Vol 18, Issue 52

December 27, 2004

2004 in Review

By Kevin Krewell

As we close out 2004, it's a time to look at the year, assessing the progress we've made and the work still ahead. At In-Stat/MDR, we established our first international forum, and we look forward to the second annual Processor Forum Taiwan in the fall of 2005. With the goal of offering increased value for your subscription in 2004, we emphasized deeper-content stories with more analysis, running fewer short, newsy stories. We are planning our 2005 editorial calendar to schedule certain in-depth stories over the year. We will be adding new features, like a buzzword and codename glossary, and the ability for readers to provide quick feedback on content.

Our goal in 2005 is to bring more industry input to the direction of the newsletter. To obtain more high-level feedback, we are creating an industry advisory council, to which we are inviting technology leaders in key companies. Our goal for the council is to set up a panel of people that can help direct us to the best content and technology trends for Microprocessor Report and for the forums. We will announce the first council members in January.

The Rise of the Multicore Processor

In the industry, 2004 was clearly the year of the multicore processor. It's not that we didn't have dual-core processors in servers before (IBM's Power 4), or in high-performance embedded processing (SiByte/Broadcom and PMC-Sierra), but in 2004, Intel staked its desktop and notebook roadmaps to multicore processors. After Intel's missteps with the Tejas cancellation, revised 4GHz introduction, and 90nm processor shipment delays, the company very publicly embraced multicore, for all its product lines, as the new path to increased performance. Still needed is more client application software that is multithreaded-aware and can scale single-application performance with additional cores. Modern server software is largely ready for multithreaded, multicore processors, but client software, with a few exceptions (like Adobe Photoshop), still has a way to go to use multiprocessor architectures efficiently. Intel did have a head start with Hyper-Threading technology, but there is more work to be done.

In many ways, however, Intel's designs are not very adventurous. The first dual-core desktop processor consists of two Prescott cores on a single die, with little redesign. The first real ground-up, dual-core design is the 65nm Yonah processor for notebook computers. We don't know anything about that design yet, but it is not expected to ship in systems until 2006. AMD's dual core Opteron, while more elegant with its shared on-die memory controller interface, is also a straight-forward design.

The most aggressive designs for multicore, multithreaded processing in 2005 will come from companies other than AMD and Intel. In servers, Sun Microsystems' Niagara processor has stripped the core down to the basics in order to pack the die with eight quad-threaded cores. First silicon is working, and Sun has publicly stated it will ship systems with Niagara in early 2006. Vendors at the high end of the embedded processor space are also moving to more cores, such as Cavium's Octeon processor with up to sixteen MIPS64 cores; Broadcom with four MIPS64 cores (for real this time) on one die (BCM14xx); and Freescale with the first dual-core PowerPC processor (PowerPC 8641D).

Another very exciting architecture on the horizon is the IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell architecture. Although the initial focus of the design is Sony's next-generation console machine, the Cell architecture is being touted as having applicability in devices ranging from handhelds to supercomputers. That is quite a tall order for one architecture. No architecture has succeeded over such a broad range of applications, not even the ubiquitous x86. Cell may be over-hyped right now, but the concepts behind it are not so radical as to be incomprehensible. Cell also fits nicely into the movement toward parallel processing, but it includes additional programming-management controls over the parallelism.

The End of an Era

The company that popularized the PC for business, created an industry, and (along the way) made Intel and Microsoft very, very rich, is now spinning off its PC division. IBM announced it is spinning off its PC division to a joint venture with Chinese computer company Levono. The new company will also be called Levono, but it will be able to use the IBM brand name for five years. It will take the IBM PC group fully intact.

The financial analyst community applauded the move and has also called for HP to spin off its own PC division as well. Once the darling of the technology market, PCs are now often considered commodity products, having little differentiation and slim margins. IBM's ThinkPad line of notebooks is widely recognized as the cream of the crop, and its recently revamped line of corporate desktops contains systems that are smaller and value priced, but they still didn't provide the company with enough value to keep.

The new Levono will be mostly a pure PC company, a rare occurrence in an era where the hot products are consumer devices. In China, however, the existing Levono makes other items, such as cellphones and servers. Once the deal is completed, in 2Q05, the new company may decide to expand beyond PCs and export those other items outside China.

So, must we now call the PC combination of an x86 processor and Microsoft software a "Levono-compatible PC"?

Reader Feedback

As always, we look for feedback from our readers. I would like to encourage you to drop us a note with your feedback on the articles we covered during the past year. What was your favorite, or what was the most outstanding? Which made the most difference to your job? What is your suggestion for articles in 2005?

Next month we will be naming our 2004 Analyst Choice Awards, always a popular topic. We're skipping the dinner this year and will announce the winners in the newsletter in January.

From all of us at Microprocessor Report, I'd like to wish you a healthy and prosperous New Year.