By Hiawatha Bray
The next time you shop for a computer, there's a good chance the salesman will try to sell you two. He'll have no choice. The next generation of chips from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. actually contain two processors on a single slab. They're called dual-core chips, and they're a clever solution to what might be called the silicon energy crisis.
There's no shortage of electricity to power computers -- at least not yet. But electricity costs money, and electrically powered machines throw off lots of waste heat. Computers are major offenders on both counts.
Consider an industry-standard Intel Pentium 4 chip. It consumes about 100 watts of power. Nearly all of it ends up being wafted away as heat -- a lot of heat, as anyone knows who's ever burned his fingers changing a 100-watt light bulb. This waste heat is no big deal to the average home user. But multiply it by a few hundred chips, and you've got a problem. A few years back, the Globe's air conditioning conked out for a few hours. It wasn't an especially hot day, but the newsroom became a sauna, largely from the heat of PCs and Macintoshes.
Corporations large and small run rooms full of computers, often in the form of ''blade servers." Each blade is a self-contained computer on a circuit board that snaps into a rack that can hold dozens of blades. Now suppose that each blade is throwing off 100 watts of heat. That warmth has to go somewhere, or the servers would burn out. So the computer department gets a hefty air conditioning bill.
What Intel and AMD need are products that can speed up, but not heat up. Which is where dual-core processors come in. Chip engineers create two full-fledged processors and link them, allowing them to share the load. The two processors don't have to be as fast as possible; merely dividing the tasks produces a nice speed boost.
Plenty of computers use multiple separate processors, ranging from large mainframes to small work stations. But putting two processors on the same core was first done by IBM Corp. in 2001 for its server computers. AMD and Intel are moving the technology to smaller servers, and even to home desktops. By the end of 2006, Intel predicts, 70 percent of new PCs will have dual-core chips.
Many will feature another power-boosting technology: 64-bit processing, which enables the chip to process twice as much raw data per cycle. A computer with today's 32-bit chips can handle a maximum of four gigabytes of memory, at a time when many computers already come with one gigabyte. A 64-bit processor can handle thousands of times more memory, which is why businesses use them. At home, this power could run games with vast virtual landscapes and movie-like resolution, or video and audio editing tools as good as anything in Hollywood.
AMD has been selling 64-bit desktop computer chips for over a year, and Intel has now brought out its own 64-bit line. But the chips have been nearly useless for home computing, because there's been no software to match. That began to change last week, when Microsoft Corp. finally released the 64-bit version of Windows XP. It's a start, but we'll still need programs tuned for 64-bit performance. Now that Microsoft has come through, look for 64-bit gaming and multimedia software to turn up over the next year or so.
We're also short on software for dual-core chips. These already benefit people who run two or more programs at once; the computer can automatically assign different tasks to different cores. But dual-core performance gets even better with ''multithreaded" software. These are programs that can feed multiple command ''threads" to the processor at the same time. A multithreaded photo program might have one thread editing a digital image, another uploading images to a website, and a third collecting pictures from a digital camera. Divide these threads between two cores, and stuff happens much faster; throw in 64-bit processing and lots of memory, and you're done almost before you started.
So when the salesman tries to sell you two computers in one, don't tune him out.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at [email protected].
http://www.boston.com/business/technolo ... at?pg=full