Intel Shelton processor

On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 16:39:22 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
wrote:
If Microsoft tried to sell XP Lite for $15 in Asia, then it would have no
choice but to sell that in North America. Nobody in Asia would buy it, it's
still way too expensive.

For $15, I would say there would be people who will buy it. But it
would also depend heavily on the degree of crippleness, home
networking is relatively common nowadays. Now if they are willing to
sell the full version for $15 or even $25, they will definitely drive
the pirates out of the market :PpPPp

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If you need basic to med complexity webpages at affordable rates, email me
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Alex Johnson wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote:
Alex Johnson wrote:
How could you possibly assume that?


Well, because they mentioned that it was based on the "_older_
Celeron core using 90nm". The older 90nm Celerons are P4-based, I
believe. cut intervening text
But if we assume that the Pentium-M is the latest
evolution of the P6 architecture, which started with the Pentium Pro
and went upto the Pentium 3 previously, then looking back at the
first Celerons which were P6-derived (cacheless Pentium 2's running
at around 300Mhz)

There you go. You just told me you believe it is P4-based because P4
is the _older_ Celeron, but right away turned around and told me the
_oldest_ Celeron is from the P6-line, as is Pentium-M. By deduction,
the _older_ Celeron is the one from the P6-line, and thus the crippled
Pentium-M.

No, you didn't read it carefully enough. I said "the older _90nm_ Celerons
are P4-based". The emphasis on "90nm" there. Of course, the oldest Celerons
are P6-based (Pentium II generation specifically) and probably from the
250nm process, but that's irrelevant.

I don't think a
cacheless P6 is going to be any more or less competitive than
cacheless P4. Now put a small amount of cache (let's say 64K) on a
P6, and it will immediately come to life, which you can't say about
a P4-based system. But at zero K cache, neither P6 nor P4 will have
any life in them.

It's not 0k cache, it is without the L2 cache. The P-M still has
Harvard L1 caches: 32k I, 32k D if I remember correctly. So it
already has your 64k it needs to come to life.

Well, it is only L2 caches we were talking about here, I assumed. The
distinction between L1 and L2 was already drawn in the first message in this
thread. For several generations now, since after the 486, it's been mostly
the size of the L2 that's driven most of the performance in chips. It was
especially extreme in the Pentium 4 generation, but the P6 generations also
required a certain minimal amount of L2 to work fast. So the 64K I was
talking about was L2 cache, of course.

Yousuf Khan

Johannes H Andersen wrote:


That kind of cut down system will be good enough for the internet. I'll tell
you that many people are interested in a cheap way of getting on the internet,
also here in the 'west'.

The bottom-line requirement, I suspect, is the ability to handle some
quality of streaming media over a "modem" that itself eats cycles. I
think that's why we're seeing these relatively muscular cache-starved
puzzlers: Nehemiah, Netburst Celeron, now this. Not a good deal for
recompiling the linux kernel, but just fine if all you need to do is
stream processing and the cache is needed only to cope with hiccups in
the stream.

RM

The little lost angel wrote:



While I agree branding is important, but unless the price parity is
non-existent, for 3rd world income levels, the price should win most
of the time. People would rather be able to brag about quantity they
already are familiar with, i.e. "my cpu (Sempron) runs at 1.8Ghz and
has 80GB of ram! Yours only 1Ghz and 256MB! hahaha loser!"

That kind of cut down system will be good enough for the internet. I'll tell
you that many people are interested in a cheap way of getting on the internet,
also here in the 'west'. Secondhand old computers might not be reliable,
depending on what life they've had and the documentation might be missing.
A new 40GB drive costs only £30, so why struggle with an old duff.

This post is written on my oldie 233 MHz P1 that is in fine shape. Yes,
I've just build a P4 system, but why power it up for an email?

On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 02:15:11 GMT,
(The little lost angel) wrote:
On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 13:55:22 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
wrote:

third-world-busting Windows XP Starter Edition (XP lite); it's taking out a
lot of functionality with it, such as file and printer sharing, multiple
user logins, etc. Features that you or I would assume is just basic to any
computer system, being sacrificed completely for economy. I also think these

The first thing they should get rid of is the stupid pointless,
wasting my time animations...

Not a bad idea, though I doubt that they'll go. XP Lite will probably
strip out things like Media Player, the firewall, networking
capabilities (XP Home already strips some of those out), etc. In
other words, they'll remove the things that people might actually
want.

Multiple user login is fine, who really
uses Windows as a multiple login workstation anyway? :PpP

looks around and raises hand Uhh.. I do! Quite a useful feature,
lets me log in as a non-admin and run everything like that and just
jump over to my admin account if/when I need to install something or
do something that requires admin privileges.

I think I'm in the minority though!

While I agree branding is important, but unless the price parity is
non-existent, for 3rd world income levels, the price should win most
of the time. People would rather be able to brag about quantity they
already are familiar with, i.e. "my cpu (Sempron) runs at 1.8Ghz and
has 80GB of ram! Yours only 1Ghz and 256MB! hahaha loser!"

Bragging about having an Intel vs a AMD might not work well,
especially if the Shelton develops the same reputation as the Celeron.
Till this day, I still meet plenty of people who will insist on
getting a Intel despite a tight budget BUT refuse adamantly to even
consider a Celeron.

Yup, I've met many myself as well, though with the quality of current
Celerons it's definitely not a bad idea to avoid them.

Brand loyalty is pretty strong in some areas of computing, though much
more so for the Dell vs. HPaq factor (hence the reason why HP sells
both "HP Pavilion" and "Compaq Presario" systems that are essentially
identical). Even at the component level though you'll still see
pretty strong brand loyalty though, just ask some techs about what
kind of hard drives they use (or refuse to use), almost all techs have
at least one of the major brands that they simply will NOT use.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 16:39:22 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
wrote:
Tony Hill wrote:
How about neither of the above cores? Maybe it's based off the old
PIII core? Intel is still pumping out PIII core chips (essentially
Celerons) for Microsoft's XBox, maybe these are some sort of failed
update for the XBox?

It certainly doesn't sound like this is going to be a big volume
product, probably designed to compete with VIA's C3 chips as much as
anything else.

I've never heard of the P3 core being migrated to 90nm, which this articles
says the Shelton is. The Xbox chips are still being produced on 130nm
(possibly 180nm) production lines. Since Intel has so many fabs, this is no
big deal for it to be running multiple process nodes.

Intel usually keeps two process nodes going for most of their fabs and
does a bit of leapfrogging, ie those old 180nm fabs would probably get
upgraded to the 90nm fabs while they keep the 130nm ones kicking
around until the next upgrade.

The XBox chips were being produced on the 180nm production line
initially, but producing them on a 90nm line would be more economical.
They are probably selling enough chips just in the XBox to make the
switch-over worthwhile, and if they could additionally get a
dirt-cheap processor for developing markets out of the deal it might
just seem worthwhile.

Just a though, I don't haven't even heard any rumors to back this up
or anything, just sort of makes sense in my mind, MUCH more so than
trying to put out a P4 or Pentium-M based Celeron with no cache. The
P4-based chip with no cache would be an absolutely abysmal performer
(probably about on-par with a PII-233) and would still be a pretty
darn big die (probably 60M+ transistors). A Pentium-M based Celeron
with no cache would perform better but it would probably require a
fair bit of tweaking to manufacture the thing cheaply. A 90nm version
of the XBox chip, on the other hand, would be DIRT-CHEAP (less than
10M transistors and a die size probably down in the 20mm^2 range) and
could straddle two markets, giving it enough production to be
meaningful. They could probably also sell some of these chips as part
of their line of embedded Celeron processors as well.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 18:46:51 GMT, Johannes H Andersen
wrote:
The little lost angel wrote:

While I agree branding is important, but unless the price parity is
non-existent, for 3rd world income levels, the price should win most
of the time. People would rather be able to brag about quantity they
already are familiar with, i.e. "my cpu (Sempron) runs at 1.8Ghz and
has 80GB of ram! Yours only 1Ghz and 256MB! hahaha loser!"

That kind of cut down system will be good enough for the internet. I'll tell
you that many people are interested in a cheap way of getting on the internet,
also here in the 'west'. Secondhand old computers might not be reliable,
depending on what life they've had and the documentation might be missing.
A new 40GB drive costs only £30, so why struggle with an old duff.


There is a HUGE market for secondhand computers in the US, that is for
sure. And you are quite right, people are buying them so that they
can get on the internet (or, more to the point, so that they can get
on to AOL).

The big downside to these systems, that most people don't realize, is
that they come with ZERO support. For most of us this may seem like a
non-issue, but for a new computer user this usually results in them
getting screwed over and having to pay WAY more than the cost of a new
computer just to get Windows and AOL installed and working on their
computer.


Essentially the hardware of a new computer is free these days, it's
software and support that people are paying for. You can buy a new
HPaq or Dell system for $400. Figure that $100 of that goes towards
software (WinXP Home + some cheap office type application) and almost
all of the rest goes towards paying for support and the people who put
these systems together and sell them. The actual amount that the big
OEMs pay for the hardware in these systems is VERY low, probably no
more than $200 for the hole system. That leaves VERY little that you
can shave off from any one component.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

Tony Hill wrote:
Just a though, I don't haven't even heard any rumors to back this up
or anything, just sort of makes sense in my mind, MUCH more so than
trying to put out a P4 or Pentium-M based Celeron with no cache. The
P4-based chip with no cache would be an absolutely abysmal performer
(probably about on-par with a PII-233) and would still be a pretty
darn big die (probably 60M+ transistors). A Pentium-M based Celeron
with no cache would perform better but it would probably require a
fair bit of tweaking to manufacture the thing cheaply. A 90nm version
of the XBox chip, on the other hand, would be DIRT-CHEAP (less than
10M transistors and a die size probably down in the 20mm^2 range) and
could straddle two markets, giving it enough production to be
meaningful. They could probably also sell some of these chips as part
of their line of embedded Celeron processors as well.

I don't think Intel wants to spend money updating the manufacturing design
on a processor that is now two generations out of date. They took the P6
core from 250nm all of the way down to 130nm, I don't think they will take
it to 90nm.

Yousuf Khan

On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 20:19:04 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
wrote:

Tony Hill wrote:
Just a though, I don't haven't even heard any rumors to back this up
or anything, just sort of makes sense in my mind, MUCH more so than
trying to put out a P4 or Pentium-M based Celeron with no cache. The
P4-based chip with no cache would be an absolutely abysmal performer
(probably about on-par with a PII-233) and would still be a pretty
darn big die (probably 60M+ transistors). A Pentium-M based Celeron
with no cache would perform better but it would probably require a
fair bit of tweaking to manufacture the thing cheaply. A 90nm version
of the XBox chip, on the other hand, would be DIRT-CHEAP (less than
10M transistors and a die size probably down in the 20mm^2 range) and
could straddle two markets, giving it enough production to be
meaningful. They could probably also sell some of these chips as part
of their line of embedded Celeron processors as well.

I don't think Intel wants to spend money updating the manufacturing design
on a processor that is now two generations out of date. They took the P6
core from 250nm all of the way down to 130nm, I don't think they will take
it to 90nm.

Actually they started it way back on a 350nm core (or was it even
before that?). Normally I would guess that they wouldn't want to
spend the money on such an old core, but the XBox means that they are
selling enough of these chips that the cost savings of moving to 90nm
could easily be sufficient to offset the fixed cost of updating the
manufacturing. They are selling something like 10 million of the
things a year and will probably continue to do so next year as well.
It only takes a fairly small per-unit cost savings to cover the
expenses of moving to a new process, especially since they don't need
to worry about really tweaking it for maximum speed or anything (just
high yields).

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

Tony Hill wrote:
I don't think Intel wants to spend money updating the manufacturing
design on a processor that is now two generations out of date. They
took the P6 core from 250nm all of the way down to 130nm, I don't
think they will take it to 90nm.

Actually they started it way back on a 350nm core (or was it even
before that?). Normally I would guess that they wouldn't want to
spend the money on such an old core, but the XBox means that they are
selling enough of these chips that the cost savings of moving to 90nm
could easily be sufficient to offset the fixed cost of updating the
manufacturing. They are selling something like 10 million of the
things a year and will probably continue to do so next year as well.
It only takes a fairly small per-unit cost savings to cover the
expenses of moving to a new process, especially since they don't need
to worry about really tweaking it for maximum speed or anything (just
high yields).

But remember, the Xbox business goes away within a couple of years, when it
becomes PowerPC based.

It makes much more sense that they would take one of their existing 90nm
chips (Prescott, or Dothan, etc.) and cut the L2 cache off of them. They
could initially start off selling full-sized Prescotts or Dothans rejects
and turn off their cache, and then later, they could actually manufacture
these chips without the caches in the first place.

Yousuf Khan