The Hindu : Business : Era of `2-in-1' chips has come

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Apr 25, 2005

Business

Business

Era of `2-in-1' chips has come

PCs with the new chip will allow Indian developers to create rich games

The two dual-core Pentium D chips that follow in a few weeks are not hyper-threaded and are aimed at the mass PC market.

TWO BRAINS IN ONE: Dual core processors from Intel and AMD.

IT IS time to say `one equals two.' The world's leading computer processor makers have just pushed PC users into a new era when the microchip under the hood is as good as two. The name of the game is `dual core' — which means the match box-sized slab of silicon that lies at the heart of every computer will henceforth include two identical processor cores. It may mean not quite double, but a 65 per cent improvement in the way the PC works.

On successive days, earlier last week, Intel and AMD unveiled their dual core offerings:

The world's number one chip maker, Intel, hit the streets on Wednesday last, with the Pentium "Extreme Edition'' 840 running at 3.2 gigahertz.

Its road map indicates two other dual chips to be called Pentium D (at slightly slower clock speeds — 2.8 and 3 GHz) before end June. Later this year Intel's chips that fuel servers (Xeon) and laptops (Pentium M) are expected to go dual.

The `other' PC chip maker, AMD , came out abroad, with own dual core announcement on Thursday — with simultaneous offerings in both its brands: the dual core Opteron 800 series for servers and workstations and the Athlon 64 X2 for consumer and business PCs.

This may just be the beginning: Tech-watcher Gartner predicts that by 2006, no major chip maker will be manufacturing single core chips except as small batches for the replacement market.

In addition to its two cores, the Extreme Edition chip from Intel includes the `hyper threading' (HT) feature — a software trick that deceives the rest of the electronics into `seeing double' that is being able to work with two virtual processors.

With two real cores and the HT, the Extreme Edition will allow application developers to write software that can carve up the task between four processors, said R. K. Amar Babu, Intel's Mumbai-based Director Sales and Marketing for South Asia, during a special technology briefing for The Hindu on the eve of its India launch.

The chip is aimed at the high end `multithreaded' gaming and graphics-intense market, he added. PCs with the new chip will allow Indian developers to create rich games and vivid animation for the global market.

The two dual-core Pentium D chips that follow in a few weeks are not hyper-threaded and are aimed at the mass PC market. Unlike the $1000 Extreme Edition chips, these are likely to be in the $200-$400 band and almost all branded PC makers including Indian names like HCL, Zenith and Wipro can be expected to shift to dual core chips later this year.

The Intel-only PC maker Dell has globally launched dual core-based machines last week.

So who needs all this computational muscle? That is a question one no longer asks — because in a technology version of Parkinson's Law, applications can soon be expected to gobble up the improved performance and enable users to do `multi tasking' — playing high resolution games while downloading a heavy movie file, for example.

Another question that some software vendors are ducking for now is the matter of pricing. Where corporates used to pay licence fees for software-per-machine, will they now have to pay per core?

Some major application vendors have said 'yes' on the argument that you pay for two pieces of cake — even if they are served on the same plate.

But in the home market, they are betting we will be so hooked on to the rich new multimedia diet, that today's single core chip-driven machines will soon seem like candidates from the Jurassic park of extinct PCs.

ANAND PARTHASARATHY

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