65nm news from Intel

In article ,
keith wrote:
On Mon, 04 Oct 2004 07:37:36 +0000, Nick Maclaren wrote:
In article ,
keith writes:
| On Sun, 03 Oct 2004 09:24:06 -0700, Eugene Miya wrote:
| Stefan Monnier wrote:
| Your second CPU will be mostly idle, of course, but so is the first CPU
| anyway ;-)
| Yeah, but that's not bad.
| 2nd CPUs are cheap these days.
|
| You may htinf the second is "cheap", but I don't. The second CPU and the
| board that dgoes with it are certainly *not* "cheap".
What board?

I will use the TF-1 as an example. CPUs weren't boards.
There were multiple CPUs on a chip, so most of the pattern was reusable.

The cost difference is far more marketing than production. Dual
CPU boards are sold as 'servers' and as 'performance workstations',
both at a premium. They could equally well be sold with the same
margin as the 'economy' boards.

The development costs (board/chipset/BIOS) have to be recaptured across
fewer units sold, so will cost more. Look at the prices of boards with
on-board SCSI, for another example. OTOH, it doesn't cost all *that* much
more to throw another core on a chip.

If you are seeking economies of scale in parallel computing, it doesn't
work well that way. The redundance works toward scale economies.
The problem is that the infrastructure does not last a long.

The desk top is not a likely near term place to find most
multiprocesssors as a final product. Dual processors are marginal for
most uses. In the numeric area, you want to see performance improvements
of factors of 8-16 if not more, not 2-4.

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