Intel Montecito... Whoa!... Two Processors In One!

[Jerry Jones]

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-980898.html?tag=fd_lede2_hed

Scheduled for 2005...

will contain two Itanium processor cores on the same piece of silicon. Dual-processor chips are pretty much what they sound like: single chips that contain two separate "brains" so they can best a single-core chip but cost less than two separate ones.

It's one of the hot design ideas in the chip world. IBM has already come out with the first dual-processor chip for the server market, Power4. Sun's UltraSparc IV, debuting toward the end of the year, is expected to contain two processor cores.

Analysts have also noted that Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron chip, coming out in the first half, could be redesigned to accommodate a second processor core.

Originally, Montecito, due in 2004, wasn't a dual-core chip, but it was morphed after engineering and manufacturing teams concurred that a dual-processor chip could be mass-manufactured at Intel by 2005.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Hulk]

This is quite interesting. As cpu and bus speeds continue to rise, the technological challenges rise as well. Combining 2, or 3, or 4 chips on one piece of silicon could be a viable method of increasing computer performance. Assuming the OS and applications are coded accordingly.

I wonder how the issue of yields would be dealt with? It would be a shame to have one cpu run 500MHz slower than the other. I guess the lower clocked cpu would be the rating of the chip, unless there is a way to asynchronously run the chips. Lots of promise and lots of problems to overcome.

[moreau]

I would rather see them continue to increase the amount of Cache (or perhaps RAM) on the chip.

They are already incorporating memory controllers into the CPU, why not throw some random access area in there...