Intel's first quad-core chips to arrive this year

Posted:
in Future Apple Hardware edited January 2014
Intel Corp. this week said it's bumping up the release of its quad-core desktop and server chips to the fourth quarter of this year from their previous target date of early 2007.



"We notified customers that we're pulling in both a desktop and server of the first quad-core processors into the fourth quarter of this year from the first half of 2007," Intel chief executive Paul Otellini said during the company's earnings call on Wednesday.



The chips, code-named Kentsfield (desktop) and Clovertown (server), were announced by Intel execs at dates earlier this year and are candidates to appear in future revisions of Apple's Mac product lines.



In February, Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner said the company planned to roll out Clovertown -- its first quad-core chip -- by early 2007. Kentsfield was announced with a similar roll-out date during the company's semiannual developers conference the following month.



Also on Wednesday, Otellini confirmed reports that Intel is pushing ahead the release of another chip, its Core 2 Duo notebook processor formerly code-named Merom.



According to Otellini, Merom is due to launch in a few weeks. The chip is expected to closely follow the release of its desktop counterpart, Conroe, which is currently in production ahead of its July 27th launch.



According to DigiTimes, Intel plans for over 50 percent of its notebook processor shipments in the first quarter of 2007 to be Merom chips, making its 64-bit dual-core model the mainstream for the notebook market.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 56
    baranovichbaranovich Posts: 184member
    "Introducing the new Mac Pro OCTO shipping January 2007"
  • Reply 2 of 56
    trobertstroberts Posts: 702member
    I guess we will find out in a couple of weeks which chips are going into which computers. I can see the XServe getting "Clovertown", the iMac getting "Conroe", the MacBook Pro getting "Merom", and the MacBook and Mac mini keeping "Yonah". Power Macs are a little tougher to guess because it seems like "Woodcrest" and "Kentsfield" will be coming out at the same time instead of about 6 months apart.
  • Reply 3 of 56
    Quote:

    Originally posted by troberts

    I guess we will find out in a couple of weeks which chips are going into which computers. I can see the XServe getting "Clovertown", the iMac getting "Conroe", the MacBook Pro getting "Merom", and the MacBook and Mac mini keeping "Yonah". Power Macs are a little tougher to guess because it seems like "Woodcrest" and "Kentsfield" will be coming out at the same time instead of about 6 months apart.



    Yeah, I think you're right. But I only see the Kentsfield in the very top of the line Mac Pro system because of a price per chip deal. Think boards and chips, and to put two chips in, that thing would be very very expensive. Projections on the dual-Woodcrest system already put it at around $3000, I would assume the Kentsfield up that price another $1000.
  • Reply 4 of 56
    I really hope we don't see Apple go for Core 2 Quad over two Xeons, though I guess time will tell. If they go with 2 Quad Xeons, then we'll likely see more liquid cooling, which I'm also not bullish on (plus ye gads the cost).



    If anything I hope this will just drive the cost of Xeon 7xxx down for Apple.



    The quad Xeon is better off than the Quad Core (I don't have the codenames memorized if you haven't noticed by now) memory wise, but I don't think either near will live up to the potential of 4 core on one die or a 4 core package with adequate memory bandwidth. The very apps that would be most likely to actually use 4-8 cores will be the same ones that will be likely to be starved for data.
  • Reply 5 of 56
    backtomacbacktomac Posts: 4,579member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by ChevalierMalFet

    , then we'll likely see more liquid cooling, which I'm also not bullish on (plus ye gads the cost).







    Aren't we heading in this direction anyway? Hard to believe that quad and octo core chips will arrive with tdp of 35 watts.
  • Reply 6 of 56
    wmfwmf Posts: 1,164member
    Yeah, Kentsfield/Cloverton is 80-130W.
  • Reply 7 of 56
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,419member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by wmf

    Yeah, Kentsfield/Cloverton is 80-130W.



    Hell that's what the Quad G5 is likely cranking out. I think Apple goes with Woodcrest and Conroe Mac Pros and then takes a look at Cloverton/Kentsfield next year.



    I'm all for adding as many cores as feasible.
  • Reply 8 of 56
    jonnyboyjonnyboy Posts: 525member
    now excuse me if i am wrong (because chip technology is hardly my forte) but could this mean that there are 8-core dual quad core mac pros out before long WITHOUT any software to even take advantage of dual core?
  • Reply 9 of 56
    sunilramansunilraman Posts: 8,133member
  • Reply 10 of 56
    onlookeronlooker Posts: 5,252member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by troberts

    Power Macs are a little tougher to guess because it seems like "Woodcrest" and "Kentsfield" will be coming out at the same time instead of about 6 months apart.





    No they are not coming out at the same time. Woodcrest is shipping, and most definitely in production in Mac Pro's right now. Clovertown will be in the later half (very end) of the year.
  • Reply 11 of 56
    Quote:

    Originally posted by hmurchison

    I'm all for adding as many cores as feasible.



    Agreed, but at the same time the Core 2 Quads will but a lot of extra bucket for not much extra bang; maybe the xeons will be better but I'm not holding my breath.
  • Reply 12 of 56
    It looks like Intel is going to offer more desktop CPU lines than Apple has desktop lines that can use them.



    Does Apple split it's towers into two lineups?



    According to Wikipedia, neither Kentsfield nor Clovertown will be multiprocessor-capable. Tigerton will be the MP-capable version of Clovertown:



    Quote:

    * Woodcrest, first eighth-generation server and workstation chip, 65 nm, dual-core, 4 MiB L2 cache (Released on June 26, 2006)



    * Clovertown, quad-core MCM, consists of two Woodcrests, with 2 × 4 MiB L2



    * Tigerton, quad-core MCM. MP-capable version of Clovertown.



    * Harpertown, either a dual-core, 45 nm shrink of Woodcrest, or an eight-core, 45 nm MCM with 12 MiB L2



    * Dunnington, four to thirty-two cores, successor to Tigerton



    Anyways, how about this Mac Pro lineup. It's a bit large for Apple, but smaller than that of any other Wintel box maker. Three Mac Pros; Dual, Quad, and Octo; two models each. The Octo will be announced at MWSF '07.



    MiniTower

    $1599 2.33 GHz Dual Mac Pro - Conroe single CPU

    $1899 2.66 GHz Dual Mac Pro - Conroe single CPU



    Tower

    $2399 2.66 GHz Quad Mac Pro - Woodcrest dual CPU

    $2799 3.00 GHz Quad Mac Pro - Woodcrest dual CPU



    MegaTower

    $3499 2.66 GHz Octo Mac Pro - Tigerton dual CPU

    $3999 3.00 GHz Octo Mac Pro - Tigerton dual CPU



    Remember that compact motherboard reportedly being worked on by Intel and Apple? Well maybe Apple is planning on two different towers, one for Conroe, and one for dual Woodcrests. A single Conroe CPU needs so much less power and cooling capacity than a dual Woodcrest that it would be cheaper for Apple to make two different mobos.



    For Conroe, use a MiniTower design that is perhaps half the size of the current Powermacs - but not so small that Apple has to buy expensive miniaturized components. Build it out of plastic, not brushed aluminum. Use a single optical drive bay, a single empty PCI slot (of course with a real video card slot), room for two HDs, and nothing more. The key word for the MiniTower is PRICE; Apple saves on the tower design and components, and prices it to go.



    Will the MiniTower cannibalize iMac sales? Perhaps, but if Apple keeps the component costs down and maintains a profit margin the same or larger than that of the iMac, will it matter? More likely the MiniTower will cannibalize Mini sales, but Apple must have pretty thin margins on the Mini, so this may not be a bad thing. Lure them into the store with the Mini, and sell them the MiniTower. Best of all, the MiniTower gives Wintel users a the option to switch into a Mac just like their Wintel. It meets the desires of the typical Wintel apologist: upgradability, expandability, and the techie "geek" factor.



    Woodcrest will use a standard tower design, aluminum like the current tower with subtle modifications. Include two optical drive bays, four HD bays, and four open PCI slots.



    Tigerton will require a "MegaTower," a beastly hunk of processing power that will sound like a 747 on takeoff, and will likely dedicate half it's internal volume towards cooling its eight motherfucking cores. Give it everything the Woodcrest tower has, but add hardware RAID support. It will need a striped RAID setup to keep up with its eight cores. This MegaTower will be built with bad-ass black anodized aluminum. It will stand on four non-anodized brushed aluminum pillars that run up each corner to the very top. An Apple logo on each side will glow blue when the machine is on.



    The MegaTower will be the Vista killer: it will turn in benchmarks insanely faster than any tigerton-based Wintel, because of Leopard's superior multithreading capability. PC Gamerz will sell their cars to own a $4K MegaTower loaded with RAM and a bitchin' video card. Apple will once again rule the computing universe.
  • Reply 13 of 56
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,419member
    Nice stuff JYD. I enjoyed that. Say I'm all for dual Tigerton based Mac Pros. I'm hoping Apple can toss in some 4gig Fibre Channel ports as well or 10g Fibre for HPC cluster solutions.
  • Reply 14 of 56
    mwswamimwswami Posts: 166member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Junkyard Dawg

    According to Wikipedia, neither Kentsfield nor Clovertown will be multiprocessor-capable. Tigerton will be the MP-capable version of Clovertown:





    Wikipedia is got to be in error. Clovertown is designed to work in the Bensley platform which supports two sockets. See TechReport article. Of course Kentfield is designed to fit Conroe motherboards and is not MP-capable.



  • Reply 15 of 56
    Uh, when did we enter world-as-myth? Have I been reading too much Heinlein?



    But seriously, good call the the non-MP nature of Cloverton; which I think makes both Cloverton and Kentwood loosing propositions from a performance standpoint, though likely a bit cheaper in a complete system.

    [edit: thanks for the clarification MWSwami, though that CPU bus is disappointing]



    Wasn't the small form factor motherboard design mooted some time ago as an abandoned strategy? I mean obviously that in and of itself could be FUD to protect the Steve's plans, but, eh. I don't think we have any solid reason to speculate there will be a mini-Tower (I doubt it, much as I'd like one). Also, Apple would be ecstatic if a mini-Tower cannibalized mini sales. I'm sure it's no secret that Apple tries to push for a strong pro to consumer ratio in their sales.



    Also, re timing I suspect we'll see Woodcrest at the top of the line, to be replaced with Tigerton when it eventually gets released. Also, RAID will have little bearing on feeding eight cores. The biggest bottleneck will be the split caches being fed by a single memory bus in most instances, though it's not untennable to believe that Intel would have increased the bus for Tigerton; the 45mm die shrink will be more important however as we'll see a cache bump alongside it and likely more in the way of optimization.



    So Leopard's going to have überthreading of some kind? You have this on recoord? I wouldn't count on one OS or the other having across the board speed advantages now that we are on the same hardware.



    As a side note, what's the signaling limitation on 10GB Ethernet? Or do they get around the signaling window with a full duplex requirement? I never really expected to see 10GB on copper, to be honest.
  • Reply 16 of 56
    junkyard dawgjunkyard dawg Posts: 2,801member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by mwswami

    Wikipedia is got to be in error. Clovertown is designed to work in the Bensley platform which supports two sockets. See TechReport article. Of course Kentfield is designed to fit Conroe motherboards and is not MP-capable.



    Cool, thanks for the correction. I was a little surprised by the Wiki info myself, but I don't keep up to date with Intel CPUs so I wasn't sure.



    This is the first time Wiki has made a liar out of me. Guess it won't be the last.
  • Reply 17 of 56
    matracermatracer Posts: 91member
    I think the new dual quad core Mac systems should be call "Octel" as in octal but with an intel slant.



    Mac Pro Octel



    Sounds cool.



    "Oh you have a Dell mmmmm nice......I have an Octel!!!" - Ultimate snob value.



  • Reply 18 of 56
    fuyutsukifuyutsuki Posts: 293member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by jonnyboy

    now excuse me if i am wrong (because chip technology is hardly my forte) but could this mean that there are 8-core dual quad core mac pros out before long WITHOUT any software to even take advantage of dual core?



    Ever used a multi-core or multi-cpu Mac? OS X runs smoooooooth, multitasking is slick, and essentially all is right with the world.



    Only a certain other OS stinks at multi-core/processor optimisation, and I'm not talking about OS 9.



    My hat off to the Dawg by the way. Fantastic ... um fantasy. You summed up the windows apologist "but what fun is there without your elbows inside the computer?" crowd. They need a lego box to make themselves feel like they're in control. Chances of Apple finally releasing one ... well ... maybe on par with those glowing blue logos on the Mac Pimp Supreme.



    How about 4 processor Tigerton in a scale model of the Manhattan cube? Limited edition, comes with "original" Photoshopped Empire Strikes Back art and SIGNED by BOTH Steves! Damn, I'm beginning to sell myself on that one...



    Anyway, whatever does happen for real, here's a toast to Intel - who ever thought they could surpass themselves like this and shame IBM, Motorola and now AMD too all in less than a year? Makes the endlessly late upgrades of the PPC era seem like an old nightmare. Superb!
  • Reply 19 of 56
    boogabooga Posts: 1,082member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by ChevalierMalFet

    So Leopard's going to have überthreading of some kind? You have this on recoord? I wouldn't count on one OS or the other having across the board speed advantages now that we are on the same hardware.





    Of course the poster doesn't have it on record... no one's saying anything about Leopard on record. But considering how horrible 10.4 and earlier are at threading, it's not rocket science to presume that Apple is putting some serious development money in it. Hopefully they'll catch up to and leapfrog the other OSes with the work in Leopard.
  • Reply 20 of 56
    jeffdmjeffdm Posts: 12,951member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by mwswami

    Wikipedia is got to be in error. Clovertown is designed to work in the Bensley platform which supports two sockets. See TechReport article. Of course Kentfield is designed to fit Conroe motherboards and is not MP-capable.





    I think it shows that Wikipedia shouldn't be a sole source. To be sure of anything, I try to confirm with as many disparate sources as reasonably possible.



    I think it's nice that the diagram shows that the dual-processor-package systems will have a dedicated bus for each processor package.
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