Intel brings forward Nehalem Launch

[informal]

Nope,not posted before afaik.How come Far East guys always get the best toys first?
Is there any mention of the Turbo mode and whether it was active during their test?If it wasn't on during testing,according to your numbers it's on average 16% faster per clock,very good.

[Movieman]

Nehalem and its plafform is a very complex change, we are busy making sure it is rock solid. More than 800Millions transistors, new Bus interface, new IO subsystem, performance validation and functional validation are exponentially complexe. It does increase as a permutation of combination.
People rarely understand the scale of validating a processor, it is looking for a niddle in 800millions parts ... with a motherboard team, a CPU team, a BUS team, a performance team, a Quality team, and several version of the CPU, for mobile, desktop, server multi processor ...
I am lucky enough to live this from the inside, right now, there are thousands of people busy, working like ants, and I admire the General manager for making all of this happen in parallele. Attention to details is critical.

We are paranoid, as Andy Groove taught us, so, even if it looks ready, we got to have the CPU and motherboard good enough to face the hightest requirements. This is almost an impossible task that we are after, we need time for this. We are workig hard on it, very hard, week end and nights are too short

I have 2 of your clovertown systems here and 2 harpertowns.
Both have exceeded expectations and the two clovertowns have been running at 100% load since Jan 2007 with an uptime exceeding 98% at over 3000mhz.
As good as the clovers are, the Harpertowns almost make them look slow.
You take your time.
I'd rather have it "right" than fast.
I guarantee you that I'll have a dual 3200 gainstown here as soon as the chips and boards are ready.
Can't wait to see what that will do in our Aids and cancer research!

[terrace215]

Have you seen theis chinese test already?

That's no good.

Check the revision: Stepping 2, Rev B0.

Big improvements since then.

[shiznit93]

That's no good.

Check the revision: Stepping 2, Rev B0.

Big improvements since then.

really? like what? I know this design isn't really meant to increase gaming performance but those numbers aren't that great, especially if the 2.66ghz version doesn't oc as well as a Q9550.

[User9498]

Nehalem has definitely been over-hyped by enthusiasts. Although, I have the feeling the average consumer will first be disappointed with a) single-threaded and general gaming performance, and then b) the expense of the entire platform. I also still have reservations about the overclockability of anything other than Extreme processors. Any delay in shipping dates certainly won't help quell this possible disappointment.

Although, I respect any company that doesn't rush buggy incomplete products to the market. Good things come to those who wait.

[Nocturno]

Nehalem has definitely been over-hyped by enthusiasts. Although, I have the feeling the average consumer will first be disappointed with a) single-threaded and general gaming performance, and then b) the expense of the entire platform. I also still have reservations about the overclockability of anything other than Extreme processors. Any delay in shipping dates certainly won't help quell this possible disappointment.

Although, I respect any company that doesn't rush buggy incomplete products to the market. Good things come to those who wait.

Have to agree!

[Hornet331]

Nehalem has definitely been over-hyped by enthusiasts. Although, I have the feeling the average consumer will first be disappointed with a) single-threaded and general gaming performance, and then b) the expense of the entire platform. I also still have reservations about the overclockability of anything other than Extreme processors. Any delay in shipping dates certainly won't help quell this possible disappointment.

Although, I respect any company that doesn't rush buggy incomplete products to the market. Good things come to those who wait.

what delay in shiping dates? is Q408 already over... damn timewarps...

[Donnie27]

Nehalem has definitely been over-hyped by enthusiasts. Although, I have the feeling the average consumer will first be disappointed with a) single-threaded and general gaming performance, and then b) the expense of the entire platform. I also still have reservations about the overclockability of anything other than Extreme processors. Any delay in shipping dates certainly won't help quell this possible disappointment.

Although, I respect any company that doesn't rush buggy incomplete products to the market. Good things come to those who wait.

Geeks over hype everything though. In their zeal and excitement, they/we always drool over new stuff! Look at the Barcelona/Phenom Hype last year?
Reservations? Hell, folks like Jumpingjack, savantu and Hornet133 gave excellent posts on why these folks should stop over hyping Barcelona, didn't help there LOL! You can add Video Cards and even Newer Raptor Hard drives as well. Then, don't even get me started about 3D LCD's

@Informal

16% is too simple. That average hides too much. I'd not even bother wasting time on 3D Marks other than something to demo on a computer I'm trying to sale.

Call of Duty DX9 --- (-8,6%)
Half Life 2: EP2 --- 2.3%
Wold in Conflict --- 6.6%
Company of Heroes --- (-7.2%)
Devil May Cry --- 5.1%

That's just short of 6% on those games. If you're a gamer that's not that impressive at all. But if games are an after thought and those other apps are you main use, those same games and useless 3D Marks is hiding some pretty awesome performance improvements.

SuperPI MOD 1.4 --- 19,3%
WinRar 3.71 --- 77,3%
Fritz Chess --- 29%
Cinebench R10, singlethread --- 6,7%
Cinebench R10, 4CPU --- 25,7%
TMPGEnc 4.5 --- (-8%)

25% on these 6 and 31.66% on those in bold! Big time improvement on an apps AMD has always given Intel a whipping on and even after Core, gave Intel a run for the money. Never mind that it is an older steppings that better not show up on the open market.

To the other guy, good luck even finding a lot of single threaded apps. Most folks buying Quads are using them for Multi-threaded apps. Hell, even I don't use Quads. I'd love to see a 3.2GHz cheap Dual Core Nehalem rescued from the scrap heap right now, but I'm going Quad next year.

[terrace215]

really? like what? I know this design isn't really meant to increase gaming performance but those numbers aren't that great, especially if the 2.66ghz version doesn't oc as well as a Q9550.

The B stepping had performance-impacting bugs, so analyzing these numbers is a waste of time.

They already have C-steppings (likely to launch, per Blauhung), and are even working on a D-stepping for the inevitable follow-up.

With C-stepping sample results now starting to appear, it is odd that this site used an old sample, but there you go.

[Jacky]

The B stepping had performance-impacting bugs, so analyzing these numbers is a waste of time.

Have we seen any numbers of the new stepping? What's your source, did I miss it in this thread and what exactly was broken? AFAIK we have only performance numbers for B stepping or earlier, which are damn impressive for everything multithreaded anyway.

[terrace215]

Have we seen any numbers of the new stepping? What's your source, did I miss it in this thread and what exactly was broken? AFAIK we have only performance numbers for B stepping or earlier, which are damn impressive for everything multithreaded anyway.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/Forums/...postcount=1288

Not sure exactly what was fubar'd in the earlier steppings.

Read through Dr. Who? 's posts, as well.

[informal]

http://www.xtremesystems.org/Forums/...postcount=1288

Not sure exactly what was fubar'd in the earlier steppings.

Read through Dr. Who? 's posts, as well.

Are you referring to Everest read/write/copy scores from pconline test?The scores are 15.3/14.7/16.5 MB/s from 2.93Ghz B0 versus 17.1/13.8/19.2 MB/s from 3.2Ghz XE Cx.They are lower on B0 due to a 1066Mhz memory that was used by pconline instead of 1600Mhz DDR3 used by hardspell and by higher clock of the NB in the XE 3.2Ghz Nehalem model... 50% difference in clock of the memory and lower CPU/NB clocks are going to affect the memory scores for sure.

[Drwho?]

Are you referring to Everest read/write/copy scores from pconline test?The scores are 15.3/14.7/16.5 MB/s from 2.93Ghz B0 versus 17.1/13.8/19.2 MB/s from 3.2Ghz XE Cx.They are lower on B0 due to a 1066Mhz memory that was used by pconline instead of 1600Mhz DDR3 used by hardspell and by higher clock of the NB in the XE 3.2Ghz Nehalem model... 50% difference in clock of the memory and lower CPU/NB clocks are going to affect the memory scores for sure.

I think everybody should relax and stop speculating on old steppings, it is like taking a brand new prototype of Nissan GTR skyline, and test it with the version of 6 months before the release ... performance tuning did not happen yet on it!

Be patient

[informal]

Well i still don't understand why pconline even used that B0 CPU to begin with...

[JumpingJack]

Nehalem has definitely been over-hyped by enthusiasts. Although, I have the feeling the average consumer will first be disappointed with a) single-threaded and general gaming performance, and then b) the expense of the entire platform. I also still have reservations about the overclockability of anything other than Extreme processors. Any delay in shipping dates certainly won't help quell this possible disappointment.

Although, I respect any company that doesn't rush buggy incomplete products to the market. Good things come to those who wait.

I think any highly anticipated release of any product receives the potential for an inordinate amount of hype. My take is that Nehalem will show overall mixed results, in some cases the results will be stellar (highly multithreaded of course), in other cases mediocre or less impressive (single threaded circumstance). On the whole, it will probably we well received but there will be a good number of fanboys who will put down the product and will be 'unimpressed or disappointed' ... even if it quadrupled performance there will be a select group that will chant -- 'was expecting more, extremely disappointed' ...

It is as predictable as predicting night and day.

Deneb will be the same way to and extent, however, AMD has been much lower key on Deneb/Shanghai than they were with Agena/Barcelona -- probably to deflate the hype factor.

On your last statement--- one big Amen!

[adamsleath]

its basically multithreading oriented, so all it needs to show is improvement over penryn quad cores.
i guess if cheaper n's dont clock very well, penryns will still sell more...the imc and monolithic core features are the same as amd phenoms. (feature-wise) so from that basic laypersons perspective..thats that, but phenoms will remain a fair bit cheaper i suppose, due to, presumeably, lower performance.

[eternaljammer]

I like all us geeks cannot wait....

[shiznit93]

In the areas where they wanted to improve on conroe/penryn like multi-threading, memory bandwidth and latency, smt, qpi, they appear to have done a great job. AMD's server market share is about to disappear unless they come up with a miracle. If most of the applications I use every day would take advantage of 4-8 threads then I would be all over it (some do but I don't use them enough to justify the cost). But since I mostly use my pc for gaming I can't help but wish for an even better penryn with an IMC and 8mb+ of L2.

[Drwho?]

In the areas where they wanted to improve on conroe/penryn like multi-threading, memory bandwidth and latency, smt, qpi, they appear to have done a great job. AMD's server market share is about to disappear unless they come up with a miracle. If most of the applications I use every day would take advantage of 4-8 threads then I would be all over it (some do but I don't use them enough to justify the cost). But since I mostly use my pc for gaming I can't help but wish for an even better penryn with an IMC and 8mb+ of L2.

Expect this Winter top games to come out threaded
If you don't have a 2500x1600 screen, you will see benefits.
For those with 2500x1600 , well SLI or Xfire can help to see the benefit of Quad cores.

The new gen of game is threaded, I got the betas, it looks good!

[T_Flight]

I fly Flight Simulators...combat flight sims mostly in the jet age, and nothing will bring a CPU to it's knees faster. Everyone talks about GPU power with games, but with sims it's very different. The majority of the load is on the CPU. There is a load on the GPU but the majority of stuff is done on the CPU.

The normal deal with flights sims is "More"...more CPU, more RAM, faster HDD's, more GPU Power in that order.

There is a new title being worked on now that will probably be worked on for a few more years called Fighter Ops. it's in development and it will bring realism to a whole new level. I currently fly a sim called Falcon 4. These sims are real, and F4 has a dynamic campaign engine. There is literally a real war going on and what you do in sim has a direct impact on what happens in the final outcome of the war. It massively taxes the CPU. Earlier versions taxed the CPU even more becasue the grpahiocs engines were not designed like they are today. More was done on the GPU.

In F4 we don't fly for the pretty graphaics although there is constant work being done on that end of it. We fly for the realism. A 10 year old sim with a DX7 engine is still the very best combat flight sim ever to be put out there. It has the love of everybody who flies it.

Even F4 that is based on some older coding performs better on multi core CPU setups. It does responmd to GPU upgrades but not as much as CPU upgrades.

This new Nehalem is not gonna hurt performance over the Penryns. It will actually increase performance so for the person upgrading now there is really no reason to go with the older 775 based stuff. The 775 based stuff will only get obsolete faster. Even with older titles like I fly it will increase performance. Flight sims are something that takes many years to develop. They are not like games. People who develop them do lots of research and some of it is hard to get. These are what we call "study sims". In any event, it takes alot of CPU to do the things I do and this new Nehalem is just what I've been looking for.

[Drwho?]

I fly Flight Simulators...combat flight sims mostly in the jet age, and nothing will bring a CPU to it's knees faster. Everyone talks about GPU power with games, but with sims it's very different. The majority of the load is on the CPU. There is a load on the GPU but the majority of stuff is done on the CPU.

The normal deal with flights sims is "More"...more CPU, more RAM, faster HDD's, more GPU Power in that order.

There is a new title being worked on now that will probably be worked on for a few more years called Fighter Ops. it's in development and it will bring realism to a whole new level. I currently fly a sim called Falcon 4. These sims are real, and F4 has a dynamic campaign engine. There is literally a real war going on and what you do in sim has a direct impact on what happens in the final outcome of the war. It massively taxes the CPU. Earlier versions taxed the CPU even more becasue the grpahiocs engines were not designed like they are today. More was done on the GPU.

In F4 we don't fly for the pretty graphaics although there is constant work being done on that end of it. We fly for the realism. A 10 year old sim with a DX7 engine is still the very best combat flight sim ever to be put out there. It has the love of everybody who flies it.

Even F4 that is based on some older coding performs better on multi core CPU setups. It does responmd to GPU upgrades but not as much as CPU upgrades.

This new Nehalem is not gonna hurt performance over the Penryns. It will actually increase performance so for the person upgrading now there is really no reason to go with the older 775 based stuff. The 775 based stuff will only get obsolete faster. Even with older titles like I fly it will increase performance. Flight sims are something that takes many years to develop. They are not like games. People who develop them do lots of research and some of it is hard to get. These are what we call "study sims". In any event, it takes alot of CPU to do the things I do and this new Nehalem is just what I've been looking for.

actually, did you try Flysimulator with FS Service Pack 1, because it is one of the only hightly threaded program. Nehalem will scream on this one especially
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/35547/135/
" At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Intel’s tech guru Francois Piednoel showed off a prototype Skulltrail-enabled Alienware system by blazing through several benchmarks. He also virtually flew an Airbus 380 (he’s French after all) in Flight Simulator, one of the very few games that can take advantage of eight cores.
"

[shiznit93]

Expect this Winter top games to come out threaded
If you don't have a 2500x1600 screen, you will see benefits.
For those with 2500x1600 , well SLI or Xfire can help to see the benefit of Quad cores.

The new gen of game is threaded, I got the betas, it looks good!

many pc games are threaded yes, but the usage on cores 3 and 4 is small enough that a 4.0ghz dual core will beat a mid 3.x ghz quad most of the time. There are some exceptions like UE3 but UT3 sucked and Gears was infested with GFWL. Source engine can use 4 cores very well with mat_queue_mode 2 but unfortunately CS:S hasn't been upgraded to the Orange Box engine and mat_queue_mode 2 isn't very stable anyway. Maybe Left 4 Dead will fix it.

[T_Flight]

actually, did you try Flysimulator with FS Service Pack 1, because it is one of the only hightly threaded program. Nehalem will scream on this one especially
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/35547/135/
" At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Intel’s tech guru Francois Piednoel showed off a prototype Skulltrail-enabled Alienware system by blazing through several benchmarks. He also virtually flew an Airbus 380 (he’s French after all) in Flight Simulator, one of the very few games that can take advantage of eight cores.
"

Are you talking about FSX? Flight Simulator 10 from Microsoft? If so, I don't currently have the computer for it...not even close. I am familiar enough with it and have freinds that fly it. Currently the technology still does not exist to properly fly that sim with everything maxed. It does do well with lots of memory on Vista with the high end machines, but you have to chill on the sliders a bit.

I'd actually like to see some of these reviews done with Flight Simulators. They do put a real hurting on stuff in ways that current games don't. They are a bit different. FSX could be used as a benchmarking program. Even the most expensive system imaginable would not run it maxed. If Bill Gates has a PC running it maxed, he has something we can't get yet. I've seen it tested with a 8 core setup with an obscene amount of RAM on Velociraptors in RAID, with Quad SLi and it still can't be run maxed out. A system like that cost upwards of 10 grand. That's way more than I can spend on a computer.

[XS Janus]

More multi threaded DVD making programs, please...

[Drwho?]

More multi threaded DVD making programs, please...

www.handbrake.fr does very well, if you have an ipod video or iphone, using 8 threads

there are now many application using 8 threads for video ...
and if you want to rotate the video of few degree, to mess up the video, you can use the new super useful features from nvidia, blur and rotation ... lol who wants to blur his video?
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquir...o-editing-roll




sorry, i had to take this out of my system ...