anandtech has hands on an Nehalem

[wonderlust]

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3326

Looks like its another advance over the core achitecture!

[alexnifty]

Yikes! Nehalem is impressive! Hyperthreading AND an integrated memory controller.

With GPU's doing lots of the work in gaming these days, and soon to be doing physics, I wonder just how useful Nehalem will be for gamers though.
Maybe this will force Games Designers to actually introduce some decent AI for once. Otherwise your uber CPU will be thumb twiddling.

[wonderlust]

It certainly appears to be a monster! Who would have thought that Intel would have succeeded in such a vast improvement.

Amd certainly has a lot of work to do to catch up, I wonder If IBM can rework the Cell Processor to run x86/x64 code quickly? As that seems to be the only other very fast chip out there...

[alexnifty]

Thing is that a lot of the vast improvement comes from the memory controller and hyperthreading.

Now that these tricks have been used, what do Intel have up their sleeves? This new chip is obviously better, but its hardly an innovation in terms of tech ideas.

[wonderlust]

well the next "tick" of the intel clock will show us that, but thats a fair time in the future.

I wonder if Ht is going to have the performance hit that it has sometime in the P4 systems (my Dell has a HT chip, It is turned off in the bios as the PC is no more than a netbox)

[alexnifty]

Hopefully this implementation of HT will have those kinks ironed out.

Granted the next Tick is a long way off, but HT and Integrated Memory Controllers have been around for a long time now.
Theres nothing I know of around now that Intel could wait to implement in the next 6 years like they did with the controller. Intel will have to come up with some brand new tricks for their now empty bag.

[00mike000]

noo im worried that intel will make the mistake amd did with intergrated memory controller coz it just ruins the upgradability of the socket yea ddr3 is new but it wont be forever and some people only upgrade every 5 years or so

[PeterStoba]

noo im worried that intel will make the mistake amd did with intergrated memory controller coz it just ruins the upgradability of the socket yea ddr3 is new but it wont be forever and some people only upgrade every 5 years or so

You come out with some odd things you do!


yea ddr3 is new but it wont be forever and some people only upgrade every 5 years or so

They will bring out a new socket by the time ddr4 is out, dont forget ddr3 is still rarely seen

[marsey99]

but these are ddr3 only pete, by the time the next tock comes around they will most likly still be ddr3 too as its only 2 years after this is on the shelves.

personally i dont think its a mistake as the extra performance it gains with the higher speeds cpu>ram is well worth the downside of having to pair your ram to the cpu and mobo. amd won the last gen battle with this being a big part of the reason.

the only downside with this is that not much software can take advantage of all those cores and thats just wasted performance.

the power/performance is nice but i want more pure power atm as more cores just dont get used yet.

[Mul.]

noo im worried that intel will make the mistake amd did with intergrated memory controller coz it just ruins the upgradability of the socket yea ddr3 is new but it wont be forever and some people only upgrade every 5 years or so

First of all, technology will always move on. The requirement to change one's motherboards due to voltage regs, chipset, bios availability or anything at a hardware level is inevitable. If upgradability is limited due to the memory controller of the CPU, surely it'd be limited wherever it's placed and don't forget that new types of RAM will never physically fit in the slot of a previous version.

Only good can come from the move to an integrated memory controller. As fast as Core architecture was, it was bandwith starved by the old school Front Side Bus means of doing things. This will lower latencies and hopefully offer more bandwith as well, as Anandtech's sneak peak seems to partially demonstrate.


Thing is that a lot of the vast improvement comes from the memory controller and hyperthreading.

Now that these tricks have been used, what do Intel have up their sleeves? This new chip is obviously better, but its hardly an innovation in terms of tech ideas.

I would say that Nehalam is quite a substantial advancement in my opinion. Historically, we've rarely experienced a Core 2 Duo boom every two years. Considering this is set to be launched about 2.5 years after the launch of the first line up of Core 2 Duo's and overall we're seeing a considerable Clock For Clock IPC advantage on a new architecture in it's prelaunch infancy, I think it's quite remarkable. That being said, I did have my concerns about the architecture, seeing that it was taking slight inspiration from what AMD's Phenom seems to have such as the unified L3 cache and the smaller split L2 cache but to be honest, I'm no longer worried.

What I am worried about though is price. Unless AMD's 45nm dieshrink somehow gains some serious momentum, not only beating the LGA775 offerings but also competing with Bloomfield, Intel can get away with murder as far as pricing is concerned here.

Next, I would like to see what this CPU is made of in singlethreaded apps where this architecture no longer has access to a huge unified pool of L2 cache. I also want to see how it fairs in games. It sure seems to be a media and encoding monster, but how about games?

[wonderlust]

Looks like the nehalem will be able to be overclocked after all :D

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37824/135/

[marsey99]

i hope its true, tbh it would be daft if intle tried to stop the oc scene as we are the people telling others to buy their stuff.

how many people have we got to buy intel this month who was after an amd setup because last time they built it was the thing to do?

edit

i just hope the mem controller hass more options than current onboard versions as i miss my nvidia mem options :(

[Mul.]

Looks like the nehalem will be able to be overclocked after all :D

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37824/135/

Quite a relief indeed.


As I've said a couple of times, I refused to believe that all of Intel's chips will be locked down in terms of overclocking. I didn't expect Bloomfield to be locked down at all but it's even better that the platform that's one step below it supports it too. Seems as though it is only the entry level platform that has it locked.