Spring IDF: Penryn, Skulltrail and SoCs
Tuesday 17th April 2007, 03:02:00 PM, written by Arun
In terms of CPUs and PC platforms, the Beijing Intel Developer Forum is focusing on the company's nearer-term prospects, such as Penryn's performance enhancements, their Quad FX equivalent and future SoCs including Tolapai. They are also hinting at an upcoming Consumer Electronics-focused SoC with "leading-edge A/V processing, graphics, and more."
First, in terms of System on Chip projects, Intel mentioned Tolapai and described it as being enterprise-targeted. HKEPC has previously leaked information on the chip, so there's really not much else to say. It's a single-chip platform based on a fairly low performance Pentium M core, but with plenty of I/O including 3 Gigabit ethernet ports. However, it does lack one thing: display capabilities. The reasoning behind that seems to be that some customers will want to use console redirect instead, and otherwise they can just add a discrete PCI Express GPU.
An upcoming SoC aimed at the consumer electronics market and slated for a 2008 release was also briefly discussed. Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini, had already mentionned this project at an investors conference a few months ago, and claimed it was aimed at a market that was "struggling to compete with the iPhone". We believe this SoC to be based on the x86 instruction set considering Otellini's comments, and it's also a likely suspect for hosting PowerVR IP, given ImgTec's previously stated desire, and their recent closeness with Intel.
As for Penryn, Intel is comparing the QX6800 (4 cores, 2x4MiB L2, 2.93GHz, 1066MHz FSB) with a 3.33GHz Yorkfield (2x6MiB L2, 1333MHz FSB) and claiming performance improvements of 15% to 40% in imaging applications and games respectively. This obviously represents a non-negligible IPC improvement, given that the clockrate only increased by about 13%, and the FSB by 25%.
And finally, the company is also announcing that they are on schedule with the Bearlake chipset family, with some of the first products arriving this quarter. They are also revealing their intentions to compete directly with AMD's Quad FX platform with a dual-socket "Skulltrail" platform. It isn't clear if it will accept Socket 775 desktop CPUs, however. Either way, this decision makes sense to us, because in the future AMD's Quad FX will host 8 cores (via the Barcelona family), and Intel won't have anything to compete with that on a single socket before the release of Nehalem in late 2008.
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