Intel Sandy Bridge to Introduce New Sockets, Chipsets, Reorganize Platform Further

[Relayer]

People who reckon it is an octa-core chip obviously are blind and haven't read the box. Quoting my i7-930 box:

[Intel Core i7 Inside Logo]
QUAD-CORE
DESKTOP
INTEL CORE i7 PROCESSOR

Not all processors come with the box. Most come inside the assembled PC. I've seen a professional animator who believed that his i7 920 had 8x 2.67GHz cores because there are 8 rendering threads and it's a 2.67GHz rated processor. He didn't build his workstation. He bought it though because the person selling it to him lead him to believe that while it wasn't really an 8 core processor, it was the same thing. I was just trying to avoid that type of misinformation. If it's that obvious though, carry on.

 

[HillBeast]

Not all processors come with the box. Most come inside the assembled PC. I've seen a professional animator who believed that his i7 920 had 8x 2.67GHz cores because there are 8 rendering threads and it's a 2.67GHz rated processor. He didn't build his workstation. He bought it though because the person selling it to him lead him to believe that while it wasn't really an 8 core processor, it was the same thing. I was just trying to avoid that type of misinformation. If it's that obvious though, carry on.

True.

 

[lukesky]

[QUOTE

On applications that aren't heavily multithreaded, the architecture of Core i# is inferior to that of Core 2 and Phenom II.[/QUOTE]

No. Core i7 is faster in single threaded application. It has higher performance per clock than any other architecture. Look at how it fares in gaming compared to phenom and Core 2 Quads.

 

[DrPepper]

No. Core i7 is faster in single threaded application. It has higher performance per clock than any other architecture. Look at how it fares in gaming compared to phenom and Core 2 Quads.

Not much better. It does have a high instructions/clock rate 23.9 compared to 18.6 for a core 2 quad yorktown so yes it is faster but not by a huge margin.

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

No. Core i7 is faster in single threaded application. It has higher performance per clock than any other architecture. Look at how it fares in gaming compared to phenom and Core 2 Quads.

Games? That's the last thing you should look at for a yorkfield vs i7 comparison. There's zero performance difference with single gpu setups, a slight edge only shows up for dual gpu situations. Random productivity benchmarks are where the difference is.

Look here at the bottom http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/45?vs=48

Two games are tied, two games where either or wins. That sums up the whole of the video game comparison... it's even.

 

[D007]

All I see is marginal improvement for far to much cost.
This is a bad financial move for intel. Exactly like the ps3 was for sony.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I highly doubt Intel would be dumb enough to release a chip worse than it's predecessor after the fiasco they had with Netburst.

Nehalem practically is Netburst with a new dress. The only real difference is the pipelines are quite a bit shorter (the mistake in NetBurst was the assumption they could keep increasing the clockspeeds indefinitely).


Look at the most to least portion of the results here:
http://forums.techpowerup.com/showpost.php?p=1686222&postcount=119

4 times was exagerating , it was (as expected) almost twice as fast with hyperthreading enabled. No hyperthreading = very low scores except in the floating point department. It got hurt very badly in the integer department without Hyperthreading. That proves that over half of the ALU's are idle without two threads throwing work at it where the FPUs are mostly loaded with just a single thread giving it work.


As you can see, I haven't done any testing at only one thread yet.

No. Core i7 is faster in single threaded application. It has higher performance per clock than any other architecture. Look at how it fares in gaming compared to phenom and Core 2 Quads.

Phenoms II win 50% of the time. Core 2 loses all the time because of the delay in reaching the RAM that is minimized in Phenom II and Core i#.

 

[Wile E]

Nehalem practically is Netburst with a new dress. The only real difference is the pipelines are quite a bit shorter (the mistake in NetBurst was the assumption they could keep increasing the clockspeeds indefinitely).


Look at the most to least portion of the results here:
http://forums.techpowerup.com/showpost.php?p=1686222&postcount=119

4 times was exagerating , it was (as expected) almost twice as fast with hyperthreading enabled. No hyperthreading = very low scores except in the floating point (double and single) department. It got hurt very badly in the integer department without Hyperthreading.

Numerous tests on i7 with HT disabled shows that it's faster clock for clock than both AMD and Core 2. It's all over the net. Just look at the 750's benchmarks.

 

[HillBeast]

As you can see, I haven't done any testing at only one thread yet.

That what I was talking about.

Also about the whole Core 2s being better than Core i7s in poorly threaded apps, it's simply not true. I wrote a program years ago for comparing P4s and it tests the CPUs per thread performance, and per MHz, Nehalem is faster than Core.

I never said it was better in multi threaded apps, but from your absolutely confusing chart all I can understand is that i7 works better when you turn on HT, which any smart person knows already. It does after all double the number of threads per core.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Numerous tests on i7 with HT disabled shows that it's faster clock for clock than both AMD and Core 2. It's all over the net. Just look at the 750's benchmarks.

Edit: Clock for clock, Core 2 (Penryn) is about equal to Phenom II. Core i7 is clock for clock faster than Core 2 (and thus, Phenom II) in multithreading but I'm not certain about single threaded.


uint64: Core i7 920 < Phenom II 955
double: Core i7 920 > Phenom II 955 (not by much on the 4 thread test)

Core i7 920 is better at floating point operations than the Phenom II 955 but not at integer operations. If you are testing with an application that is heavy in floats, the Core i7 will come out on top (with hypthreading disabled). If the application is heavy on ints, Core i7 (hyperthreading disabled) will come in second.

Turning on hyperthreading and the workload the same (4 threads each), Phenom II 955 and Core i7 920 are very close (i7 on top) while the Core i7 920 slaughters the Phenom II 955 in the floating point area. Turn on hyperthreading and add 4 more threads and the Core i7 920 simply mocks the Phenom II 955.

I never said it was better in multi threaded apps, but from your absolutely confusing chart all I can understand is that i7 works better when you turn on HT, which any smart person knows already. It does after all double the number of threads per core.

Read the results at the bottom for analysis. The test was to compare HT to no HT, two processors versus one, and AMD versus Intel (they were about the same price when the benchmark was done).

 

[HillBeast]

Right so here are some results from my testing program.

When I first wrote it, it was when P4s were all big and I made it to compare them. I first wrote it on my P4 2.4GHz Northwood and since then I have been using it on all the CPUs I have had since and here are some quick results:

Arch.		Processor				Core Clock	Score		Points/MHz
Nehalem		Intel Core i7 930			3800MHz		11704	3.08
Nehalem		Intel Core i7 860			2860MHz		8780	3.07
Nehalem		Intel Core i7 920			2793MHz		8520	3.05
Core		Intel Core 2 Duo E8400			3000MHz		8677	2.89
Core		Intel Core 2 Duo E6550			2333MHz		5577	2.39
Pentium M	Intel Pentium M 1.86 GHz		1866MHz		3972	2.19
Pentium M	Intel Celeron M 420			1600MHz		3478	2.17
K8		AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+			2400MHz		4748	1.98
K8		AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+			2200MHz		4348	1.98
K7		AMD Athlon XP Barton (Underclocked)	1722MHz		3137	1.81
K7		AMD Duron 800+				800MHz		1330	1.66
Netburst	Intel Pentium 4 540			3000MHz		3499	1.17
Netburst	Intel Pentium 4 Northwood		2400MHz		2985	1.14

And if you look back at history these scores really do correlate well. K7 was faster than Netburst per clock, Pentium M was much faster than Netburst, Core was faster still. Nehalem gets the highest score therefore Nehalem is the best.

Anyone who doubts these findings are either a fanboy or a just plain stupid.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Wanna send me that app so I can try it?

 

[HillBeast]

Here is my testing app. Ignore the Total Processor Score as it is inaccurate. It simply theorizes what the CPU could do if all the cores work perfectly together in multi threaded applications. I didn't have the know-how to write a multi threaded program back when I wrote it. The Per Thread Score is still accurate though.

Oh this is a rewrite of the original program for P4s.

Let me know what you get.

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

I've never seen a review that showed Phenom II being even with core 2. Close in some things, ahead in a few select things, but lagging in the vast majority. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/48?vs=88

Edit* I got 11468

 

[FordGT90Concept]

My Core i7 920 matches your score (within a few dozen points).

Core		Intel Xeon E5310 (dual processor)		1600MHz		4336	2.71

What type of calculations does this appication do? Lemme guess, floating point?

I've never seen a review that showed Phenom II being even with core 2. Close in some things, ahead in a few select things, but lagging in the vast majority. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/48?vs=88

According to that, Phenom II 965 BE and Core 2 Q9650 are well matched, Core 2 being slightly more efficient clock for clock.

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

I usually don't consider mismatched stock speed comparisons as phenom and core 2 chips have roughly equal clock speed potentials, so clock for clock is most relevant for enthusiasts.

 

[HillBeast]

What type of calculations does this appication do? Lemme guess, floating point?

I can't remember. It was a long time ago. I don't think so though. I'm pretty sure it was just simple arithmetic.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I haven't tested any Core 2s and you didn't list any Phenom IIs so it's hard to line up my multithreaded charts to your single-threaded chart. Still, note how close Core 2 (Penryn) is to Core i7 despite the major architectural changes (namely, moving the memory controllers to the chip).

 

[HillBeast]

I haven't tested any Core 2s and you didn't list any Phenom IIs so it's hard to line up my multithreaded charts to your single-threaded chart. Still, note how close Core 2 (Penryn) is to Core i7 despite the major architectural changes (namely, moving the memory controllers to the chip).

Yeah after my bad experience with my original Phenom, I promised myself to stay away from them. I was an AMD boy until I got my first Phenom and it really let me down.

I don't think my program is affected by memory much, hence the very low difference.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I predicted (back on Hardware Analysis) the Phenom was going to suck before it even had a name (it was referred to as K8L or K10 at the time). I avoided them like the plague when they did finally launch like 18 months late. I'm glad they finally got off their rubbish 65nm fab with the Phenom II and Athlon II processors though (they are decent for mainstream systems).