Intel claims Woodcrest server chip has 80% performance boost

INTEL ADMITTED today that it has been under tremendous competitive pressure but it's heading back again. So said Intel's chief tech officer Justin Rattner.

There is a broad landscape of technology and energy is on everyone's mind, he said. Energy has become critical. Car makers are preoccupied with energy too, said Rattner. This is the classic trade off, he claimed. Is there a way out of the dilemma between power and performance, he asked.

Since the Pentium in 1993, every increase in performance means more energy per instruction. For the last 10 years the amount of energy required to execute an instruction has increased by a factor of four.

Israeli engineers saved Intel's butt with the Pentium M, said Rattner. The Pentium M allowed Intel to take a giant step backwards, he said. Two points define a line, the Israeli guys could produce as much energy efficiency as the original Pentium.

Core microarchitecture, said Rattner, includes energy efficient performance for desktops, for notebooks and for servers. Intel is making chips at 65 nanometres at four fabs across the world, said the techie chief. He said Intel is a year ahead of the competition and in the second half will move to 45 nanometres.

Intel has widened the pipeline so it can put four stages in a single clock, and will use a 14-stage pipeline. It has something called Macrofusion which lets Intel combine two instructions in a single jump. The chip-maker is introducing 128 bit SSE in a single cycle. Then comes a shared L2 cache with significant improvements, said Rattner. The cache can serve one processor exclusively, Intel is not partitioning the cache, he said.

Intel has introduced advanced pre-fetch which includes memory disambiguation - we think this means a change in the instruction set. It is using power gating to shut down sections of a chip that aren't needed, Rattner said.

Merom will retain good battery life, he claimed. Conroe will give a 40 per cent improvement in performance with a 40 per cent reduction in power, he said. He reckons Woodcrest will give an 80 per cent improvement in performance and a 35 per cent reduction in power. µ