Dippo said:
Of course, Intel isn't going to redesign their chips to be better, they are just going to slap two cores together and call it a "super chip".
Wrong.
I love it when my predictions come true so soon after I make them. For the last few weeks, I've been reading up on Intel, their chip strategies, the roadmap, and so on, and this doesn't surprise me one bit.
The chip that you're describing as "just slapping two cores together" is, in fact, a pretty impressive bit of engineering. The Pentium-M core had its birth in the Penitum 3's core, with a Pentium 4 derived memory controller, a few more stages on the pipeline, added cache, and amazing power management features for anything coming out of Intel. The Dothan is a revision of this design to go on a 90nm die. The chip (i.e. all the functional logic parts) fit in 23nm when the transistors are that small. It would be a crime not to take advantage of that and fit at least two onto the die (at 46nm), with an even bigger cache. In fact, that's on the roadmap, code-named Jonas. In late 2005 or early 2006, we are supposed to see a third-generation child of today's Centrino that will be dual-core, 90nm, with even more L2 cache to spare it from needing to fetch information quite so much.
I think Intel is the one that is screwing up, they need to get some 64 bit consumer processors on the market before they get left behind, and these two 32bit chips on one processor isn't going to cut.
Why? Consumers aren't really doing anything with 64-bit , neither at the memory addressing or complex mathematics level. It's a gimmick, something to hold up and look shiny for people who don't understand that it doesn't necessarily
do anything at the moment.
How many of you have more tha 4GB in a machine at home, or do math with integers that need 64-bit points? I find it unlikely that either apply.
dopefiend said:
They already are left behind.
AMD already has its mobile 64bit cpu out
The Athlon 64 M runs from 65 tto 82 watts. It's hardly a competitor in the same market as the Centrino, unless AMD manages to get it down to 35w, as they claim that they will.