Quote Originally Posted by Pinacolada View Post
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...oc.aspx?i=2991
"In our recent DDR3 vs. DDR2 review we discovered a 16% to 18% improvement in memory bandwidth with the P35 chipset. This translated into a 2% to 5% increase in real world performance in some computer applications.

This bandwith will be only for overpriced Bloomfield Nehalem,Nehalems in lower price will come in 2H 2009 and will have only dual channel.I expect Bloomfield setup to be 100-150% more expensive than Penryn setup (Intel will position Bloomfield as high-end system and it will cost) with performance around 10-20% single thread ,20-40% multithread.New drivers and better mobos won't help more than 1-3%.

So until you really need new computer or you are into multithreaded apps upgrade to quadcore Nehalem does make sense.Otherwise you will pay 100% more for about 10-20% improvement - not worth IMO for typical user it's much wiser to upgrade GPU or wait for cheap SSDs.
Quadcore penryn is good enough to wait till 2H 2009 for 32nm shrink where price/performance ration against Penryn will be much better.Most probably octalcores will be available then.

People are expecting marvels from Nehalem but it will be more evolution than revolution.
This extraction is not quite fair, nor correct. The entire memory sub-system for Nehalem has been reworked, you cannot look at the off-die DDR2-DDR3 comparision and make the assumption you are making.

In terms of marvels, who knows ... we have very little info to go by ... however, the hype machine of Geslinger compared the leap of Nehalem over Conroe to the magnitude of Conroe over Netburst, this indeed would be marvelous. My take on it is that it will be less overwhelming in single thread, but multithreaded situations will be impressive on this magnitude... Anand's preview data seems to indicate that this is indeed the potential... 30-50% gains depending on the app (multithreaded of course).

This will be even more impressive in server, where the mem BW issue is much much more pronounced... Kanter (RWT) seems to think Nehalem will be nothing short of a miracle. Time will tell.... however, initial indications are very positive that your downplay of Nehalem is probably not warranted.

Jack