Just a few months after the launch of AMD's quad-core Barcelona chips, Intel is hitting back with Penryn, now known as the Xeon 5400 family of processors.
A total of 15 server chips are set to launch on Monday, as well as a new Core 2 Extreme desktop processor, with Penryn chips for mainstream desktops and notebooks scheduled to launch in the first quarter of next year.
Penryn is essentially a shrink of the Core architecture that brought Intel out of the woods in 2006. But these are also the company's first chips to use Intel's 45nm (nanometre) manufacturing technology, and they will usher in the first change to the basic properties of the transistor since the 1960s.
For the first time, Intel plans to use a metal gate and a new material for the oxide layer around the gate in its transistor designs. This fundamental part of the transistor provides the foundation for computing as the part that determines whether a transistor is off or on, a "0" or a "1".
"We needed the scaling and power/performance, and it would be very hard to do it on the previous technology," said Dadi Perlmutter, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Mobility Group.
Intel and other chipmakers were running into problems making the gates smaller and smaller. The gates were getting down to the point where the gate dielectric — an insulating layer that sits between the gate and the rest of the transistor — was only a few atoms thick. The chipmaking industry has figured out lots of amazing things, but it hasn't figured out how to split an atom without causing a bit of an energy problem.
The new materials allowed Intel to build thicker gates with the same switching properties as the older ones, which helps control current leakage and also buys the industry a few more generations of scaling. IBM and AMD plan to release chips based on similar technology in 2008.
And the combination of the new transistors and some design tweaks appears to have been enough to give Intel a performance lead with the Penryn generation of chips. The company said some of its partners set world records for scores on well-known benchmarks, such as TPC-C and SPECint_rate2006, with the basic Xeon chips. When paired with the 1600MHz front-side bus available on some chips, Intel said it also set records on SPECfp_2006rate, long a stronghold of AMD's. SPECint_rate is a general measure of transactional performance that's important to business customers, while SPECfp_rate measures floating-point performance and is important to high-performance computing customers.
Intel avoided making direct comparisons to AMD's chips in briefing materials distributed ahead of the announcement. It plans to have a website up and running on Monday with more detailed performance information.
Intel did say that the new Xeons will be about 28 percent faster than their older brothers on SPECint_rate2006, and 30 percent faster on SPECfp_rate2006. Barcelona barely edged out the older generation of Xeon chips on SPECint_rate2006, so it looks like Intel will have an edge in that area.
Penryn marks the second generation of Intel's quad-core designs. Around this time last year, Intel packaged its dual-core Core generation processors into quad-core chips that enjoyed several months free from competition from AMD.
AMD gained back some market share in the third quarter, as Barcelona systems trickled into the market. Still, going into the launch, the company didn't expect Barcelona to contribute meaningful revenue until the fourth quarter. Reports surfaced last week in the run-up to the Penryn launch that some server vendors are quoting 2008 as the time frame for Barcelona's availability, even though AMD executives said they plan to ship "hundreds of thousands" of Barcelona chips this quarter.
AMD has two new designs for desktops and notebooks (known as Spider and Puma) that are set to arrive over the next few months. But Intel isn't sitting still either: the first quarter of next year will see Penryn chips arriving for desktops and notebooks, as well as an extremely low-power chip called "Silverthorne" that could open new markets for Intel that AMD can't touch until 2009.
Intel's main plan for 2008 is to release chips, called "Nehalem", that borrow many of the same design techniques, such as an integrated memory controller and point-to-point connections, that made AMD's Opteron chips a winner for several years.
But AMD also appears to be pinning its hopes on 2009, when it aims to release "Fusion" chips that integrate a high-powered GPU with a PC and server processor. The "Bulldozer" chips will also be assembled from smaller building blocks, which could let the chipmaker target specific customers with designs tailored for their needs.
For now, though, Intel is in excellent shape — assuming it doesn't run into any problems during the first few months of the Penryn launch. In just two years, Intel has managed to get beyond the embarrassment of its abrupt change in course at the hands of AMD to get its server group back on track.
