Finally, a Xeon MP with four cores and modern blueprint

Why do they do this

I like the performance of the core architecture they are horses

the shear amount of OC action proves the room to increase demand

from them why on earth would they have waited this long to do this

makes no sense at all surely they know what it can do why screw

around allowing AMD to beat them when they already had better

product.

Pentium 4 was a dog

Pentium 4 was a dog right from the first release. They kept on making it smaller, faster, with better cache, which (apart from the dip when it was first introduced) kept it competitive, but it was never a good design.

Now that they have left that disaster behind, it's going to be a lot tougher for AMD.

P4

I agree with you

P3?

I was under the impression that the Core micro-architecture was derived from the P3. If so, then Intel is abandoning a geriatric architecture in favour of an even older one!

But I suppose that Core is derived from the P3 architecture in the same way that Homo Sapiens is derived from Australopithecus. And the P4 design is simply an evolutionary dead end.

The core2 architecture...

is a descendant of the original pentium pro line, like the PII and the PIII. The changes are the following: implementation of the x86-64 instruction set and paging mechanism, addition of the 32 and the 64 bit virtual mode support and one more pipeline. (the ppro had 2 alus, the core2 has 3 which is the same as in amd athlons) Fortunately they left the rest of the architecture as it was in the original design. Currently the core2 and amd athlon architecture looks almost the same except that amd doesn't have the technology to reach higher clockspeeds. One possible exension of this technology in the future is to add one more pipeline making a ppro architecture cpu with 4 alus. Both intel and amd could make this step. Another trick is to update the classic on the fly x86 - risc converter to take advantage of more alus.

Lines of descent

The impression I had always gotten was that Intel was like Disney Animation, with two fairly separate teams doing interleaved products, separated in time by one-half a product development cycle. Given that, you would expect the 1st, third, ... products to have more in common with each other than they do with the 2nd, 4th, etc.

There are solid product-management reasons for this, but also a fair probability that if you are, e.g. a fan of the odd-numbered products you will find something to not like about the evens. That said, I, too, am a fan of the PII (aka Sexium/P6, IIRC) based line. Among Intel CPUs. :-)

Server consolidation

I don't "get" server consolidation yet (but then I'm not from PC world), though I see why it's of interest to the Chip and Tin crowd; yes it can save on electricity and cooling. But in what way does it save on people costs (still the same number of Windoze instances to manage?) or software costs (still the same number of app and OS licences to pay for?)

Also, is this the "Common System Interconnect" announcement? If so, why not actually mention it, now that Intel finally has something to compete with Hypertransport or LDT or whatever AMD's inter-chip bus is called.

Server Consolidation

For large companies you can find that data centre issues (power and heat dissipation) can mean tens of millions of expenditure. Also in outsourcing deals (common for the moment - surely will die out soon?) astronomic charges can be made per box so reducing the number of apparently insignificant servers can result in millions upon millions of savings. It only makes sense in that world but that world is very big for Intel etc.