Intel introduces the Conroe architecture
It’s that time of the year again – it’s IDF time! (For those not familiar with IDF – it stands for Intel Developer’s Forum). I used to attend IDF every so often when I worked for Intel and it was a great time to see the marketing engines shine at Intel. Yes you also saw some third party companies show off their goods but this is really all about Intel and to a lesser extent their developers – whether hardware or software. So what’s new for 2006 you might ask? Well in a word – Conroe. Conroe is basically the codename for Intel’s next generation desktop processor. One look at the specs and you’d think that Intel stole a page from AMD’s book with their Athlon and Athlon64 processor. Well.. they have in many ways. Conroe emphasizes doing more work per clock cycle than the original Pentium 4 ever did.
The Pentium 4 had a nice long pipeline which meant that you could crank up the clock speed in order to get better performance. However, if you had programs that weren’t optimized for the Pentium 4 architecture, you could easily find yourself wasting that long pipeline. Of course the higher you crank up the clock speed, the more heat the CPU is going to put out and the less optimum it is for things like servers and mobile systems.
Conroe is based on what Intel calls the Core architecture and shares the same architecture with its mobile counterpart – the Merom architecture. The only difference is in power management and manufacturing processes. So what’s the big deal about Conroe? It has a 14 stage pipeline compared to the P4′s 30 stage pipeline. It’s an entirely new design from the ground up although it does take ideas from the Pentium M architecture. The P4 has basically been around since the Pentium Pro processor days. The Conroe has a larger instruction bandwidth totally 4. (Compared to the Pentium 4 and Pentium M’s three).
Each Conroe core has 64KB of L1 cache. There’s also a large 4MB L2 cache that is shared among all the cores. The new architectures support “micro-ops fusion” which basically means that a typical x86 instruction is broken down into smaller operations. There are even cases where several x86 instructions can be paired into a single instruction.
So why are people supposedly excited? Well Intel started showing off the Conroe processor at IDF and compared it against an overclocked AMD Athlon64 FX-60 processor running at 2.8GHz. The Conroe was actually running at a slower clock frequency (2.66GHz) and it was beating the AMD processor. Of course this was in a controlled environment so all the tech geek sites out there need to get their hands on the new Intel proc. However, it’s nice to see Intel back in the game. AMD’s been beating them pretty easily in the desktop market and really - the only saving grace for Intel has been the Pentium M and the Core Duo lineup. With Conroe, Intel finally is striking back with possibly a vengeance. Conroe should be coming out sometime during Q3 of this year if all goes well.
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