Intel Core I7 Launched, Nehalem and X58 Tested 194
MojoKid writes "Today marks the official launch of
Intel's new Core i7 processor, the most major overhaul of Intel's core processor architecture since the release of their Core 2
design. As has been reported, the Core i7 is a major departure from
Intel's aging Front Side Bus architecture of old, now replaced by
Intel's QPI (Quick Path Interconnect) serial links. This 20 lane
bi-directional (40 lanes total) point-to-point connection provides 6.4 GT/s of
bandwidth and scalability for future multi-socket designs as well. In
addition, the Core i7 now has an integrated triple channel memory controller
offering over 3X the bandwidth of the previous Core 2 architecture with
DDR3 system memory. Though the product is set to ship in volume later this
month,
the early benchmark numbers show Intel's new chip is markedly faster
clock-for-clock versus their previous generation CPU and much faster than
anything AMD has out currently."
Sweet! (Score:4, Interesting)
A little hot, but on time, in time for Christmas and slamming the benchmarks. Hey, there is a system that can run Crysis with all the features turned on!
Maybe a price break on the LGA775 quad lineup now please?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Expen$ive (Score:2, Interesting)
Another great /. post. (Score:5, Interesting)
Link to the middle of an ad-laden article and to the Cinebench of all pages - because, you know, that is what the average /. reader is running...
Also, add a nice touch: forget to mention that while the i7 is faster clock for clock with the Core 2, it currently tops out at 3.2GHz and has some sort of overclock protection (lowers clock when it goes over 110A or 130w).
My cheap Core 2 is running at 4GHz on just the stock fan, I don't see myself upgrading to the i7 anytime soon.
What did you say? ... What do you mean Cinebench would still run faster?
Real world performance??? (Score:4, Interesting)
And I was *just* about to retire my "old" socket 940 dual-core opteron box for a quad core Intel system. I think I'll just wait another month or two and jump to the i7 platform instead. 8-)
Would be nice to see some video and audio encoding benchmarks and some real world application performance numbers instead of teenmarks (gaming performance).
Cheers,
Servers? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Being an innovator not always smart? (Score:3, Interesting)
yes, I was thinking of that. but how radical is the new amd vs that older ev6 stuff?
the whole idea is that its NOT a front side bus and its pt-pt from every node to every node.
intel still has this FSB notion and amd dropped that years ago (?)
Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Interesting)
But it doesn't magically increases RAM bandwidth.
i7 memory interconnect would help applications which are not hand-crafted to maximize performance. And I expect that games like Crysis already optimized through the nose to utilize all bandwidths to max.
Or to put it in other words: unoptimized code would gain from i7 more than highly optimized code, since in former case CPU would have more opportunities to optimize memory accesses on its own and better fill up the data bus.
But I also can be wrong and hand crafted code of Crysis/etc is simply cannot take advantage of i7 features.
Re:Expen$ive (Score:1, Interesting)
$2,000 is cheap for a new professional workstation. I can pay for this with a couple or three Wedding shoots. Makes running noise reduction and all the other 'automagic make it cool!' photoshop plugins alot more economical.
Re:Being an innovator not always smart? (Score:1, Interesting)
Where are you getting the idea that AMD's technology is so much faster. Crappy benchmarks that try to sum up a complex problem into a single number?
I do IT support for scientific computing and I just don't see it. In fact, I spent all last week benchmarking some of my user's programs on an AMD 2212 vs an Intel E8400, and the Intel system is wiping the floor with the AMD system (20% faster) for this particular program. And I'm not an Intel fanboy. I used to be an AMD fanboy, but then I got a whole mess of various different models of Tyan AMD motherboards that consistently got MCEs and kernel panics under load (yes, I'm using both memory and CPUs from Tyan's list of supported chips for that specific board). It could be Tyan and it could be AMD, but since I switched to Intel, I can't get an machine check to save my life.
My point is that the very small subset of that actually run CPU-bound programs for any significant length of time know that the best performance is:
a) Very application specific
b) Switches back and forth all the time
c) Represents differences less than a factor of 1, so if your code is actually too slow to run, you'll have to resort to tuning your software rather than buying better hardware (unless, of course, your hardware is many years old).
Re:Please stop using the GT/s performance indicato (Score:3, Interesting)
No bits or bytes anywhere to be seen.
Love the heat sink!!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
..and Intel and AMD, please blast through 3.2Ghz per CPU so all programs work faster all the time.
And security? (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder if they have fixed the security problems of the past.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/28/1124256 [slashdot.org]