Indian Team Designs Intel’s First ‘true’ Quad-core Chip

 

Intel released its first “true” quad-core processors on Monday with the introduction of its Xeon 7400 series of server chips, formerly called Dunnington. Designed by Intel engineers in Bangalore, India, the chip lineup includes the company’s first quad-core and six-core chips produced on a single piece of silicon.

The Xeon 7400 series is the first chip to come out of Intel’s Bangalore design center. Established in 2002, the center had previously worked on another Xeon server chip called Whitefield. But that chip never made it to market. It was cancelled in 2005, when Intel revised its product road maps to better compete with Advanced Micro Devices, and the Indian design team soon put its focus on Dunnington.

“This is a tremendous accomplishment,” said Praveen Vishakantaiah, the chief architect of Dunnington, discussing the server chip in a phone interview. “No other team has been able to accomplish something like this so fast.”

Moreover, the Bangalore design center is the first Intel team outside the U.S. to complete the design of a 45-nanometer processor, he said.

The Dunnington chip design marks a technical milestone for Intel, as it uses a monolithic die, the term engineers use to describe putting all of the cores on a single piece of silicon.

Intel’s existing quad-core processor lines use two pieces of silicon, each with two cores, packaged together. That approach made the older quad-core chips easier to produce and avoided the manufacturing difficulties that hampered the release of AMD’s Barcelona chip — an x86 server chip with four cores on a single piece of silicon. Those difficulties were compounded by AMD’s transition to a new 65-nanometer manufacturing process.

Semiconductor manufacturing is as much art as it is science, and chip makers can struggle for months to get high yields from a new manufacturing process.

With the introduction of Dunnington — and the upcoming Nehalem line of quad-core processors that also uses a monolithic design — Intel waited until its 45-nanometer process was in mass production, with any technical difficulties presumably ironed out, before making this transition.

Apple re-releases iTunes 8 for Windows

Apple late Thursday re-released iTunes 8 for Windows to roll back a buggy driver that had been bricking Windows Vista PCs with dreaded “blue screen of death” crashes since Tuesday.

In a support document posted around 8:30 p.m. EDT on Thursday, Apple urged Vista users who had been unable to synchronize their iPods or iPhones using iTunes 8 to uninstall both iTunes and an Apple-provided device driver, then download and reinstall the entire 75MB package yet again.

From Vista’s “Uninstall a Program” control panel, users should ditch the “Apple Mobile Device Support” driver as well as iTunes itself, then restart the PC. “Re-download and install the updated iTunes 8 installer from www.apple.com/itunes/download,” said Apple. “Do not use the iTunes8Setup or iTunes864Setup file you previously downloaded.”

Users running Microsoft ‘s Vista operating system had reported problems almost as soon as the updated iTunes 8 was posted for download Tuesday. According to scores of users on the Apple support forum, plugging in an iPod or iPhone caused Vista to crash, then display the “blue screen of death” (BSOD), a Windows critical error screen best-known for its blue background.

The BSOD message fingered an Apple-provided USB driver—”usbaapl.sys” in the 32-bit version of Vista, “usbaapl64.sys” in the 64-bit edition of the OS—as the culprit. Windows identifies that driver as “Apple Mobile Device Support” in Vista’s uninstaller.

According to Windows blogger Ed Bott, who first reported on the iTunes re-release, Apple simply dumped buggy versions of usbaapl.sys and usbaapl64.sys, and swapped in older editions from a July iTunes update.

Computerworld confirmed that a copy of iTunes 8 downloaded late Thursday, after Apple re-issued the application, installed the same older 31.2KB driver identified by Bott. InComputerworld’s case, however, the usbaapl.sys driver was date-stamped as July 10, not July 22, as Bott said.

Apple released iTunes 7.7 on July 10 as part of its run-up to the iPhone 3G launch, and the unveiling of both the iPhone 2.0 software and the MobileMe online sync and storage service.

Intel’s six-core Dunnington chip hits the market:

Intel’s latest server chips, the Xeon 7400 series, formerly called Dunnington, are now available in six-core and quad-core models designed to be used in systems with four or more processors.

The new chip line offers a performance bump over its predecessor, the Xeon 7200 series, Intel said. Much of that increase comes from adding a 16MB level 3 cache. The 7400 series processors are the first Xeon chips to use a level 3 cache, which stores data closer to the processor cores, helping to boost overall performance.

“With the level 3 cache, that does contain additional performance for some of the high-compute-intensive and data-intensive enterprise applications,” said Adesh Gupta, regional server platform manager at Intel Asia-Pacific.

The extra cores also help. Unlike desktops and laptops that rarely run applications capable of tapping the full processing power of quad-core chips, many server applications, like virtualization, run better on multi-core processors.

The first processors to come out of Intel’s India Design Center in Bangalore, the Xeon 7400 chips run at clock speeds up to 2.66GHz and have either four or six cores. They are priced ranging from $856 to $2,729, in 1,000-unit quantities. Servers based on the chips will be available starting Tuesday from vendors like Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell, among others.

The Xeon 7400 contains all six cores on one piece of silicon, while Intel’s existing line of quad-core Xeon chips pack two pieces of silicon inside a single package. This was possible because the 45-nanometer process used to make the new chip reduces the size of the features on a chip, increases performance and reduces power consumption.

“We knew that this process would help us pack in more transistors,” Gupta said.

The Xeon 7400 series is the last member of Intel’s Penryn chip family to be released. Later this year, the company will shift to a new processor architecture called Nehalem.

Like earlier chips, the Xeon 7400 relies on a memory controller located in an external chip, which can cause memory bottlenecks in certain applications. The level 3 cache helps to alleviate this problem, but cannot eliminate it entirely. Nehalem will move the memory controller onto the processor itself, which is likely to speed up memory access considerably.