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Hot Chips: Intel's dual-core Pentium 4 a rush job
Tom Krazit ( AUGUST 17, 2005 )

Intel Corp.'s first dual-core chip was a hastily concocted design that was rushed out the door in hopes of beating rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. to the punch, an Intel engineer told attendees at the Hot Chips conference Tuesday.

With the realization that its single-core processors had hit a wall, Intel engineers plunged headlong into designing the Smithfield dual-core chip in 2004 but faced numerous challenges in getting that chip to market, said Jonathan Douglas, a principal engineer in Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, which makes chips for office desktops and servers.

"We faced many challenges from taking a design team focused on making the highest performing processors possible to one focused on multicore designs," Douglas said in a presentation on Intel's Pentium D 800 series desktop chips and the forthcoming Paxville server chip, both of which are based on the Smithfield core.

Intel was unable to design a new memory bus in time for the dual-core chip, so it kept the same bus structure used by older Pentium 4 chips, Douglas said at the conference at Stanford University in Palo Alto , Calif. This bus was capable of supporting two separate single-core processors, but it was not nearly as efficient as the dual-independent buses that will appear on the Paxville processors or the integrated memory controller used on AMD's chips. The memory bus or front-side bus on Intel's chips is used to connect the processor to memory.

All of Intel's testing tools and processes had been designed for single-core chips, Douglas said. This meant that the company had to quickly come up with a new testing methodology for dual-core chips that could measure the connections between both cores.

Reference: http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/desktops/story/0,10801,103993,00.html?

SKC=desktops-103993

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