
Originally Posted by
iocedmyself
Well after reading the Nehalem review i'm really not that impressed with intel progress, they had to go back to the Pentium pro - P3 arch with core/2 and regardless of it's 32bit performance it's the arch is getting long in the tooth. Aside from being 45nm the nehalems only other real selling point is that it's an intel chip with what is essentially an AMD IMC. It's taken Intel near 6 years to get to the point of being able to COPY AMD's IMC, and despite how they may try and sell explinations such as
"we at intel don't really feel that there is any reason that conumers really need to have an IMC at this time, or the forseeable future, there is no significant performance gain to justify the additional difficulty in producing something that would be considerably more expensive for us to produce and thus make the product more expensive for the consumer. We were already working on a chip with an IMC back in 1998, were ready to launch it alongside the P4 but we realized there wasn't a market for it at the time and decided to focus our attention elsewhere. So the IMC is just another example of the "competition" following in our footsteps, not the other way around"
Which of course doesn't resemble the truth so much as "creative testimony." Intel omits the fact that they actually did launch chips with an IMC in '91 the 386SL and the 486SL which were 20mhz - 40mhz, despite AMD not even being on the radar at that point, the chip was such a PoS that vendors openly snubbed them and the chips were scrapped by '92. The chip they began working on in late '98, the Timna, the design was based around using Rambus RDRAM which never actually became affordable they had to scrap the design and rework it for use with SDRAM, pushing the launch back several times to final confirmed spring of 2001. But this was around the time that intel was getting ready to launch another industry milestone....netburst-ing P4. So it got pushed back again....along with the P4. Then of course when a test batch was rolled out...there was a pesky fatal design flaw. Which meant they would have to go and do more work, when really it wasn't worth putting so much effort into a cpu for a $500-$600 desktop, because thats not where the market was at, the consumers wanted to pay more money for their hardware, not less! So they scrapped it. So in reality they had already been a two time failure with IMC in the 12 year span prior to AMD 64's launch.
Then of course Intel also downplays 64bit applications and OS. Again, similar explinations to their reasoning for not having an IMC are given for not pushing 64bit Apps, or 64bit performance. Intel claims 64bit is just a marketing gimmick that in reality offers no real benifit in real world scenario's at this time. Well again, doesn't much resemble the truth, while the Alpha team at DEC produced the first 64bit RISC cpu in 91 or 92, intel partnered up with HP to develop the original IA-64 itanium in 94, with plans to launch by the end of 98, claiming that it would dominate the server market offering performance several times faster than anything else even concieved. So convincing were they that Microsoft tailored a Server OS specifically for Itanium HP and Intel invested billions in the project. Alas, much like the Timna, and the P4 the Itanic didn't actually launch until 2001. The Itanium was 64bit RISC processor, so it either had to run as a 64bit chip, in which case any 32bit code had to be emulated resulting in performance no even on par with 32bit desktop intel chips, or it had to be run as a dedicated 32bit processor....which meant that not only did it still perform worse than thier destop segment, but it made the 7 year multi-billion dollar project...well pointless. So of course by the time it was launched it was stomped by the competition. Every application had to be written specifically for the IA-64 to actually run in 64bit mode, which was more complicated than anyone imagined, it was slow, it ran hot and sucked up alot of power. That investment brokered sales in the thousands, not tens of thousands....4 digit thousands.
But strangely enough, here they are producing 64bit chips using the x86-64 code they have to licsense from AMD (even though 64bit is just a marketing gimmick) that will now use IMC's almost identical to AMD's even though Intel paved the way.
Going back to the original 500mhz Socket A chip (which was essentially an Alpha 64 with higher clock and larger caches) aside from acctually being a RISC processor optimized for 32bit, hypertransport was already built into the chip, though they had no plans to release the specs to all of the Motherboard manufacturers that were in bed with Intel. Socket A was implimented both as a holding pattern and distraction to intel while they developed the Opteron, which was actually meant to launch in 2001/'02. They already had the option of using an IMC since the Alpha engineers were working at AMD at that point, though they opted to introduce DDR instead and save the IMC for opteron. Actually, the Alpha EV8 was the first processor to offer similtanious multi-threading and was ready to launch two years before Intel got the P4 out, though EV8 got scrapped after DEC was sold off.
It really doesn't matter how much money Intel has, or how much faster they can shoot out die shrinks, they've never had tangible long term plans (which is probably why when they get ahead they go into production overtime putting out the same chips either on a different socket, with a smaller die, larger Cache faster clocks and then start going through that list using combinations) they seem to either think that just because they have a roadmap the market will remain in synch until they've carried through their plans, or it doesn't matter what the reality is so long as hundreds of millions are thrown into agressive marketing to set the public straight.
For instance after reading the nehalem review by anadtech, which showcased the cutting edge 64bit quad core running 32bit Cinebench i decided to clock my 9850BE phenom to 2.7ghz and see what my results were in 64bit vista ultimate with 4gigs of 1066mhz DDR2.
64Bit 32bit
1cpu= 2874 2245 21.88% performance gain
xCpu= 10550 8230 21.99% performance gain
speedup= 3.67 3.67
openGL 4564 4568
Incidently, the 2.66ghz Nehalem got 3048 in single core, and 12,400 i think running all 4 cores. I realize it's based off of results running on a unsupported x58 board...but seeing as how cinebench actually takes advantage of IMC 5.7% lead on a single core and 15% running 4 cores really isn't too impressive for a 45nm chip with twice the on die Cache....while running 1366mhz DDR3. But my how nice it is to see they have already worked their way back up to netburst features and ressurected hyper-threading.
As for the 4ghz clock on the 45nm AMD, it's entirely plausable, even on air cooling. Someone recently managed to break 4ghz with one of the B3 phenoms using phase change i blieve, and my 939 4400x2 toledo core clocked from the stock 2.2 up to 3.66ghz 24/7 stable using a TT Big typhoon with a 120mm 110cfm silverstone fan in place of the stock 54cfm fan, running on 1.475V, which i ran for 2 years until 3.5 weeks ago when i upgraded to my Phenom the highest i managed to boot and get a scuicide screenie was just shy of 3.8ghz though the voltage was pumped up to 1.525 or something insanely high like that.
Now that Dirk meyer is in the CEO seat at AMD, i think things are going to be looking much brighter for them. But then again, AMD has always put placeholder products out while they work on the secret project to wipe the floor with Intel.
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