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Embracing Multi-Core Technology

Posted on: Thursday, 24 March 2005, 00:00 CST

DUAL-CORE and multi-core processors will not only be in the high- end servers of today, but also in workstations, desktops, mobile computers and networking platforms. This is the promise shared at the recent Intel Developer Conference in San Francisco in the United States.

Intel Corp's senior fellow Steve Palowski said end users told him that they have tremendous demand for performance but need low power. "Multi- core technology is the way for us to get that performance and keep the power level within a reasonable level," he explained.

"In fact, going to dual-core and multi-core approaches... you more or less throttle the clock speed increases, but you're able to continue to use more and more transistors and more and more processing elements - cores - to bring forward great capability," said Intel's chief executive officer Craig Barrett.

Dual-core and multi-core technologies also enable new applications, he added.

Intel is planning to have multi-core processors in all of its product lines, from laptops to servers, this year, and will continue to integrate more cores and threads and increase the basic computing performance of its platforms. "We estimate by next year 85 per cent of our products and processors will be multi-core," Palowski said.

At the Intel conference, the company introduced three new processors: Dempsey, Paxville and Presler.

Dempsey is a 65-nanometre Xeon DP server/workstation dual-core processor while Paxville is the company's 65nm Itanium family dual- core processor based on the Montecito processor. Both are expected in the first quarter of next year.

Presler is a 65nm desktop dual-core processor with two Cedar Mill cores in a multi-chip processor package, and is expected in the first half of next year.

The company also plans to deliver the dual-core Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition for PC enthusiasts and the dual-core Intel Pentium D processor, formerly codenamed Smithfield, for mainstream PC users in the second quarter of this year.

The Pentium Processor Extreme Edition will include Hyper- Threading technology, showcasing the capability of four threads or instructions simultaneously versus single and dual threads from one and two-core processors. The Intel Pentium D processor does not include Hyper-Threading technology.

Doing more with multi-core. Intel is developing 15 multi-core products, including the introduction of dual-core desktop platforms in the second quarter.

"Our approach to development is focused around platforms. We believe that we deliver benefits to end users by creating platforms that address the uniqueness of the models of each segment - desktop, server and mobile," said Intel's vice president, digital enterprise group Stephen Smith.

End users can benefit from multi-core processors in two different ways: through applications that have been optimised for threading, and in multi- tasking applications.

"The application is fine-tuned for performance," Smith said. "Within the application, threads are created and those threads actually deliver better performance on the application."

As for multi-tasking, multi-core technology allows more resources to be dedicated so a computer can be more responsive, Smith said.

Computers are able to simultaneously run programs in the background such as anti-virus and anti-spyware, yet users want the machines to respond in one or multiple foreground tasks.

"The way to deliver more performance on that model is to go from single core that was hyperthreaded to products that have two or four cores, or more in the future," Smith said.

"In the remainder of the decade, we expect to see desktops with up to eight threads and servers with four processors up to 32 threads as mainstream product offerings," he added.

Multi-core will also see some new usage models. "As we continue to scale up in the enterprise, there's a natural ability of that workload scale to even higher-performance processors and more threads. Multi-core simply gives you more execution resource per thread. So we see it delivering more performance," Smith said.

Besides that, multi-core can be used in the virtual environment. Many companies going through the consolidation phase of a data centre hope to bring several different software environments and potentially several different operating systems into fewer machines. With virtualisation, one can assign more execution resources to different virtual machines through the multi-core approach.

Smith also sees emerging usage of multi-core in digital homes, as consumers put multimedia content into their PCs and would like to have access to it elsewhere in the house and at the same time allow another person to play computer games with other programs still running in the background.

"We think that a dual-core machine with more execution resources allows you to have a better experience with that machine responding to you at the same time it takes care of those background tasks," Smith said.

Source: New Straits Times

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