Wednesday, April 2nd 2008
IDF 2008 Day 1: Intel Nehalem Working at 3.2GHz Pictured
I promissed more details on Intel Nehalem yesterday, and now it is time to keep my word. During the first day of Spring IDF 2008, the guys over at HEXUS.net have pictured the first working sample of a quad-core Intel Nehalem processor operating at 3.2GHz (revision A1). The 1366-pin, 731M-transistor 45nm native quad-core model, utilizes 256KB of L2 cache for each core, as well as 8MB of L3 cache. The CPU also integrates triple-channel DDR3-1333MHz memory controller and SSE4 instructions. Like the new 533MHz Silverthorne-based Atom processors, Nehalem will also incorporate Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) which is also known as Hyper-Threading (HT). Each physical core in a single Nehalem processor is paired up with its own virtual core. As a result, the quad-core processor will be detected to have eight cores (on the picture). Predictions say that this new architecture will offer around 30% better performance, on a clock-for-clock basis, when compared to Core 2, in a heavily-multithreaded environment - HPC and low-end servers, mainly. Current Intel roadmaps list the Nehalem launch date for Q4 2008, with a simulteanous rollout across servers and desktops.
Sources:
HEXUS.net, DailyTech
31 Comments on IDF 2008 Day 1: Intel Nehalem Working at 3.2GHz Pictured
I want.
if you look at it the 9850 and the 9950 does give the q6600 problems and if you really think about this is its main competitor... not the 9300/9450 that some websites are comparing/contrasting them to...i for one think 65nm vs 65nm is a fair comparison...the only time there should be a comparison between 65nm vs 45nm is when we are comparin the same company to see how much better the old vs new tech is....
dont get me wrong 65nm amds vs 65nm is ok but its not an apples to apples contest.
Worked well in my experience.
that'll keep those pesky AMD fanboys quiet for a while :laugh: (joking, btw)
I feel people who rush out and buy this chip for games are going to be sorely disappointed.
This chip is designed for serious multitasking, the average users and gamers need quad cores with better individual core performance before they need 4 physical cores and 4 logical cores.
Stay on topic. This thread isn't for flame wars.
In Sony Vegas (my editor of choice) you can define maximum number of rendering threads... making any core / HT / whatever combination adaptable to the program (sense with Video editing, rendering is not real-time dependent like games)
But the main question on my mind is, how does it OC? :D
It's not about cache being split, just like in the Conroe where there's a common cache for two cores (think two threads basically) and each thread has its instructions and data tagged in the common cache. So, processes that are single threaded, will completely utilise the cache of a core (or if two cores share an L2 cache (as in Kentsfield/Yorkfield)).
IMO, HT is good way of making sure the core is fully utilised. And please don't bring the Presler-HT into this argument. Sure it was dual-core + HT but a lot of other factors went against it performing well.
If they start coding games for quads, this Nehalem is definitly something to look forward to, in my case, depending on the price/performance ratio compared to other cpu's of course.
2 grand LOL