Intel Hyper-Threading evolution roadmap
After the recent announcement of Intel Hyper-Threading, I guess everyone understands that the company will develop the technology further for new processors. In his interview for Japanese PC Watch William M. Siu, vice-president and director of Intel Desktop Platforms Group shed some light on Hyper-Threading evolution plans.
In 2003 Hyper-Threading will be implemented into all Pentium 4 products along with their price cut. Initially, Intel planned to use HT with 3.06 GHz P4 and higher, however this might be reconsidered and, perhaps, we’ll see Hyper-Threading in chips of several price ranges by summer, including <3GHz P4.
The next logical innovation: as Hyper-Threading is supported by today’s high-end Northwood processors, why shouldn’t Intel embed it into Celerons with the same core? In the interview Siu has underlined that the question of releasing mainstream HT products is still raised, though doesn’t include any technical limits.
The situation with mobile CPUs, supporting HT, is more complex. According to industry sources, mainly due to Microsoft delays of Hyper-Threading and C3/C4 power saving modes implementation. So the Hyper-Threading mobile support might appear only in Longhorn.
The development of products, supporting more than two virtual processors, will be the main line of Hyper-Threading evolution for these years. There’s no specific data on this question, but supposedly the next generation processors with Nehalem core, expected in H2 2004, will be able to handle up to four threads. In other words, 4-processor server will feature 16 virtual devices.
The development of TLP (Thread-Level Parallelism) won’t be limited to IA-32 platform. TLP is expected in the next generation of 64-bit IA-64 (Itanium). Most likely, it will happen closer to 2005 along with the appearance of new 64-bit 65-nm Chivano featuring about 400 sq.mm core, about 100 million transistors, and several processing cores per chip.
Source: PC Watch
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