Out With The Clock Speed, In With The Watts

August 16th, 2005 · No Comments

Intel 486 DX2-66

Seeing the recent trend in processors (what with dual core and all) Intel thinks (righty so) that the time of measuring a chips speed by its clock speed is over. They now want to measure it by performance per watt:

Intel, which next week is expected to announce plans to move to a new processor architecture, is switching to a new yardstick to measure processor performance: performance per watt.

Intel Corp. is expected to detail next week at its IDF (Intel Developer Forum) a plan to begin building multicore chips with the architecture, a modified version of the circuitry behind its Pentium M notebook processor, during 2006.

Intel’s announcement will publicly signal an internal shift that’s already taken place. After years of promoting clock speed, it’s now emphasizing overall performance and power-efficiency.

Intel’s shift to processor numbers and its wholesale move to multicore processors—a multicore chip includes pack two or more processor cores in one package—sealed the deal for the architectural change, as power can be a limiting factor in fitting two or more processor cores together into a single chip.

Chips with multiple processor cores boost PC performance versus single-core chips by splitting up jobs.

“It’s not even so much even performance per watt as it is fitting higher performance computing into more constrained environments, either constrained by power, by [heat] or by noise or size,” said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research Inc.

I remember when having a 40Mhz 486 made me the big man on the block (well, big kid anyway). This sort of stuff really makes you feel that you’re getting older and that personal computing itself is changing.

I for one will miss the clock speed as geek status symbol and will remember the past fondly. At least I can always boot up any one of my regiment of pentiums or 486s to get my “olk skool” fix