Feature Articles

Sustaining Moore's Law - 10 Years of the CPU

By Vincent Chang - 29 Dec 2008

Timeline: 2008

2008

As we had mentioned, our first published results of the Phenom X4 came only in April 2008 after the new B3 steppings were made available. The Phenom X4 had "phenomenal branding, yesterday's performance" and the delay had served to illustrate the lead Intel now holds in the market. Newer Core 2 models had entered the market since the Phenom was supposed to be launched while older Core 2 models have fallen in price. Hence, this severely squeezed the price range that the Phenom X4 could exist and still be attractive to enthusiasts. In short, it was hard to choose the Phenom X4 unless you're a die-hard AMD fan.

Around the same time, AMD would try to spin the old trick of salvaging those quad-core chips that failed the mark, recycling them as triple-core processors and sold under the Phenom X3 brand. Given its track record, we weren't expecting any miracles from these processors and "the newcomer is not the answer either." Of course, Intel was not about to give its competitors any breathing space and price cuts were timed to maximize the impact it had on the launches of both the Phenom X4 and X3.

The 'Black Edition' of the Phenom X4 is unlocked and the company's high-end enthusiast product, but its price and performance made it a poor match for Intel's entry level quad-core processor.

The middle of the year saw the launch at Computex of a new line of Intel processors aimed at the low-power, mobile device segment. The Atom processor was supposed to herald in a new era of computing which was in a way triggered by the popularity of sub-notebooks like the ASUS Eee PC. Obviously, Intel had grander ambitions for this segment and Netbooks was its way of naming these mobile computing devices.

These devices would be "designed more towards a content consumption model off the Internet" and would be paired with a mobile 945GM chipset and a ICH-7M Southbridge, which are existing chipset components from Intel. The Atom itself takes its architectural cues from older Intel micro-architectures and is only a single core, though it does see a return of Hyper-Threading and most importantly, has an attractively low TDP rating of 4W.

Can Intel succeed in the lower end segment where Microsoft have floundered in the past?

As the year drew to an end, AMD's 45nm process shrink for its K10 processors came to fruition ahead of schedule:- the 'Shanghai' core Opterons. The consumer version of the Shanghai, dubbed Phenom II will also debut next year at CES 2009 and like the 45nm Opterons, bring the advantages of the die shrink along with other core and cache enhancements that will narrow the gap slightly between AMD and Intel.

Intel meanwhile is going full steam on its next generation Nehalem micro-architecture which is to succeed the Core and which we first saw here. Known in the consumer retail scene as the Core i7, it has up to 8 processing cores (four physical, four logical) and a new integrated memory controller supporting DDR3. The Nehalem micro-architecture shows that the core count will remain the next frontier for the x86 platform for the near future. Already true six and eight-core variants are being planned for release later in 2009 for the server arena.

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