Intel decides two cores are better than one

Intel Corp.'s decision to scrap its single-core processor road map in favor of chips with two cores will help the company improve the performance of its future chips without having to rely on a power-centric design, analysts said Friday.

Two future processors were eliminated from Intel's product plans on Friday. Tejas, once the future of the Pentium 4, and Jayhawk, a planned successor to the Xeon server processor, have been dropped, an Intel spokesman said. Instead, Intel plans to roll out dual-core designs across all of its server, desktop and mobile processor lines by the end of 2005.

Dual-core processors are just what the name implies: two processor cores on a single die. Chip designers have been gravitating toward this design because it allows them to use two lower-power cores to improve performance rather than depending on a high-frequency single core.

Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst with Insight 64 in Saratoga, California, drew an automotive analogy for the shift to dual-core processors.

"This is a shift from a one-cylinder engine to a two-cylinder engine. It runs smoother, it gets better mileage, and you can use two smaller cylinders instead of one huge cylinder," Brookwood said.

IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. have each released dual-core chips for high-end servers. Intel has also announced plans to bring dual-core chips to its Itanium server processor family.

The dual-core design allows Intel to handle a power-consumption problem that was coming to a head with the February release of the Prescott Pentium 4, the company's first chip built on a 90 nanometer process generation. Power consumption is of paramount concern to chip designers as circuits shrink to the point where power can leak out of those circuits as heat.

In almost every other transition between process generations, Intel has been able to follow a simple plan for managing frequency and power consumption, said Kevin Krewell, editor in chief of The Microprocessor Report, in San Jose, California.

The company would steadily increase the frequency of its older chips to the limit imposed by the older process generation. Once the new process generation was ready, Intel would introduce new chips that run at even higher frequencies but with lower power consumption due to the benefits of the new process technology, he said.

However, Prescott actually consumed more power at the same frequency of its Northwood predecessor. This was due in part to new instructions and additional cache, but analysts also feel that power leakage is worse than expected at the 90 nanometer process generation.

Each core on a dual-core processor can run at a lower frequency, and therefore consume less power, while still delivering better performance than a higher frequency processor with a single core, Krewell said.

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