Next week's Intel Developer Forum and the race to faster notebooks
Tags: Intel, Marketing, Apple, Microprocessors, Microprocessors
Next week, I am off to the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco to catch up on Intel's new chip architectures. Given that this is the first IDF since Apple announced it was going with Intel for its next generation of systems, it should be a very interesting meeting. Today, Laptop Logic posted the current Intel roadmap for its chips, and from what I can tell, the story is really all about multi-core chips to manage power consumption.
There is no question that this is a wonderful turn of events from Intel's prior quest for performance through clock speed only. Why? Because most of the time, we don't use computers to compute. In fact, computers spend most of their time waiting for us to move a mouse or type. And high clock speeds mean a lot of waste of power. Think of a high clock speed processor chip like a Formula 1 racer. it can go very fast on straightaways, but you don't really need it to go to the grocery store. And while it gets you to the grocery store fast, you have to send it home again to take the next person to where they want to go. After all, it's only one car.
What Intel is doing now is saying, wait a minute. What if, for the same price as that Formula 1 race car, I gave you a collection of lower-performance, but quite capable cars for you to use. Could you use those instead? For your average computer workload, the answer is heck yes. Most highly intensive applications nowadays like Adobe Photoshop are multithreaded already. Ditto for almost all of the modern Apple applications. Yet, when you aren't running those intense applications, we can put the spare processors in the garage and not have them burn power. So batteries should last longer, yet peak performance should be nearly as good as -- or better than -- those Formula 1 processors.
What the roadmap says is that the first processors we'll see will be dual core -- that is, two processors in one chip. But that will just be the start. At previous IDFs, we've heard people say that we'll see quad core processors on the roadmap as well. And since these parts don't consume all the power the old ones do, we could have multiple quad-cores inside one notebook computer without running into cooling problems. Suddenly, the single-processor 2 GHz notebook will look so early 2000s compared with their long-battery-life multiprocessor successors.
Of course, this is all speculation at this point. But given what Jobs was talking about during his last keynote, this sounds a lot like what he was talking about when he said we could expect factors of 50 or 60 more performance per watt than we see today. The great thing: Intel may build the chips, but Jobs will be a marketing force for this new world of mobile computing. And don't expect it to stop at notebooks; after all, iPods are just mobile computers dedicated to music. It's going to be a fun couple of years.
Next week, I am off to the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco to catch up on Intel's new chip architectures. Given that this is the first IDF since Apple announced it was going with Intel for its next generation of systems, it should be a very interesting meeting. Today, Laptop Logic posted the current Intel roadmap for its chips, and from what I can tell, the story is really all about multi-core chips to manage power consumption.
There is no question that this is a wonderful turn of events from Intel's prior quest for performance through clock speed only. Why? Because most of the time, we don't use computers to compute. In fact, computers spend most of their time waiting for us to move a mouse or type. And high clock speeds mean a lot of waste of power. Think of a high clock speed processor chip like a Formula 1 racer. it can go very fast on straightaways, but you don't really need it to go to the grocery store. And while it gets you to the grocery store fast, you have to send it home again to take the next person to where they want to go. After all, it's only one car.
What Intel is doing now is saying, wait a minute. What if, for the same price as that Formula 1 race car, I gave you a collection of lower-performance, but quite capable cars for you to use. Could you use those instead? For your average computer workload, the answer is heck yes. Most highly intensive applications nowadays like Adobe Photoshop are multithreaded already. Ditto for almost all of the modern Apple applications. Yet, when you aren't running those intense applications, we can put the spare processors in the garage and not have them burn power. So batteries should last longer, yet peak performance should be nearly as good as -- or better than -- those Formula 1 processors.
What the roadmap says is that the first processors we'll see will be dual core -- that is, two processors in one chip. But that will just be the start. At previous IDFs, we've heard people say that we'll see quad core processors on the roadmap as well. And since these parts don't consume all the power the old ones do, we could have multiple quad-cores inside one notebook computer without running into cooling problems. Suddenly, the single-processor 2 GHz notebook will look so early 2000s compared with their long-battery-life multiprocessor successors.
Of course, this is all speculation at this point. But given what Jobs was talking about during his last keynote, this sounds a lot like what he was talking about when he said we could expect factors of 50 or 60 more performance per watt than we see today. The great thing: Intel may build the chips, but Jobs will be a marketing force for this new world of mobile computing. And don't expect it to stop at notebooks; after all, iPods are just mobile computers dedicated to music. It's going to be a fun couple of years.
posted by Carl Howe at
10:19 AM
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