Monday, August 6th 2007

Intel Sheds Light on Penryn Enhancements

Aug 6th, 2007 06:54 Discuss (53 Comments)

With Intel's Penryn set to launch next quarter, Intel has decided to shed some light on improvements it has made to the architecture, and prove that Penryn is not just a shrunk Conroe.

Intel has decided to improve existing Wide Dynamic Execution, Advanced Smart Cache, Advanced Digital Media Boost and Intelligent Power Capability, technologies that previously made their debut with Conroe and Merom.

Below is Intel's Tick-Tock long term roadmap, as well as "Penryn" plans (source: HKEPC)

Penryn enhances Wide Dynamic Execution technology with a fast radix-16 divider and improved Virtualization technology, which should boost divide instruction capability and reduce virtual machine transition latencies by 25-to-75%.

Advanced Smart Cache not only increases the cache size (6MB and 12MB L2-cache on dual and quad-core CPUs, respectively), but also reduces its latency.

Advanced Digital Media Boost technology is the inclusion of a new Intel SSE4 instruction set. SSE4 introduces 47 new instructions to improve performance of video accelerators, graphics building blocks and streaming load. Intel claims a 2x performance gain in video acceleration tasks. There are 14 new instructions for video accelerator performance enhancement. Intel improves compiler auto-vectorization performance with 32 new instructions.

Intel expects SSE4 optimizations to deliver performance improvements in video authoring, imagine, graphics, video search, off-chip accelerators, gaming and physics applications.

Mobile Penryn processors receive enhanced power saving technologies. New to the mobile Penryn is a deep power down state. In the deep power down state, the processor lowers the core voltage, more so than in the C4 state, and turns off the L1 and L2 caches. Intel claims significant power savings in idle modes for extended battery life with the new power state.

Source: DailyTech

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53 Comments on Intel Sheds Light on Penryn Enhancements

#26

kakazza

45nm and still a TDP of 65W? Disappointing, I hope they have something similar to the E4000 series which uses less power. :)

#27

HellasVagabond

Tatty_OneI agree, as I said in an earlier post, there has always been shifts in supremacy, thats normal, some would argue that ATi held the DX9 crown, and some would say that perhaps NVidia has the DX10 at this moment in time, AMD had the performance and 64bit crown (for what thats worth) for about 3 years, Intel came back and edged back on top again, nothing here suggests that Intel will remain on top forever, if AMD can catchup inside of 2 years then thats just another 3 year shift!

Shifts in which CPU is better will always occur. However INTEL was and is richer than AMD that has yet to change and thats what mostly bugs as all. AMD has never seen a worse financial era up till now than the one they are having as we speak.

#28

Unregistered

Intel can afford to lose the performance crown for years and it will still have a larger market share and much more money than AMD will have, they are probably rich enough to absorb loses for many years without any major problems.

AMD must get and stay ahead in the performance area backed up with a very clever and aggressive business strategy, in the past they have achieved the former yet still failed to gain significant market share from Intel.

AMD needs to really cut into Intel's worldwide market share, we're talking about HUGE market share gains of 30%> 40%> 50% of the total CPU market, not exactly an easy task when such companies force OEM's to stock nothing but "Intel inside" PC's, any PC maker that refuses will be denied Intel chips and/or find their rival PC makers get Intel chips much cheaper as retaliation from Intel.

#29

Chewy

well amd were starting to be used more often by hp elc in desktops and laptops but after this fall it may return to be all intel.. I thin intel were the man chips used in pre-built because they had a deal/agreement wtih the pre-built manufacturers.

#30

WarEagleAU

Bird of Prey

Well at least you see my point. AMD had a reasonable financial success with the Athlon 64, hence they could afford to buy ATI. They are taking a hit right now, but will bounce back soon enough. Their main problem, and Ive said it countless times before, is they rested on their laurels with the athlon 64 without doing any newer changes to the core. They did small minor tweaks, mainly speed and tdp...but nothing ground breaking. Intel, while they did have two different teams working on two different chips, learned from the mistakes they made and also took some of AMDS bravado with their designs. You see it in the chips they have now, although no on die memory controller. Once Intel goes that route, they will indeed be the biggest player and AMD will have to come up with something else.

However, and I stand by this, IF AMD can offer reasonable priced chips to compete with Intel and still have a nice OC ceiling, they will do just fine. Beat them if you can AMD, but if you spar well enough to keep it even and you offer great performance at a reasonable price, you will do well enough to take a good market share of Intels world. Also, some direct advertising (tv mainly) will definately help.

#31

evil bill

WarEagleAUHowever, and I stand by this, IF AMD can offer reasonable priced chips to compete with Intel and still have a nice OC ceiling, they will do just fine. Beat them if you can AMD, but if you spar well enough to keep it even and you offer great performance at a reasonable price, you will do well enough to take a good market share of Intels world. Also, some direct advertising (tv mainly) will definately help.

Agreed - so long as their performance is there or thereabouts, and they are able to offer their old school benefits of reasonable prices and overclocking potential they will keep hold of a viable market share. However, if they fall too far behind Intel they will be in real trouble.

#32

trt740

You guys have you read the specks on the new AMD chips , yes I know it is only on paper, but the bandwith and the chips designs are going to press Intel hard thats why they are doing this. Why do you think intel is running chips at 1.6 to 3.0 ghz when they know these chips can easly be made to run at 3.8 to 4.0ghz or higher and are underclocking them. They are saving a little mghz room for the future. AMD's chips are going to come out hammering and they don't want to push there chips yet. Look, up until a few months ago the old AMD chips were about 5 to 10 percent behind Intel. AMD really does'nt have to change the 64 x2 chips all that much to catch them. Compare a e6600 and e6700 against a fx62 and a 6000+ . The intel chip do beat them but they don't blow them away. All AMD has to increase is the Integer potential and Intel better look out. The 64s already have better memory controller and are more of a true 64 bit design (shoot Vista was made for them) they also have better floating point, so if you add integer potential you have a C2D killer. I am a AMD fanboy and I like Intel aswell but I can also see both sides of an issue.

#33

kwchang007

trt740You guys have you read the specks on the new AMD chips , yes I know it is only on paper, but the bandwith and the chips designs are going to press Intel hard thats why they are doing this. why do you think intel is running chips at 3.0 ghz when they know these cgips can easly be made to run at 3.8 or higher and are underclocking them. They are saving a little mghz room for the future. AMD's chips are going to come out hammering. Look, up until a few months ago the old AMD chips were about 5 to 10 percent behind intel. AMD really does'nt have to change the 64 x2 chips all that much to catch them. Compare a e6600 and e6700 against a fx62 and a 6000+ . The intel chip do beat them but they don't blow them away. All AMD has to increase is the Integer potential and Intel better look out. The 64s already have better memory controller and are more of a true 64 bit design (shoot Vista was made for them) they also have better floating point, so if you add integer potential you have a C2D killer. I am a AMD fanboy and I like Intel aswell but I can also see both sides of an issue.

On paper K10 looks like it's another relatively conservative upgrade of K8. AMD looks like they are going to improve their lead in floating point while trying to catch up in Integer. I honestly think that the cpu world may end up as AMD=Floating Point while Intel=Integer. It's because how neither company really wants to radically change their architecture because they're already good. My view is AMD will have business in the server market due to HTT and high floating point, but with Intel rolling out CSI we may see Itanium push into where AMD is strongest 2+ cpu server boards. Just my 2 cents on the future.

#34

trt740

kwchang007On paper K10 looks like it's another relatively conservative upgrade of K8. AMD looks like they are going to improve their lead in floating point while trying to catch up in Integer. I honestly think that the cpu world may end up as AMD=Floating Point while Intel=Integer. It's because how neither company really wants to radically change their architecture because they're already good. My view is AMD will have business in the server market due to HTT and high floating point, but with Intel rolling out CSI we may see Itanium push into where AMD is strongest 2+ cpu server boards. Just my 2 cents on the future.

You do know in the 90's the roles were changed AMD was the interger champ and intel floating point champ funny how things change. The new AMD chips do have some serious bandwith.

#35

kwchang007

trt740You do know in the 90's the roles were changed AMD was the interger champ and intel floating point champ funny how things change. The new AMD chips do have some serious bandwith.

It's all how their focuses have changed. Intel goes for higher clocks at the expense of efficiency (yeah I'm talking about Core 2, 13 stages for Core 2 vs 11 stages for K8 and K10). In the 90's....I was a little young to know about things like integer and floating point, lol. Anyways, the 90's were 7 years ago, which is obviously lots of time in the computer world. It will be interesting to see what angle Nehlem takes and see if Intel decided to drop cpu stages to 11 due to a better manufacturing technique (high k with 45nm or w/e they call it). I also think that AMD's cores have a lot of potential, but how well they'll be able to roll them out is another question. Especially the quad cores, because the dies are so big it isn't as easy to roll the off the line as Intel's 2 die's on one package. All in all, K10 looks like it'll be able to stand a chance as long as AMD can drop prices fast enough.

#36

Tatty_Two

Gone Fishing

trt740You guys have you read the specks on the new AMD chips , yes I know it is only on paper, but the bandwith and the chips designs are going to press Intel hard thats why they are doing this. Why do you think intel is running chips at 1.6 to 3.0 ghz when they know these chips can easly be made to run at 3.8 to 4.0ghz or higher and are underclocking them. They are saving a little mghz room for the future. AMD's chips are going to come out hammering and they don't want to push there chips yet. Look, up until a few months ago the old AMD chips were about 5 to 10 percent behind Intel. AMD really does'nt have to change the 64 x2 chips all that much to catch them. Compare a e6600 and e6700 against a fx62 and a 6000+ . The intel chip do beat them but they don't blow them away. All AMD has to increase is the Integer potential and Intel better look out. The 64s already have better memory controller and are more of a true 64 bit design (shoot Vista was made for them) they also have better floating point, so if you add integer potential you have a C2D killer. I am a AMD fanboy and I like Intel aswell but I can also see both sides of an issue.

I agree with you, and you know I am an AMD fanboi, however, Integer and Floating point are not the only command functions that the microprocessor commits, there are many, add to that the basic architecture of the processor....they differ, add to that the instruction pipeline architecture, the instruction sets stacked within and on and on and on and you quickly come to the conclusion that if floating point calculus was the only thing AMD was quicker than Intel at currently (which I am sure there will be many others) then there is a long way to go, I spose the bottom line is, dependant on what the CPU is doing depends on how far it is ahead (or behind).

To put it in it's simplest terms, taking out integer and floating point, look at SuperPI which is probably concentrating on Bus efficiency and instruction pipeline efficiency........raw speed and simple short calculations (so prob not Integer of float) you can see just how far ahead Intel is, thats not to say that AMD wont catch them......I am sure they will, just hope it's sooner rather than later.

Let's not forget, when the AMD64 was dominant, some of the P4's still beat it in some processes.....video encoding for example.

#37

Batou1986

EastCoasthandlewolfdale @ 2.33 :twitch:

wow amd is in deep shit

#38

driver66

trt740AMD really does'nt have to change the 64 x2 chips all that much to catch them. Compare a e6600 and e6700 against a fx62 and a 6000+ . The intel chip do beat them but they don't blow them away. All AMD has to increase is the Integer potential and Intel better look out.

Those are at stock speeds:shadedshu The problem with that argument is that the intel's have alot more headroom as far as overclocking goes. An e6300 will whoop all over a 6000+ overclocked!!? The 6000+ doesn't have the overhead a c2d does. That is why Amd need's to step up:toast:

#39

trt740

driver66Those are at stock speeds:shadedshu The problem with that argument is that the intel's have alot more headroom as far as overclocking goes. An e6300 will whoop all over a 6000+ overclocked!!? The 6000+ doesn't have the overhead a c2d does. That is why Amd need's to step up:toast:

A 6000+ oced to 3.5ghz will beat a e6300 in several thing even a e6300 at 3.4ghz or 3.5ghz, you are wrong I owned one. You would have to get a core 2 duo clocked to about 300 mghz higher than a 6000+ to beat it badly say 3.6ghz to 3.8ghz. A e6420 or e6600 would be a better match for it at say 3.7 to 3.8ghz they would start to pulled ahead then in every aspect, but still in somethings the AMD chip would win, not in most ,but still in several things like science mark 2.0, that doesn't just measure raw power but memory management, chip instruction, floating point, mp3 conversion, Vista performance due to chip set instruction and Vista was designed for the AMD 64 chips. This is a very old arguement if you don't get caught up in fan boy stuff you will see I'm right. The C2D is faster once you get to the e6700 or e6850 all the time and e6600 most of the time anything less is hard to match a 6000+ for the money.

#40

kwchang007

trt740A 6000+ oced to 3.5ghz will beat a e6300 in several thing even a e6300 at 3.4ghz or 3.5ghz, you are wrong I owned one. You would have to get a core 2 duo clocked to about 300 mghz higher than a 6000+ to beat it badly say 3.6ghz to 3.8ghz. A e6420 or e6600 would be a better match for it at say 3.7 to 3.8ghz they would start to pulled ahead then, but still in something the AMD chip would win, not in most ,but still in several things like science mark 2.0, that doesn't just measure raw power but memory management, chip instruction and floating point, mp3 conversion and Vista performance due to chip set instruction and Vista was designed for the AMD 64 chips. this is a very old arguement if you don't get caught up in fan boy stuff you will see I'm right. The C2D is faster once you get to the e6700 or e6850 all the time.

Well....at the same speed Core 2 will beat K10. I don't know what you're trying to say?

#41

trt740

kwchang007Well....at the same speed Core 2 will beat K10. I don't know what you're trying to say?

I'm not going to have this debate it's exhausting. I'm saying exactly what I'm saying and in something you would be correct and in other thing you would be wrong. The core 2 duo doesn't beat the 64x2 chips in everything just most things until you consider the brand new G0 stepping chips. I'm saying Intel is really not that far ahead of AMD. Not like AMD was a year or two ago over Intel It is much closer and AMD can easily match them maybe not exceed them but match them.

#42

kwchang007

trt740I'm not going to have this debate it's exhausting. I'm saying exactly what I'm saying and in something you would be correct and in other thing you would be wrong. The core 2 duo doesn't beat the 64x2 chips in everything just most things until you consider the brand new G0 stepping chips. I'm saying Intel is really not that far ahead of AMD. Not like AMD was a year or two ago over Intel It is much closer and AMD can easily match them maybe not exceed them but match them.

You're right it all depends on what you look at. In some areas Intels are much faster, while AMD's aren't but AMD also has their strong points. Look at the 1 million super pi thread, my 2ghz core 2 beats AMD's at 2.7 ghz.

#43

trt740

kwchang007You're right it all depends on what you look at. In some areas Intels are much faster, while AMD's aren't but AMD also has their strong points. Look at the 1 million super pi thread, my 2ghz core 2 beats AMD's at 2.7 ghz.

That is only one test look at science mark 2.0. My 6000+ beat 22 core 2 duo's clocked at similar or higher speeds. In real world computing they are not that far apart. When I ran those tests I didn't really know what I was doing and had some programs were open so It could have gone higher. Still the C2D chips are faster but they hardy blow away the AMD 64 x2 chips. I love the Intel chips and plan on getting a quad core but I'm waiting for AMD to pull the prices down.

#44

kwchang007

trt740That is only one test look at science mark 2.0. My 6000+ beat 22 core 2 duo's clocked at similar or higher speeds.

Woops, forgot to include a good AMD benchmark. Yeah scincemark does well with AMD due to high Floating Point. In floating point they will rip apart core 2, once again, just how the architecture is. Anyways, we can both safely say that core 2 and k8 are good in respective areas right? That's what matters, plus in games, they're both kick ass compared to pentium 4 :toast:

#45

Tatty_Two

Gone Fishing

Lol, you cant compare fairly between AMD and Intel on Sceincemark 2, there are too many factors involved, SM2 depends too much on memory bandwidth and latency as well as HDD access times.....cache blah blah.

Of course AMD beat Intel on some things , even clock for clock....point is Intel beat AMD on MOST things so across the board Intel is faster, clock for clock upto 15-20% :eek:....forgot, I am an AMD fanboi :cry: Point is if AMD were not faster in somethings they would not sell any chips! because there is not really any like for like bang for buck arguments in favour of AMD anymore, just look at the prices of the lower end C2D's now, even in the UK you can get them for approx £40 :eek: and they will still clock above 3 Gig, shit in the UK you can now get 2 C2D's for the price of a 6000+)

#46

Wile E

Power User

Tatty_OneLol, you cant compare fairly between AMD and Intel on Sceincemark 2, there are too many factors involved, SM2 depends too much on memory bandwidth and latency as well as HDD access times.....cache blah blah.

Of course AMD beat Intel on some things , even clock for clock....point is Intel beat AMD on MOST things so across the board Intel is faster, clock for clock upto 15-20% :eek:....forgot, I am an AMD fanboi :cry: Point is if AMD were not faster in somethings they would not sell any chips! because there is not really any like for like bang for buck arguments in favour of AMD anymore, just look at the prices of the lower end C2D's now, even in the UK you can get them for approx £40 :eek: and they will still clock above 3 Gig, shit in the UK you can now get 2 C2D's for the price of a 6000+)

Yeah, but the price/performance ratio evens out if you don't overclock, which most people don't. Over here, the E6550 and X2 6000+ are about the same price. Stock vs stock, they are basically equals, trading blows depending on the test.

The prices are right in line for average consumers, so the bang for the buck argument is still there, just not for us overclockers.

#47

Tatty_Two

Gone Fishing

Wile EYeah, but the price/performance ratio evens out if you don't overclock, which most people don't. Over here, the E6550 and X2 6000+ are about the same price. Stock vs stock, they are basically equals, trading blows depending on the test.

The prices are right in line for average consumers, so the bang for the buck argument is still there, just not for us overclockers.

Yup....I cant argue with that but in my defence, I was addressing the issues raised in this thread and most in here are overclockers :D

#48

Wile E

Power User

Tatty_OneYup....I cant argue with that but in my defence, I was addressing the issues raised in this thread and most in here are overclockers :D

:toast:

#49

trt740

Tatty_OneLol, you cant compare fairly between AMD and Intel on Sceincemark 2, there are too many factors involved, SM2 depends too much on memory bandwidth and latency as well as HDD access times.....cache blah blah.

Of course AMD beat Intel on some things , even clock for clock....point is Intel beat AMD on MOST things so across the board Intel is faster, clock for clock upto 15-20% :eek:....forgot, I am an AMD fanboi :cry: Point is if AMD were not faster in somethings they would not sell any chips! because there is not really any like for like bang for buck arguments in favour of AMD anymore, just look at the prices of the lower end C2D's now, even in the UK you can get them for approx £40 :eek: and they will still clock above 3 Gig, shit in the UK you can now get 2 C2D's for the price of a 6000+)

That is all true but not my point.

#50

Tatty_Two

Gone Fishing

I know your point.....but it doesent change the truth :D

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