The Tick-Tock of Doom, or For Whom Intel Tolls

In these subprime economic times, PC users -- whether enterprise IT managers or home-office loners -- want their hardware investments to last. They want to make sure they're buying smart, or at least buying at the right time, instead of getting gear that'll be obsolete within weeks. How fortunate, then, that last week Intel Corp. told shoppers the ideal time to make their next PC purchases, the window of opportunity for buying with no fear of looking foolish in the near future:

Never.

Intel is no longer touting raw processor clock speed as it did in the Pentium/NetBurst era, but the company has clocks very much on its mind: The phrase used by exec after exec at this fall's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco was "tick-tock."

Senior vice president Pat Gelsinger is general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group. But in his keynote speech he referred to his favorite market segment as "the tick-tock digital enterprise," as well as discussing the "tick-tock innovation engine" and "tick-tock [design] cadence."

What's with the metronome meme? In a new twist on company cofounder Gordon Moore's famous law about exponentially climbing transistor counts, Intel has declared that it will push the state of the microprocessor art by taking an annual step toward more powerful and energy-efficient CPUs -- or rather, alternating between two steps every two years.

Left Foot, Right Foot

In odd-numbered years, the chipmaker promises, it'll improve existing products via an advance in production or manufacturing technology. The 2007 tick will be the migration from 65- to 45-nanometer-process engineering with the next generation of Core 2 Duo/Quad/Extreme processors, codenamed "Penryn," that will arrive on November 12. (True, Intel won't get around to its annual improvement for 2007 until well after Detroit has shipped its new models for 2008, but tech vendors treat ship dates like the post office staying open till midnight on tax day.)

In even-numbered years, Intel vows to make a bigger change by introducing a new -- well, presumably new except for x86 compatibility -- processor architecture. In 2006, it was the spectacular, game-changing Core 2 Duo.

The tock, or talk, of 2008 will be the Penryn successor dubbed "Nehalem" -- another 45-nanometer-process CPU with an all-new architecture that scales to as many as eight cores, each executing two threads at a time, with an integrated memory controller and new mega-bandwidth system interconnect called QuickPath. (Yes, as AMD points out, the last two features do sound a bit Athlon- and HyperTransport-esque.)

No doubt about it, these are tantalizing prospects. The majority of my computing time is spent wandering Web sites and writing documents and e-mails, and I'm as excited about Nehalem as you are. You just know there's going to be a 16-threaded version of Solitaire.

But when should I buy my next PC? There are great bargains around now, but I'd be stupid to hit Circuit City this weekend when 45-nanometer Penryn systems will be there in seven weeks. And a year after that -- or maybe less than a year after that, or maybe 11:59 p.m. on December 31, 2008 -- there'll be Nehalem. Of course, in 2009, Nehalem's going to get faster and more energy-frugal thanks to 32-nanometer-process engineering. And in 2010 ...

In other words, Intel has at least partly paralyzed any purchaser concerned about PC lifespan: No matter when you buy, there'll be either moderately or markedly better systems available within a year.