Forums | MacLife
You are not logged in.
#1 2008-08-19 10:09 am
- Bat
- Adult's Play
- Royal Wombat
- From: Björk, Björk
- Registered: 2001-05-14
- Posts: 24109
AT first look at Nehalem
On Day 1 of IDF, the NDAs come off.
As IDF has started, the first benchmarks of Nehalem will probably pop up. It is without a doubt an impressive architecture that gets a much better platform to run on, but this CPU is not about giving you better frames per second in your favorite game than the Penryn family. Let me make that more clear: even when the GPU is not the bottleneck, it is likely that most games will not significantly faster than on Penryn. We, the people behind it.anandtech.com will probably have the most fun with it, more than your favorite review crew at Anandtech.com :-). And no, I have not seen any tests before I type this. Nehalem is about improving HPC, Database and virtualization performance, much less about gaming performance. Maybe this will change once games get some heavy physics threads, but not right away.
Why? Most Games are about fast caches and super integer performance. After all, most of the Floating point action is already happening on the GPU. All Core 2 CPUs were a huge step forward in integer performance (not in the least because of memory disambiguation) compared to the CPUs of that time (P4 and K8). Nehalem is only a small step forward in integer performance. And the gains due to slightly increased integer performance are mostly negated by the new cache system. In a previous post I told you that most games really like the huge L2 of the Core family. With Nehalem they are getting a 32 KB L1 with a 4 cycle latency, next a very small (compared to the older Intel CPUs) 256 KB L2 cache with 12 cycle latency and after that a pretty slow 40 cycle 8 MB L3. When running on Penryn, they used to get a 3 cycle L1 and a 14 cycle 6144 KB L2. That is a 24 times larger L2 than Nehalem!
If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion - George Bernard Shaw
"Fire up a colortini, sit back, relax, and watch the pictures, now, as they fly through the air."
Offline
#2 2008-08-19 10:13 am
- Bat
- Adult's Play
- Royal Wombat
- From: Björk, Björk
- Registered: 2001-05-14
- Posts: 24109
Re: AT first look at Nehalem
And somewhat relatedly, a day defore IDF, a bit of the usual thunder-stealing:
STILL REMEMBER HyperTransport? Well, the fast chip-to-chip interconnect, now in its seventh year of existence, has not given up just because a bad day - let's make it a year - at the AMD processor races.
Companies including Broadcom, Altera, Nvidia and such are actively pushing HT in a variety of apps not exactly related to the AMD CPUs, like ultrafast networking, FPGAs and non-X86 CPUs. And, it is matching its new competitor, Intel QuickPath, in the speed department right now.
In about eight hours, Mario Cavalli, GM of HyperTransport consortium, is to announce the HyperTransport 3.1 spec, which adds the 2.8, 3.0 and 3.2 GHz clock speed settings to bring the 2 x 16 bit bidirectional standard implementation bandwidth towards 6.4 gigatransfers per second, or 51.2 Gigabytes/s for us ordinary mortals.
...
Importantly, with the updated HTX slot and board spec, HyperTransport has fully defined ultrafast chip-to-chip, board-to-board AND box-to-box links. QPI still lacks on the last two, which in my mind is a miss - as Intel's initial workstation & HPC server Nehalems are only DP Gainestowns, a defined " External QPI" spec at this point would help offer a competitive solution to AMD four and eight socket MP servers, getting more popular as the "fat node" concept is coming back with a vengeance.
If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion - George Bernard Shaw
"Fire up a colortini, sit back, relax, and watch the pictures, now, as they fly through the air."
Offline
#3 2008-08-19 1:42 pm
Re: AT first look at Nehalem
If it's good for games, Macs won't get it, right?
Stack it!Offline
#4 2008-08-20 1:34 am
- Bat
- Adult's Play
- Royal Wombat
- From: Björk, Björk
- Registered: 2001-05-14
- Posts: 24109
Re: AT first look at Nehalem
It's probably irrelevant. Macs, PMs anyway, will likely get whatever is the latest pricey buzz- the Xeon end of the product line. Makes some sense for workstations, but makes those a poor gaming value, if that's your interest. A C2D and good videocard are still a cheaper basis for that, sacrificing nothing needful. General-purpose systems don't need ECC RAM, 8 cores and the like.
If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion - George Bernard Shaw
"Fire up a colortini, sit back, relax, and watch the pictures, now, as they fly through the air."
Offline
