Intel can switch on 64-bitness for Prescotts at will

PAUL OTELLINI showed an interesting slide at the NY analyst meeting last night which shows how fast Intel hopes to move to multicore processors.

As we reported this morning, this is essentially the end of the road for the Pentium 4 Netburst technology.

Otellini said: "What's next is something more profound, moving our product line from logical to physical parallelism. Parallelism is computer speak for taking a serial of tasks and doing them together. You need parallelism in the hardware and operating systems and apps that are aware the machine can handle multiple threads".

He said that Intel can move to a very broad use of multicores, so inside a given chip there will be two separate microprocessors that can handle a variety of tasks.

"Most software application developers operate under a constraint that compute power at the PC is limited, with a certain amount of MIPS available," he said. "With multicores, software developers turned that whole paradigm around with unlimited instruction cycles. They can dedicate an entire core to the user interface, or to rendering, or to firewalls, or security. It unleashes them from the constraints".

Software will take advantage of the microcore technology. "[Microsoft] Longhorn goes one step better and the user experience on a multicore machine will be much better than on a single core machine," he said.

"We'll add multicore products into the desktop, servers and notebooks in 2005, these will be distinctly different models. All of our microprocessor development going forward is now multicore," said Otellini.

"In 2006, all IA-32 servers will be multicore. Over half of all the performance clients we ship will be multicore, and in servers and Itaniums all the products will be multicore".

He said that attempting to continue to drive gigahertz up puts more heat into the systems, "so by going to multicore, Intel will be able to increase performance within existing or better thermal envelopes for each of the form factors".

Intel will almost completely switch over to Prescotts by Q3, he said. Intel's version of NX, a security feature that can help prevent viral attack, is called XD and will be switched on in summer.

It will also introduce a version of AMD's throttling technology which it uses in its Athlon 64 family to reduce the heat overheads on Prescotts.

Sixty four bit technology starts, he claims, next month, with the workstation and server product based on the Prescott die. He said Intel has the ability to turn 64-bit tech on as soon as Microsoft has finished the validation system.

He said the EM64T technology will also be put into dual core systems.

As we suggested last week, Intel will migrate Prescotts to the 65 nanometre process, probably next year, Otellini confirmed. µ

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