Clovertown- A quad core server chip by Intel

Just as the bragging rights for dual-core chip supremacy are dying down, Intel gave the first glimpse of a quad-core chip coming next year Proving its embrace of multicore technology, Intel today revealed the "Clovertown" processor, which is a four-core dandy meant to ship in early 2007.

Clovertown has been mentioned before on hardware sites, but this marks the first time Intel has confirmed the chip. It will slot into two-socket servers, giving low-end systems up to eight processor cores. This new chip bundles four processors in a single package, allowing computers to process data more quickly or run more applications at the same time, while using less power than a single-core design. Clovertown is aimed at server computers that run corporate networks and host Web sites on the Internet. Intel’s Chief technology officer Justin Rattner, who showed off a computer running two of the first four Clovertown chips produced, declined to say whether all four cores are on a single die, or if Clovertown would use two dual-core chips stuck together. Putting cores on the same die is more efficient since they can more easily exchange information and share resources.

Rattner said he envisioned a day when a single chip will have tens or even hundreds of cores, echoing the early era of the electronics industry when companies raced to see how many transistors they could squeeze on a chip. "It’s kind of like how many angels can you fit on the head of a pin?" Rattner said. But he said there were significant challenges in breaking beyond eight or 16 cores, from how to provide enough system memory to how to write software to take advantage of the new features.

Adding cores requires careful planning. Energy efficiency, data input/output and memory latency (the time it takes data to go from memory and the processor and vice versa) will be major issues with each level of core expansion.

To get around some of these issues, Intel is conducting research into circuit design and chip architecture as it has in the past. In addition, the company is working with application developers to determine how the architecture of its chips can be optimized.
By working with one server application developer, Intel determined that it needed to make three small changes to the architecture of one of its future server chips. Before the changes, the application only ran well in simulations on chips with 16 cores. After that, performance began to decline, Rattner said. After the changes, performance continued to climb. "We got it to scale well past 32" cores, he said.

Intel had been looking for "Whitefield" to appear as its first four-core chip but cancelled this project after some rough going in the design process. A series of chip delays and cancellations across Intel’s product lines caused some to question whether the company would match rival AMD in the multicore race. Now, however, it looks like Intel will be right in step with AMD, which is also expected to roll out four-core processors in 2007.

Intel recently launched a chip with two cores on the same die, replacing one that was essentially two single-core chips stuck together and was viewed as a quick-fix attempt to catch up with rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD’s dual-core product has helped the company grab market share from Intel, especially in the market for servers. While Intel has about 85 percent of the overall PC market, its share of servers has slipped to about 75 percent or less, according to estimates from market research firms.

"As I look at Intel’s product lineup versus AMD, it’s clear that Intel is weakest in servers and strongest in notebooks. So from that standpoint I can see why Intel would want to create an impression that says they are closing that gap," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight64

Also, many still wonder when Intel’s crucial CSI high-speed serial interconnect will appear. This technology is meant to match AMD’s Hypertransport and ship with an integrated memory controller. Without such advances, Intel will likely struggle to beat AMD’s Opteron chip in raw performance. At present, Intel has only said that CSI will appear in a 2008 version of Itanium. The technology was once meant to be built into Whitefield, but Intel has not given a CSI release date now.

All that said, Intel with the showcasing of Clovertown does now appear to be ramping its multi-core server lineup at speed after being slow to adopt the design concept. Come 2007, things will be tougher on AMD