The Many Cores Of Intel

[AYHJA]

Ed Sperling, 02.16.09, 03:00 AM EST
Senior Vice President Pat Gelsinger discusses the chip maker's future.

Since the creation of Moore's Law in 1965, people have been predicting its death. Even Gordon Moore, the law's creator, had to revise it a couple of times to make it work.

The new wrinkle is that it's no longer just transistors doubling every couple years. Now, it's processor cores and different kinds of chips and spaces between the wires on a chip that are so small you can literally count the atoms between them. Forbes caught up with Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) Enterprise Group, to take a look into Intel's future.

Forbes: We've been adhering to Moore's Law since the 1960s. How much farther does it go?

Gelsinger: We see no end in sight. The analogy I like to use is it's like driving down a road on a foggy night. How far can you see in front of you? Maybe 100 yards. But if you go down the road 50 yards, you can see another 100 yards. For Moore's Law, it's always been about a decade of visibility into the future. Today we have about a decade of visibility. We're at 45 nanometers; 32 nanometers is looking healthy, 22 nanometers is healthy, 14 nanometers is well under way and we're doing the core research on 10 nanometers.

More/Source: http://snipurl.com/c03oc

[zaphodz]

Intel is already well advanced on 32nm and should be out the door next year hopefully.

[Sir Jig-A-Lot]

So, can one of y'all 'splain me what Intel Atom is exactly? And how does in compare to Centrino & Celeron etc etc..?

[zaphodz]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverthorne_(CPU)

It is a low power and low cost CPU mainly for netbooks. They are clocked pretty slow and so far have only been released in single core varieties - no dual core available at the moment in a mainstream device as far as I know.

Basically these were made for the netbook market - those tiny 8.9 inch and 10 inch notebooks. They are quite slow and underpowered relative to current desktop and notebook cpu's. Having said that, they are fine for web browsing and basic office work. Depends on your needs...

Devices with these in them are restricted to 2GB ram and 160GB hard drives courtesy of Microsoft.

[Sir Jig-A-Lot]

Thanks Zaph. It was in various retail catalogues selling netbooks I first saw reference to Atom. How do you think a netbook with Atom would work out for the likes of multiple file downloaders like me?!?..I'm playin' around with gettin' one as all i'd really use it for would be surfing the net & d/l'ing.

[jdog]

Intel is already well advanced on 32nm and should be out the door next year hopefully.

Yeah, isn't that a 6 core CPU as well? Imagine that...6 cores all with Hyperthreading enabled? 12 threads...amazing capability. I have been wanting a Core i7 but I think my Core 2 Duo can last until a 6 core comes out. :silly:

[zaphodz]

6 and above core cpu's shouldn't be too far off. I read somewhere there may be 6 core server cpu's showing up later this year.

To Jig:

A netbook for surfing the web and downloading would be fine. To put it in some perspective, I use an old P3 600Mhz laptop with 192MB ram to run bittorrents, downloads that I know will take ages, and occasionally browse the web on it. It runs Windows 2000 on a 12GB hard drive and it is fine.

The netbooks are a good deal higher specced so they should do what you want with ease.

It would be a different matter if you wanted to run games, photoshop and convert music/video files on a netbook... such things would be painfully slow compared to desktop/notebook cpus.

[Sir Jig-A-Lot]

Saaaaaaaaweeeeeeeeeeeet! Maybe i will invest in one. Thanks Zaph. I'll just store all files on a TB external to keep it running faster. Oh one last thing, it's ok to install multiple programs on a netbook right? I just ask due to it's lack of a dvd/cd drive which some 'gram installations still come on..

[zaphodz]

You can install anything on it that you could on a normal pc. You can get a usb DVD drive or just copy the installation files onto a flash drive. You can even just network your computers and copy stuff from one to the other to install programs.

The lack of an inbuilt dvd/cd drive is a minor inconvenience for the size and weight benefits of these devices.

[Sir Jig-A-Lot]

Cool. Just had to double check.