Multicore processor on Intel road map

Intel will preview a multicore future this week during the Fall Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco as it tries to leave behind a tumultuous year plagued by product delays and road-map revisions.

Intel will preview a multicore future this week during the Fall Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco as it tries to leave behind a tumultuous year plagued by product delays and road-map revisions.

The company is expected to provide more information about its plans to introduce multicore processors across its product lines by the end of 2005. The multicore concept involves placing two separate processing engines on the same silicon chip.

Several other chipmakers have introduced dual-core chips or revealed plans to build these chips as thermal problems have forced the chip industry to investigate new methods of improving performance that don’t involve faster clock speeds. Last week, Advanced Micro Devices demonstrated a dual-core Opteron server processor that is scheduled to arrive in mid-2005.

Intel canceled two future processor cores in May without providing any details about what would replace Tejas and Jayhawk, the code names for the planned successors to the Pentium 4 and Xeon DP processors. The company didn’t comment on what prompted the cancellations, saying only that it had realized it could bring multicore processors to market faster than anticipated.

Analysts say they believe Intel’s NetBurst architecture for the Pentium 4 and Xeon relied too heavily on raw clock speed to improve performance amid the heat dissipation problems that have accompanied the arrival of the 90-nm process generation.

Intel’s Frank Spindler, vice president of the company’s Corporate Technology Group, declined to comment on the specifics of Intel’s multicore plans during a show-preview conference call, but promised that more information would be revealed this week.

“They have to talk about dual-core. That’s the question du jour at this conference,” says Kevin Krewell, editor in chief of the Microprocessor Report. The conference attendees that build products based on Intel’s technology will want to hear more about the dual-core chips to start working on their own products for next year, he says.

On the enterprise server side, Intel has disclosed its plans for a dual-core Itanium 2 processor code-named Montecito and a dual-core Xeon MP chip called Tulsa, both of which are scheduled to arrive next year.

Krazit is a correspondent with the IDG News Service.