OS X Code (r,s)

Posted on Wednesday 24 August 2005 - Popularity: 2%

As announced last week, Intel has now shown their new line of x86 chips. Thirst thing you should do is forget everything you know about Gigahertz, that’s not important anymore, because the new Gigahertz is “performance per watt”. Steve Jobs has used the term to explain Apple’s switch to Intel chips and now Intel is using the term for their whole new line of chips. The new architecture is called “Merom” and was designed from the ground-up to have a much better “performance per watt” rating compared to their previous chips. There are many features that make this possible, for example:

Then comes power savings, which is what this family was designed to to. Pentium 4s are pretty much on all the time they are powered up, and if you need to cook eggs, this is your chip. Banias/Dothan took power savings seriously, and allowed the chip to power down units that were not in use. This was a massive power savings.

Merom goes well beyond this, all units are powered down in the default state. When units are needed , they are powered up, and the chip takes power savings to a new level entirely.

Now how much power do this new chips take? There are four versions of the chip. The smallest one, designed for handtops (a new Newton maybe?), takes a mere 0.5 Watt! The version for sub-laptops (aka notebooks) takes 5 Watt, that’s comparable to a G3 of the past and much less than the current G4 chips built into Apples notebooks. Desktop versions of the chip are 65 Watt and server versions are 80 Watt. The chips are announced for the second half of 2006, right in time for the Intel Macs!

Here are some links with photos from the presentation and further information: Ars Technica, AnandTech (1), AnandTech (2), AnandTech (3), TheInq, The Tech Report, Tom’s Hardware

Fredi