithfield, But there are a lot of unexpected problems. "Our design team will have a lot of problems shifting the focus from designing a high-performance single core processor to designing a multi-core processor," he said. ”

The backward bus design

Intel's memory bus, or the front-end bus, is a line system that communicates between the processor and the memory. Because of time constraints, Intel did not design a new memory bus for a dual-core processor, so it moved the bus design of the Pentium 4 processor in the past. Although the old bus can support a dual-core processor, its effectiveness cannot be compared with Intel's forthcoming Paxville server processor with two separate bus channels, or the memory controller built into the AMD processor.

Previously, Intel had focused all of its attention on a single core processor, and as a result went to the dual-core processor design, in order to allow two of cores to communicate with each other, it was only a rush to devise a framework to solve the problem.
　　
In addition, the engineers had to redesign the dual-core Pentium D processor to package the two core designs in the original size package, as if it were now difficult for us to wear the pants in high school.

Another set of perfect design plan

Intel has designed another perfect solution for two core packages, such as a future desktop processor Presler, which uses a new design, but the Intel design team was too late to apply it to the Smithfield Core.

Meanwhile, the Pentium D processor's tightly integrated two Pentium 4 processing cores in one package creates many problems, since the two cores communicate with each other, and some circuits must be designed to allow them to communicate with each other. But the original already crowded packaging design to design some circuit to go in, the difficulty is conceivable, but these difficulties must be solved. In addition, Intel also needs to design special diode circuits to make the two high-speed cores emit as low as possible.

Kevin Crewe, editor-in-chief of the California Science and Technology journal Microprocessor, said the Intel's first dual-core processor was designed for a short period of only 9 months, and that, according to Intel's practice, it usually takes years to design a processor. It is evident that Intel is rushing to design this dual-core processor in response to competition from AMD. Despite Intel's hasty launch of the Smithfield processor, it has created a new era of dual-core processors. The design was not perfect, but it was a stopgap for Intel and it was a good response to users after it was launched.

Race Against time

Intel has finally realized that by increasing the frequency of a single processor to improve performance, there will be a large amount of power generation, and ultimately the processor will not be accepted by users, so in May 04 publicly indicated that it will fully develop Smithfield dual-core processors, while eliminating the two single core processor development plan.

AMD, meanwhile, has aggressively developed dual-core processors, and this April released its built-in dual-core server processor Opteron, which was released only a few days later than the date of Intel's Smithfield processor release.

One important reason for Intel's all-out development of the Smithfield processor, Douglas said, is that it is under the competition of AMD, "we need to respond to our competitors ' actions and we are behind our opponents."

In addition, Intel will continue to refine the design of the server processor Paxville based on the Smithfield Core. The Paxville processor is said to be designed with two separate front-end bus designs, which can improve processor performance. At the same time, Paxville adopted the improved packaging technology, its calorific value will be greatly reduced.

Although Intel initially intended to release the Paxville processor in 2006, Intel announced in Monday that it would release the Paxville processor by the end of the year. Another dual-core server processor, code-named Dempsey, will be released in the first quarter of 06.

Douglas says Intel will also face more challenges, such as Opteron and cell processors, which use advanced point-to-point bus technology and integrated memory controller technology that will greatly improve processor performance. But at the same time this design also has a disadvantage, is to design a large number of processor pins to transmit the current, will inevitably lead to the decline in the yield.