Intel Revealed Speed Secrets of Coming New Multi-Core CPUs at IDF

Now that Apple is in the process of switching to Intel CPUs, we have another set of venues to cover that affect Macs. At its three-day Intel Developer Forum this week being held in San Francisco's Moscone Center, Intel revealed ways that will improve the performance of its coming set of multi-core CPUs.

It used to be that Intel increased performance by simply increasing the "megahertz" or cycle frequency of its CPUs and decreased the heat generated by the faster frequency by using smaller and smaller manufacturing processes measured in nanometers. Now Intel is fusing certain x86 instructions (micro-ops) into larger units (macro-ops), effectively moving in the direction of Apple's (and IBM's) Power PC architecture of reduced instruction set chips (RISC)--surprise, surprise.

Intel's new set of multi-core CPUs, code-named Merom (laptops), Conroe (desktops) and Woodcrest (servers), will have significant performance improvements due to macro-ops technology. The improvements will be as much as 40 per cent in Conroe and 80 per cent in Woodcrest with Merom gettin good gains over the perfomance of the present top of the line Core Duo (Yonah).

Right behind these CPUs due out later in 2006 is another set of CPUs with quad-cores due out in early 2007. Code-named Kentsfield, Clovertown and Tigerton, these quad-core CPUs destined for high end desktops and servers are really two dual-core chips packaged together sharing resources on a 65 nanometer manufacturing process. Later in 2007, they are scheduled to be produced on a much smaller 45 nanometer process.

Intel's rapid performance improvements will allow Apple the opportunity for more frequent "on the fly" performance increases. It will be interesting to see how Apple takes advantage of this after years of long performance plateaus with Motorola and IBM G4 and G5 CPUs. More...and...more...[Bill Fox]