The Nehalem Preview: Anandtech

[udaman]

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3326&p=1


Sort of disappointing there are no power savings, will have to wait until 2010 for 32nm process to see an significant power reduction.

What with notebooks overtaking desktops in sales, power saving becomes critical. Takes energy to power all of those computers being sold all over the world. Not very eco-socially, politically correct to consume more power, instead of less than previous generation.

 

[Bozo]

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3326&p=1


Sort of disappointing there are no power savings, will have to wait until 2010 for 32nm process to see an significant power reduction.

What with notebooks overtaking desktops in sales, power saving becomes critical. Takes energy to power all of those computers being sold all over the world. Not very eco-socially, politically correct to consume more power, instead of less than previous generation.

If the new computers are replacing computers that are 3 years old or older, then there probably is an energy savings.

Then again, what do you do with the old computers?

Bozo :joker:

 

[snowhiker]

If the new computers are replacing computers that are 3 years old or older, then there probably is an energy savings.

Then again, what do you do with the old computers?

Bozo :joker:

Give your 3 year old computer to me. It will be 3 years newer than what I have now.

 

[LunarMist]

Is this a good upgrade for Q1 2009? Will it run XP, or only Vista? Thanks.

 

[jtr1962]

Sort of disappointing there are no power savings, will have to wait until 2010 for 32nm process to see an significant power reduction.

What with notebooks overtaking desktops in sales, power saving becomes critical. Takes energy to power all of those computers being sold all over the world. Not very eco-socially, politically correct to consume more power, instead of less than previous generation.

Putting aside the environmental aspects of lower power processors, I'd like to see them for the ease of cooling. It would be nice to have multi-core processors running at a decent clock speed, but dissipating 10 watts or less. That means passive cooling would be possible. Couple that with a passively cooled power supply and SSD, and you have a silent, ecofriendly computer. Not next year, but perhaps by the time SSDs achieve price parity with mechanical hard disks we'll also have nice ultra-low power processors to compliment them.

 

[MaxBurn]

Putting aside the environmental aspects of lower power processors, I'd like to see them for the ease of cooling. It would be nice to have multi-core processors running at a decent clock speed, but dissipating 10 watts or less. That means passive cooling would be possible. Couple that with a passively cooled power supply and SSD, and you have a silent, ecofriendly computer. Not next year, but perhaps by the time SSDs achieve price parity with mechanical hard disks we'll also have nice ultra-low power processors to compliment them.

We are on the way there but they need selling points other than green, and staying on top of the horsepower curve keeps products selling.

I'm thinking by 2020 we can have a whole computer on one chip, multiple CPU, memory, video card, drive space all of it. Motherboards by then are just physical interfaces for expansion devices and plugging external peripherals in.

Just think what laptops turn into by then.

 

[Handruin]

Putting aside the environmental aspects of lower power processors, I'd like to see them for the ease of cooling. It would be nice to have multi-core processors running at a decent clock speed, but dissipating 10 watts or less. That means passive cooling would be possible. Couple that with a passively cooled power supply and SSD, and you have a silent, ecofriendly computer. Not next year, but perhaps by the time SSDs achieve price parity with mechanical hard disks we'll also have nice ultra-low power processors to compliment them.

jtr, if you're looking for an AMD chip below 10 watts, this might be appealing:
Athlon 64 2000+ at 8-watts outperforms, draws less energy than Atom. Sadly I don't think it's multi-core...

With the new ramp up discussions of SSD's, it seems Western Digital is looking into increasing platter speeds to 20K RPMs. My guess is that they aren't ready to embrace SSD's yet.

 

[ddrueding]

Athlon 64 2000+ at 8-watts outperforms, draws less energy than Atom. Sadly I don't think it's multi-core...

Neat find. I don't think multi-core is efficient in a general performance/watt sort of way, and a single core is quick enough for what these will be asked to do.

 

[udaman]

http://www.techradar.com/news/compu...socket-nehalem-ep-platform-benchmarked-487131

All of that is gone with Nehalem EP, replaced with the sleek new Quick Path Interconnect and on-die memory controllers. The result is truly epic bandwidth and performance scaling. The big number many will be waiting for is the SPECfp base rate. So here it is: 160.
To put that into context, the Intel's current Penryn-based Xeon dual-socket platform fails to hit 90, even running at 3.4GHz. Perhaps even more significantly, AMD's shiny new 45nm Shanghai chips in dual-socket 2.7GHz trim score just 105 points. Even a four-socket Shanghai rig is only good for just under 190.
And remember, Nehalem EP's 160 point score is for a pre-production system running at 2.8GHz. Models humming a 3.2GHz tune will be available when the chip launches early next year. What's more, our testing was carried out on Windows Server 2008.
Run the same benchmark courtesy of the leaner, meaner Linux OS and you'd be looking at an even higher score.
In other words, as good as AMD's new Shanghai chip is, it appears that Nehalem EP will slap it around with a wet fish.

Too confusing, two different sockets, which CPU's go into what, Xeon = Nehalem EP?

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3461&p=3

Without mainstream mobile Nehalem until Q1 2010, next year will be a very long wait for a serious mobile upgrade. But if you can wait it out, or buy something cheaper today, the time to upgrade will be in Q1 2010. I’m going to go ahead and revise my Apple notebook recommendation given that we probably won’t see a Nehalem based MacBook until 2010. Buy the cheapest MacBook you can today and make it last, upgrade again in 2010

Whaaa , 2010, and it still won't be on 32nm die shrink???

Snow Leopard, along with Open CL in 2009 can take advantage of using the GPU for some CPU tasks, speeding things up...but I'll need to wait until 2011 for 32nm Westmere, especially seeing how we're going into a worldwide recession that will last likely into 2011.

By the end of 2009 we should have support for both OpenCL and DirectX 11 by GPUs from all vendors, including Intel with Larrabee. These APIs in combination with the highly parallel nature of the GPUs that will be able to run them, should allow for some incredible speedups on highly data parallel applications. While most of these applications are currently limited to the scientific field, we’ll start to see them appear in the consumer space (we’re starting to already with video transcoding and Photoshop).

OpenCL is almost finalized as of this week, it's a go for Snow Leopard, which is rumored to be released 1Q 2009, so I would expect support for it in the laptops using Nvidia chipsets/GPU's early 2009.

A trademark is being sought under International Class 009, which revolves around computer software.

OpenCL is similar in concept to the CUDA technology developed by NVIDIA, but should be independent of any particular card or platform. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has in fact described OpenCL as "way beyond" code by NVIDIA or any other company. It is being overseen not just by Apple, however, but by the Khronos Group, which specializes in creating such APIs. Other companies participating in development of OpenCL include game publishers like Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts, numerous phone and computer hardware makers, and NVIDIA itself. Apple's implementation should first see public exposure in Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/11/19/opencl.built.in.6.months/

Khronos Group and its alliance of associated companies have managed to build the OpenCL programming standard in just six months, according to Macworld. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a standard for parallel programming, which could serve as the foundation for a variety of devices and applications, without the limitations of platform-dependent or closed architecture. “If you go to some other larger standards bodies, it’s quite normal for a standard to take five years or more,” said Neil Trevett, CEO of Khronos. The team pushed the limit in order to meet Apple's time-frame for consideration in the next release of OS X, Snow Leopard.

“The fact that if we could hit this impossible deadline [Apple] would support it in Snow Leopard was a huge plus to us,” said Tim Mattson of Intel.

Although the bulk share of technical work has been completed, time will still be given for other companies and lawyers to investigate any intellectual property issues. The collaboration was announced in June, bringing together industry leaders including 3DLabs, AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, ARM, Freescale, and Qualcomm.

OpenCL framework takes advantage of mult-cored CPUs and GPUs, aiming to drive the parallel computing market. The standard is royalty-free and open, with a wide range of potential applications, from mobile phones to DSPs. To keep a certain amount of integrity, implementations will be tested before the trademark can be used.

The standard would allow many process-intensive tasks to run faster with the CPU, or off-load part of the work to another processor. Developers could use OpenCL to enhance games, video or image editing software, and even basic computer functions. The team chose to use a C-based language that many programmers are familiar with.

Khronos has not provided an exact date for the official public release. Apple has already announced the inclusion of OpenCL in Snow Leopard, but the necessary ratification process has just begun. Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to work on its rival standard, DirectX 11.

LOL, battle of the titans OpenCL vs DirectX 11, M$ has less cash reserves than Apple now, iPhone is selling beyond all industry analyst expectations...we'll see who wins out in the standards front .

 

[LunarMist]

Too confusing...

You could stop right there.