Intel's Slipping Tick-Tock Schedule

So Sandy Bridge's NDA lifted today and I'm reading the review (even though I should be sleeping so I can wake up for my flight tomorrow), and I saw that there would be no enthusiast parts until Q4, which hasn't happened for a "tock" since Intel adopted the Tick-Tock schedule. So I'm gonna take a look at history and see if I can spot a trend.

The story began in 2006. Intel's Pentium 4 was losing to AMD's Athlon 939 series on the desktop side, but was enjoying success with the Pentium M/Core Duo line on the mobile side. As a reaction to how power hungry the Pentium 4's were, Intel decided to abandon the Pentium 4 line and instead evolve the Core Duo line to serve both desktop and mobile markets. In July 2006, Core 2 Duo(Conroe) was unleashed to the world. It was epic pwn, and marked the start of the Intel's new Tick-Tock schedule.

The schedule was put to test a year later with the 2007 tick; a 45nm shrink. Penryn/Wolfdale was not release until October, a 3-month delay. Negligible, I thought, blame it on the difficulty with the shrink or whatever. Next year's release should be closer to the July time frame.

July 2008 came, and the much anticipated Nehalem tock was nowhere to be seen. October came, and there was still no tock. It wasn't until November did Nehalem come out. At this point it became obvious that Intel wasn't keeping a strict one-year release cycle. And why would they? There was no market pressure. Since being beat by Conroe in 2006, AMD had not been able to keep up with Intel. Athlon's successor, Phenom, was delayed way too much due to the technical difficulty of it being the first monolithic quad core. When Phenom did come out, midway through the Penryn lifecycle, it merely equaled the performance of Penryn's quad-core variant, Yorkfield. So at this time Intel had already dominated much of the market for 1.5 years, except for one segment, the HPC/Server market. In the high performance market, AMD's processors, with its high memory peformance thanks to the integrated memory controller, has kept itself relevent, trading blows with Intel's processors depending on the type of workload. This was actually the focus of the Nehalem release. Intel added an integrated memory controller to Nehalem to help it capture the HPC/server market, and the first models of Nehalem's released were the enthusiasts/HPC/1P/2P models.

Wait, what? A different die for the high performance segment? Didn't Intel just say they were keeping one architecture for the entire line-up back in 2006? Well, architecturally the cores are the same, but the rest of the dies varied between the server and consumer versions. The consumer version of Nehalem, with Intel still not feeling any market pressure in that space, did not see the light of day until 10 monthes later. But all is well as far as the enthusiasts are concerned; we got our processors during the initial release.

When's the tick for 2009? Did not happen until December. With this release, Intel focused on the mobile segment. There were no enthusiast part, no mainstream part, just the dual core mobile part. Intel's dominant market position allowed it to not only not keep the yearly tick-tock, but also initially release models in only the market segment of interest. 32nm shrink lowered power consumption, and the mobile segment could use the lower power consumption. The 6 core server part would be released some time later, but no enthusiast or mainstream part was ever planned. It was okay though, I thought. Ticks aren't exciting anyway; as long as we got our enthusiasts parts during Tocks then we're happy.

That brings us to now, the 2010 Tock. But wait, Intel actually waited till January 3rd 2011 to lift the NDA. So any illusion of an yearly release schedule is gone now. It was obvious from the previous 3 years, but I held out hope that Intel would not miss the Christmas shopping season. The thing I did not see coming, which is less surprising now that I typed out this post, is the lack of enthusiasts models until Q4. This Tock was for the mainstream and mobile market. The mainstream was skipped over last time so a new model was long overdue. And the mobile market can really use the improved integrated graphics performance. The enthusiasts? Well, we were never important to begin with. We got our parts in 2006 and 2007 because Intel had just one die for the entire family. We got our parts in 2008 because Intel was attacking the HPC/server market. We didn't get our parts in 2009, and we're not getting it now in 2010/2011.

In conclusion, we have 3 trends from Intel: 1) Longer than 12-month Release cycles, 2) diversification of feature set in different dies, and 3) targeting certain market segments during each initial release. Honestly though, only the hardcore enthusiasts should be affected this time around. Most enthusiasts (me included) should be fine with the mainstream Sandy Bridge parts, which has plenty of performance. The only thing I don't like is the fact that it contains an integrated graphics cores that we'll never use because despite performance improvements it's still way slower than a dedicated graphics card, so it's kind of a waste of space/transistor/money. Looking forward, the 2012 Ivy Bridge Tick will probably happen around February or March. There will still be different dies containing different feature sets. But which market Intel will target initially isn't as easy to predict, though I suspect it will be the mobile segment again, as it had been the past 2 years.

J.C. Staff and Kugimiya Rei

So I'm watching Toradora! and on the second episode Taiga went "Urusai urusai!" and I went "Is that Kugimiya Rei?" and sure enough it is. Sometime later I was curious about which studio is doing this and it turned out to be J.C. Staff and then I went "wait, didn't they also do...?" and they actually did Zero no Tsukaima, Shakugan no Shana, and Hayate no Gotoku. Seems like J.C. Staff is just picking up adaptations that they can cast Kugimiya Rei as the wrathful loli in. Which is win. WIN I tell you. Now back to Toradora!...

Nehalem prices

Newegg just listed Nehalem related parts:

CPU: $320 for 2.66GHz, 20x multi (+2 for turbo)
Motherboards: we have ONE at $220, then they're $280~$400
Ram: 2GB $70+, 4GB $115+, 6GB $250+

So with cheapest motherboard and cpu and 4GB ram we're already looking at $655. Add case ($50), heatsink($50), power supply($100), and hard drive($50) it'll be around $900.

Now I don't feel like buying anymore. Let's wait for some of these prices to drop and people to report their overclocks.

Wikipedia is teh win

Mao-HiME

Nothing that was related to Mai-HiME that's not Mai-HiME has been good, and the bad name doesn't instill confidence. Coming next season.

Chihiroooooooooooooooooooo

=DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

Economy Update

$150 now buys you 1.5TB hard drive. This works out to be the easy math of 10 cents per gigabyte. So now it's easier than ever to determine what hard drive prices are good. I still remember the time when a good deal was 40 cents per gigabyte, when 250GB for $100 was the deal to get (yes yes I'm a noob).

Nehalem NDA lifted yesterday, performance advantage over Penryn was about 30% overall like the abundance of leaks we've seen for quite a while. We will still need more time, however, to see what the prices will look like. Nehalem isn't even available for purchase yet, motherboards prices rumors aren't optimistic, and DDR3 combined with triple-channel kits will certainly be a new market.

AT&T joins Time Warner and Comcast in trying out the bandwidth cap thing. So um... I think that covers all the high speed internet providers...

In other news, Obama wins teh presidency. The popular votes are still very close: 51% to 47%. But what was so differently this time compared to the past to that made the electoral votes a landslide 338 -156? Boggle.

Tales of the Abyss was teh fail, despite epic op. =(

New season update

Shikabane Hime licensed, oh wellz.

Menclave did pick up A tale of Melodies, so I did too. It looks just like the first season, and for that I am giddy. But after the second episode, I noticed that we're only following 2 couples this time. Last season we had 3, and Chihiro was one of them. I don't know if this season can be good with just 2 couples, and without Chihiro. On another note, the raw looks like analogue capture because it halo's a lot.

Clannad After Story 1 widescreen finally came out today whereas 4:3 version is already at episode 4. We continue where we left off from the first season and not much has changed. The new OP sounds cool at the end, and follows the same format the first OP... wait... where's Fuuko!? Nooooo. ;_; ED was pretty fail; nothing interesting like Dango Daikazoku. Seriously why does everyone hate Fuuko? Hopefully she'll come back at the end like Makoto and it'll be good. Yeah why does everyone hate Makoto too!? Her arc was teh best.

For the actual first episode, the lolz from first season continued in full swing. And I'm not sure if this season can succeed, we seemed to have already fully developed all the characters in the first season. I guess we'll see how much tear I'll shed, and if they'll start up some interesting plots. The first episode was just a reintroduction of all the characters (MINUS FUUKO >=( ).

Lucky Star OVA - looks like a.f.k. debanded, so I'm going to watch the only subbed version out there, now. And well, it's the same hit and miss comedy with hit and miss references as the series. But seriously, they gave the fans what the fans raged about on the internets. Especially Kagami, poor Kagami. And an extended live-action lucky channel

Wagaya no Oinari-sama finished, overall an enjoyable series.

I also picked up Xam'd, which started last season, and I would've picked it up last season, except I didn't know it was being subbed. The pictures are really clean, animation is good, with the first 2 episodes featuring way too much animation. The story so far is alright, it's like Eureka 7.

Other than that, Bleach is out of fillers, Detroit Metal City continues to be teh funny. Chiko gets a cool weapon out of no where in Daughter of Twenty Faces 20 that allows her to become batman and fight robots and make swishing sounds and look cool. But it broke at the end of the episode.

I forgot to watch the debate =(

Instead I was shooting bullets all night, like I've been doing all week.

I picked up Shikabane Hime: Aka, mainly because it was GAINAX's first new show after Gurren Lagann. The first episode showed that it had inherited some of Gurren Lagann's physics. The second episode revealed the OP, which promised epicness. Although the actual second episode made it clear that this anime will be full of emo, it also flaunted some high quality animation. Definitely going to keep watching this, hoping for epic Gurren Lagann physics in high quality animation, and we'll see if it's got high quality emo too while we're at it.

Tom Brokaw Town Hall

8:00: I didn't even check the time for this. 9e/8c seems to be a magical time. This "town hall" format appears interesting. This talking directly to the people thing should be right up Palin's alley.

8:07: McCain's just getting right into this guy's face. And I thought Obama got into his face.

8:08: Tom Brokawwwwwwwwww joins the discussion!

8:11: McCain's already touting his suspension of campaign to work on the bailout package.

8:13: McCain referred to the first questioner's name. Impressive.

8:16: Tom Brokaw is so cool

8:18: Wow this is a really negative questioner

8:24: The candidates are still confused that they are to answer 2 questions in a row then switch instead of after each question.

8:32: As is tradition here on Grazing Hitbox, Obama continues to wear his American flag pin, and McCain continues to not wear a pin.

8:45: McCain appears to be winning with his passionate tones. I guess he is good at town halls.

8:47: McCain is using a Sharpie. He was holding a sharpie last debate too. McCain endorses Sharpie.

8:50: All these poor folks asking well thought out hard questions that are getting dodged.

8:54: McCain slipped a plug for Arizona XD

9:00: All four corners of the Earth?

9:01: Obama is now very apparently getting pwned trying to defend himself while going overtime and not answering questions.

9:24: McCain isn't talking to his microphone. So again the microphone is just for show. Whyyy?

9:25: More profuse love for Israel going around

9:30 closing statements