Intel: we rushed the dual-core P4 to market

[babumuchhala]

We suspected as much, and Intel has confirmed it: the dual-core Pentium 4 was a hack. Speaking at the Hot Chips conference in advance of next week's Intel Developers Forum, Intel engineer Jonathan Douglas said that the dual-core Smithfield was rushed out the door because of competitive pressures from AMD. "We were behind," and Intel needed a "competitive response" to the dual-core CPUs in development by its rival.

Smithfield made it through testing and out the door in about nine months, which is remarkably quick by Intel standards. The need to get a dual-core CPU into the market as a response to AMD meant that Smithfield lacked features of the dual-core Opteron and Athlon 64 like independent memory buses for each core. In addition, the need to put two Pentium 4 cores on a single die led to additional signaling problems as the transistors were even closer together on the new dual-core CPUs.

Since the release of Smithfield, Intel has been working hard on its next generation of dual-core CPUs. The company has moved up the debut of the dual-core Xeon (Paxville) from early 2006 to the fourth quarter of this year (which will allow Dell to finally offer an alternative to the dual-core Opterons). Unlike Smithfield, Paxville will feature a dedicated memory controller for each core on the CPU.

At the IDF next week, Intel is expected to provide an update on the progress of its next-generation CPUs. Merom and its brethren are all departures from the Pentium 4's Netburst architecture, based on the Pentium M instead. Fabbed at 65nm, those CPUs are expected to start shipping in 2Q/3Q 2006, and may very well power the first generation of Apple's Intel machines.

Now there's more proof that Intels lost its performance & innovation touch, big time

 

[pimpom]

That Intel was desperate to put something new on the market was pretty obvious even without confirmation from Intel. On the whole, consumers benefit from such competition.

However, when two or more competing giants are so eager to announce some new innovation, they often release a product to the market before it has been fully refined and matured. The result is that they constantly release a slightly upgraded version every few months, forcing us consumers into a state of perpetual obsolescence. That is, it's impossible to have a reasonably up-to-date computer for any length of time.

This is also the case with those other two rivals - nVidia and ATI.

 

[AlienTech]

Now there's more proof that Intels lost its performance & innovation touch, big time

Intel has never had either. They bought out HP/APOLLO/DEC and had an advantage for a while by gaining access to RISC workstation technology transfer but Intel has not had any innovations EVER. Even their original chip was inferior to the then competitions of like Z80, 6502, TMS9900 and 6800's. Every single one of them was faster and had better memory management.

The only reason this horrible company even survived to cause us grief was because the Intel 8086 was IBM's choice in 1978 adn the IBM PC was a huge success for business.

*www.microprocessor.sscc.ru/great/s3.html

 

[AlienTech]

Well here it is, Why we got stuck with the stuckiest companies in the world that bombed us to the dark ages of computers for decades and may have helped start the end of human civilization on planet earth.


So why did IBM chose the 8-bit 8088 (1979) version of the 8086 for the IBM 5150 PC (1981) when most of the alternatives were so much better? Apparently IBM's own engineers wanted to use the 68000, and it was used later in the forgotten IBM Instruments 9000 Laboratory Computer, but IBM already had rights to manufacture the 8086, in exchange for giving Intel the rights to its bubble memory designs. Apparently IBM was using 8086s in the IBM Displaywriter word processor.
Other factors were the fact that the the 8-bit 8088 could use existing low cost 8085-type components, and allowed the computer to be based on a modified 8085 design. 68000 components were not widely available, though it could use 6800 components to an extent. After the failure and expense of the IBM 5100 (1974/5/6? - their first attempt at a peronal computer - discrete random logic CPU with no bus, built in BASIC and APL as the OS), cost was a large factor in the design of the PC.

The availability of CP/M-86 is also likely a factor, since CP/M was the operating system standard for the computer industry at the time. However Digital Research founder Gary Kildall was unhappy with the legal demands of IBM, so Microsoft, a programming language company, was hired instead to provide the operating system (initially known at varying times as QDOS, SCP-DOS, and finally 86-DOS, it was purchased by Microsoft from Seattle Computer Products (For around 50,000 US$) and renamed MS-DOS (and sold to IBM for over $1,000,000 plus royalties ).

Digital Research did eventually produce CP/M 68K for the 68000 series, making the operating system choice less relevant than other factors.

Intel bubble memory was on the market for a while, but faded away as better and cheaper memory technologies arrived.


*www.microprocessor.sscc.ru/great/s3.html#8086