UGN Security
Posted By: IceMyst Pentium 4 Dual-Core, a Rush Job? - 08/18/05 11:52 PM
Intel's first dual-core chip was a hastily concocted design that was rushed out the door in hopes of beating rival Advanced Micro Devices to the punch, an Intel engineer told attendees at the Hot Chips conference yesterday, reports IDG.

"We faced many challenges from taking a design team focused on making the highest-performing processors possible to one focused on multicore designs", Douglas said
during the conference.

The engineer said that due to the short period of time at their disposal, Intel didn�t have time to design a new memory bus for the dual-core chip, the team being forced to use the old one employed for Pentium 4. It seems
that this bus supports two processors, but it isn�t as efficient as the one used for the Paxville processors or the one used for AMD�s dual-core processors.

In addition, all the testing devices and technological processes were designed for single-core chips, and because of that, they had to devise a new way of testing the connection between the two cores.

Three days ago, Intel announced that it will deliver the dual-core, hyper-threaded processors sooner than planned. It seems that we�ve found out how Intel succeeded in achieving this performance.

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