Intel Corporation

ntel (NASDAQ: INTC; SEHK: 4335) is the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. The company is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers. Intel was founded on July 18, 1968, as Integrated Electronics Corporation and based in Santa Clara, California, USA. Intel also makes motherboard chipsets, network cards and ICs, flash memory, graphic chips, embedded processors, and other devices related to communications and computing. Founded by semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, and widely associated with the executive leadership and vision of Andrew Grove, Intel combines advanced chip design capability with a leading-edge manufacturing capability. Originally known primarily to engineers and technologists, Intel's successful "Intel Inside" advertising campaign of the 1990s made it and its Pentium processor household names.

Technology

The first PC motherboards with support for RDRAM debuted in 1999. They supported PC800 RDRAM, which operated at 400 MHz but presented data on both rise and fall of clock cycle resulting in effectively 800 MHz, and delivered 1600 MB/s of bandwidth over a 16-bit bus using a 184-pin RIMM form factor. This was significantly faster than the previous standard, PC133 SDRAM, which operated at 133 MHz and delivered 1066 MB/s of bandwidth over a 64-bit bus using a 168-pin DIMM form factor.

Some downsides of RDRAM technology, however, included significantly increased latency, heat output, manufacturing complexity, and cost. PC800 RDRAM operated with a latency of 45 ns, compared to only 7.5 ns for PC133 SDRAM. RDRAM memory chips also put out significantly more heat than SDRAM chips, necessitating heatsinks on all RIMM devices. RDRAM also includes a memory controller on each memory chip, significantly increasing manufacturing complexity compared to SDRAM, which used a single memory controller located on the northbridge chipset. RDRAM was also two to three times the price of PC133 SDRAM due to manufacturing costs, license fees and other market factors. DDR SDRAM, introduced in 2000, operated at an effective clockspeed of 266 MHz and delivered 2100 MB/s over a 64-bit bus using a 184-pin DIMM form factor.

Non-profit distinction

Whereas for-profit corporations exist to earn and distribute taxable business earnings to shareholders, the nonprofit corporation exists solely to provide programs and services that are of public benefit. Often these programs and services are not otherwise provided by local, state, or federal entities. While they are able to earn a profit, more accurately called a surplus, such earnings must be retained by the organization for its future provision of programs and services. Earnings may not benefit individuals or stake-holders. Nonprofit organizations may put substantial funds into hiring leadership and management personnel. In the past many nonprofits considered this to be unreasonably businesslike and money-focused, but since the late 1980s there has been a growing consensus that nonprofits can achieve their missions more effectively by using some of the same methods developed in for-profit enterprises. These include effective internal management, ensuring accountability for results, and monitoring the performance of different divisions or projects in order to make the best use of their funds and people. Those require management and that, in turn, begins with the organization's mission.

Non-profit organization

A nonprofit organization (abbreviated NPO, also not-for-profit) is an organization that does not distribute its surplus funds to owners or shareholders, but instead uses them to help pursue its goals. Examples of NPOs include charities (i.e. charitable organizations) , trade unions, and public arts organizations. Most governments and government agencies meet this definition, but in most countries they are considered a separate type of organization and not counted as NPOs.

K5, K6 and Athlon

AMD's first in-house x86 processor was the K5 which was launched in 1996. The "K" was a reference to "Kryptonite", which from comic book lore, was the only substance (radioactive pieces of his home planet) which could harm Superman, a clear reference to Intel, which dominated in the market at the time, as "Superman".

In 1996, AMD purchased NexGen specifically for the rights to their Nx series of x86-compatible processors. AMD gave the NexGen design team their own building, left them alone, and gave them time and money to rework the Nx686. The result was the K6 processor, introduced in 1997.

The K7 was AMD's seventh generation x86 processor, making its debut on June 23, 1999, under the brand name Athlon. On October 9, 2001 the Athlon XP was released, followed by the Athlon XP with 512KB L2 Cache on February 10, 2003

Athlon 64, Opteron and Phenom

The K8 was a major revision of the K7 architecture, with the most notable features being the addition of a 64-bit extension to the x86 instruction set (officially called AMD64), the incorporation of an on-chip memory controller, and the implementation of an extremely high performance point-to-point interconnect called HyperTransport, as part of the Direct Connect Architecture. The technology was initially launched as the Opteron server-oriented processor. Shortly thereafter it was incorporated into a product for desktop PCs, branded Athlon 64.

AMD released the first dual core Opteron, an x86-based server CPU, on April 21, 2005. The first desktop-based dual core processor family—the Athlon 64 X2—came a month later. In early May 2007, AMD had abandoned the string "64" in its dual-core desktop product branding, becoming Athlon X2, downplaying the significance of 64-bit computing in its processors while upcoming updates involved some of the improvements to the microarchitecture, and a shift of target market from mainstream desktop systems to value dual-core desktop systems. AMD has also started to release dual-core Sempron processors in early 2008 exclusively in China, branded as Sempron 2000 series, with lower HyperTransport speed and smaller L2 cache, thus the firm completes its dual-core product portfolio for each market segment.

Benchmarks

Automotive

• AutoBench 1.1, performance of microprocessors and microcontrollers in automotive, industrial, and general-purpose applications

Consumer

• ConsumerBench 1.1, performance of processors in digital still cameras, printers, and other embedded systems that handle digital imaging tasks

Digital Entertainment

• DENBench 1.0, performance of processor subsystems in multimedia tasks such as image, video, and audio file compression and decompression

Java

• GrinderBench 1.0, performance of Java ME applications in products such as mobile phones and PDAs

Multicore

• MultiBench 1.0 extends the EEMBC scope to analyze multicore architectures, memory bottlenecks, OS scheduling support, synchronization efficiency, and other related system functions. It measures the impact of parallelization and scalability across both data processing and computationally-intensive tasks.

Networking

• NetworkingBench 1.1, performance of processors in low-end routers
• NetworkingBench 2.0, performance of processors tasked with moving packets in networking applications

Office Automation

• OABench 1.1, performance of processors in printers, plotters, and other office automation systems that handle text and image processing tasks

Telecom

• TeleBench 1.1, performance of processors in modem, xDSL, and related fixed-telecom applications

Power/Energy

• EnergyBench, ties performance with energy consumption for specific benchmarks, specified for silicon devices which can be certified under current procedures

EEMBC

EEMBC, the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium, is a non-profit organization formed in 1997 with the aim of developing meaningful performance benchmarks for the hardware and software used in embedded systems. The goal of its members is to make EEMBC benchmarks an industry standard for evaluating the capabilities of embedded microprocessors, compilers, and the associated embedded system implementations according to objective, clearly defined, application-based criteria.

EEMBC benchmarks aim to reflect real-world applications and the demands that embedded systems encounter in these environments. The consortium licenses "algorithms" and "applications" organized into benchmark suites targeting telecommunications, networking, digital entertainment, Java, automotive/industrial, consumer, and office equipment products, and an additional suite that allows users to observe the energy consumed by the processor when performing these algorithms and applications. EEMBC also has a series of multicore-specific benchmarks that span multiple application areas.

AMD chipsets

Before the launch of Athlon 64 processors in 2003, AMD designed chipsets for their processors spanning the K6 and K7 processor generations. The chipsets include the AMD-640, AMD-751 and the AMD-761 chipsets. The situation changed in 2003 with the release of Athlon 64 processors, and AMD chose not to further design its own chipsets for its desktop processors while opening the desktop platform to allow other firms to design chipsets. This is the "Open Platform ATI, VIA and SiS developing their own chipset for Athlon 64 processors and later Athlon 64 X2 and Athlon 64 FX processors, including the Quad FX platform chipset from Nvidia.

The initiative went further with the release of Opteron server processors as AMD stopped the design of server chipsets in 2004 after releasing the AMD-8111 chipset, and again opened the server platform for firms to develop chipsets for Opteron processors. As of today, Nvidia and Broadcom are the sole designing firms of server chipsets for Opteron processors.

Advanced Micro Devices

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) (NYSE: AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Sunnyvale, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for commercial and consumer markets. Its main products include microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, embedded processors and graphics processors for servers, workstations and personal computers, and processor technologies for handheld devices, digital television, automobiles, game consoles, and other embedded systems applications.

AMD is the second-largest global supplier of microprocessors based on the x86 architecture after Intel Corporation, and the third-largest supplier of graphics processing units, behind Intel and Nvidia. It also owns 21 percent of Spansion, a supplier of non-volatile flash memory. In 2007, AMD ranked eleventh among semiconductor manufacturers in terms of revenue.

Rambus

Rambus Incorporated (NASDAQ: RMBS), founded in 1990, is a provider of high-speed interface technology. The company became particularly well known for its aggressive intellectual property based litigation practices following the introduction of DDR-SDRAM memory.

Yonah

The first processors using the brand appeared in notebook computers in early 2007. Those processors, named Pentium T2060, T2080, and T2130, had the 32-bit Pentium M-derived Yonah core, and closely resembled the Core Duo T2050 processor with the exception of having 1 MB of L2 cache instead of 2 MB. All three of them had a 533 MHz FSB connecting the CPU with the memory. Intel developed the Pentium Dual-Core at the request of laptop manufacturers.

Pentium Dual-Core

The Pentium Dual-Core brand refers to mainstream x86-architecture microprocessors from Intel. They are based on either the 32-bit Yonah or (with quite different microarchitectures) 64-bit Merom, Allendale, and, more recently, with the launch of the model E5200, Wolfdale core, targeted at mobile or desktop computers.

In terms of features, price and performance at a given clock frequency, Pentium Dual-Core processors are positioned above Celeron but below Core and Core 2 microprocessors in Intel's product range.

Core Solo and Core Duo

The original Core brand refers to Intel's 32-bit mobile dual-core x86 CPUs that derived from the Pentium M branded processors. The processor family used a more enhanced version of the Intel P6 microarchitecture. It emerged in parallel with the NetBurst (Intel P68) microarchitecture of the Pentium 4 brand, and was a precursor of the 64-bit Core microarchitecture of Core 2 branded CPUs. The Core brand comprised two branches: the Duo (dual-core) and Solo (Duo with one disabled core, which replaced the Pentium M brand of single-core mobile processor).

The Core brand was launched on January 5, 2006 by the release of the 32-bit Yonah CPU - Intel's first dual-core mobile (low-power) processor. Its dual-core layout closely resembled two interconnected Pentium M branded CPUs packaged as a single die (piece) silicon chip (IC). Hence, the 32-bit microarchitecture of Core branded CPUs - contrary to its name - had more in common with Pentium M branded CPUs than with the subsequent 64-bit Core microarchitecture of Core 2 branded CPUs. Despite a major rebranding effort by Intel starting January 2006, some computers with the Yonah core continued to be marked as Pentium M.

The Core series is also known for being the first Intel processor to be used as the main CPU for an Apple Macintosh computer. The Core Duo was the CPU for the first generation Macbook Pro while the Core Solo appeared in Apple's Mac Mini line. Core Duo signified the beginning of Apple's shift to Intel processors across their entire line.

Intel Core

Intel Core is a brand name used for various mid-range to high-end consumer and business microprocessors. In general, processors sold as Core are more powerful variants of the same processors marketed as entry-level Celeron and Pentium. Similarly, identical or more capable versions of Core processors are also sold as Xeon processors for the server market.

The current lineup of Core processors includes the latest Intel Core i7 and Intel Core i5 and the older Core 2 Solo, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Extreme lines.

List of Intel Pentium Dual-Core microprocessors

The Intel Pentium Dual-Core brand refers to mainstream x86-architecture microprocessors from Intel. With the exception of a few early Yonah based mobile models, they are now all based on the 64-bit Core microarchitecture. Pentium Dual-Core lacks the SSE4.1 instruction found in the 45 nm Core 2 processors.

The Intel Pentium Dual-Core processors, E2140, E2160, E2180, E2200, and E2220 use the Allendale core, which includes 2 MB of native L2 cache, with half disabled leaving only 1 MB. This compares to the higher end Conroe core which features 4 MB L2 Cache natively. Intel has shifted its product lines having the Core 2 line as Mainstream/Performance, Pentium Dual-Core as Mainstream, and the new Celeron (based on the Conroe-L core) as Budget/Value. The E2xxx processors have half of their L2 cache disabled, from 2 MB to 1 MB.

The E5000 series and E6000 series use the same 45 nm Wolfdale-3M core as the E7000 series Core 2s, which has 3 MB L2 cache natively. 1 MB of L2 cache is disabled, for a total of 2 MB L2 cache, or twice the amount in the original Allendale Pentiums. The Wolfdale core is capable of SSE4, but it is disabled in these Pentiums. Pentium E2210 is an OEM processor based on Wolfdale-3M with only 1 MB L2 cache enabled out of the total 3 MB.

Dunnington

The Xeon "Dunnington" processor (CPUID Family 6, model 30) is closely related to Wolfdale but comes with six cores and an on-chip L3 cache and is designed for servers with Socket 604, so it is not marketed as Core 2. It is mentioned here for completeness.

Processor cores

Conroe / Merom (65 nm)

The original Core 2 processors are based around the same dies that can be identified as CPUID Family 6 Model 15. Depending on their configuration and packaging, their code names are Conroe (LGA 775, 4 MB L2 cache), Allendale (LGA 775, 2 MB L2 cache), Merom (Socket M, 4 MB L2 cache) and Kentsfield (Multi-chip module, LGA 775, 2x4MB L2 cache). Merom and Allendale processors with limited features can be found in Pentium Dual Core and Celeron processors, while Conroe, Allendale and Kentsfield also are sold as Xeon processors.

Additional code names for processors based on this model are Woodcrest (LGA 771, 4 MB L2 cache), Clovertown (MCM, LGA 771, 2x4MB L2 cache) and Tigerton (MCM, Socket 604, 2x4MB L2 cache), all of which are marketed only under the Xeon brand.

Duo, Quad, and Extreme

The Core 2-branded CPUs include: "Conroe"/"Allendale" (dual-core for desktops), "Merom" (dual-core for laptops), "Merom-L" (single-core for laptops), "Kentsfield" (quad-core for desktops), and the updated variants named "Wolfdale" (dual-core for desktops), "Penryn" (dual-core for laptops), and "Yorkfield" (quad-core for desktops). (Note: For the server and workstation "Woodcrest", "Clovertown", "Tigerton", "Harpertown" and "Dunnington" CPUs see the Xeon brand)

The Core 2 branded processors featured the Virtualization Technology (with some exceptions), Execute Disable Bit, and SSE3. Their Core microarchitecture introduced also SSSE3, Trusted Execution Technology, Enhanced SpeedStep, and Active Management Technology (iAMT2). With a thermal design power (TDP) of up to only 65 W, the Core 2 dual-core Conroe consumed only half the power of less capable, but also dual-core Pentium D-branded desktop chips with a TDP of up to 130 W (a high TDP requires additional cooling that can be noisy or expensive).

Intel Core 2

Core 2 is a brand encompassing a range of Intel's consumer 64-bit x86-64 single-, dual-, and quad-core CPUs based on the Intel Core microarchitecture. The single- and dual-core models are single-die, whereas the quad-core models comprise two dies, each containing two cores, packaged in a multi-chip module. The introduction of Core 2 relegated the Pentium brand to the mid-range market, and reunified laptop and desktop CPU lines, which previously had been divided into the Pentium 4, Pentium D, and Pentium M brands.

The Core microarchitecture returned to lower clock rates and improved the usage of both available clock cycles and power when compared with the preceding NetBurst microarchitectue of the Pentium 4/D-branded CPUs. The Core microarchitecture provides more efficient decoding stages, execution units, caches, and buses, reducing the power consumption of Core 2-branded CPUs while increasing their processing capacity. Intel's CPUs have varied wildly in power consumption according to clock rate, architecture, and semiconductor process, shown in the CPU power dissipation tables.