Intel has recently launched a reiteration of the Hyper Threading design, which was originally available on the Pentium 4 processor family and offered an early taste of multithreaded applications, and showed up as a dual core processor in the Windows operating system.
This current version of Hyper Threading is an integral part of the design of the Core i7 processor family. Every Core i7 processor is a quadruple core chip, with Hyper Threading active on all four cores, giving a total of 8 possible processing threads at one time. With speeds ranging from 2.53 GHz to 3.20 GHz, and 8 MB cache on die, the Core i7 heralds a new era for Intel's desktop and mobile processor families.
Some other innovations that are part of the i7's design include on chip memory control, a new 45 nm manufacturing process which produces less waste, with more chips per assembly line, and TurboBoost, an technology that enables greater efficiency from such a powerful chip. TurboBoost is used by the processor to "overclock" itself to get more work done at any time.
The Core i7 has been available since fall 2009, with new versions having been released in spring 2010. (Information and Image from Intel.com)
Sometime in the sixties Gordon E. Moore a co-founder of Intel, predicted that number of components in integrated circuits would double every year. This has been changed to about every 18 months instead of every year, and is referred to as Moore’s Law.
ReplyDeleteMoore’s Law has been constant in the computer processor industry for decades, but even he thought that at some point his own prediction would lose relevance. I wonder if when Moore tried to explain his law he had any idea of how far computer processors would eventually come.