Deneb just around the corner?

[Sentential]

Not really. Intel targeted Nehalem for processing lots of threads vs. emphasis on single threaded performance. It still does quite well on single threads, at least as good as current C2D's, its just not a huge jump like some people are expecting for some reason. Intel (and IIRC AMD) has said many times that many-core is the future since the effort needed to get more single threaded performance became burdensome a long time ago and is now becoming impracticle. At some point in time you're going to see chips from Intel/AMD which have down right crappy single thread performance on a per core basis, but will have hundreds if not thousands of cores. Nehalem is just Intel's 2nd step in that direction (IIRC quad/dual cores were their first).

I'm completely with you on this one, the problem that I have is that this chip is supposed to be the basis for all of their new cpus for the next 5 years or so and if this is all they have to offer they are in trouble.

I understand the arguement about threading, I do, but my concern is that we are comparing a brand new arch vs a design that is atleast 4 years old (Clawhammer -> Agena)

It would be one thing if Nelhalem was a 16/32 core chip with 64k of cache per core and it wound up peforming this well but its not, its a quad with hyperthreading and tri-channel RAM that provides zero peformance gain in multi-threaded games.

So what should we expect of lynfield? Is it going to be worse than C2D? By all accounts it should be. As for bloomfield and 1366 I believe this socket will quickly dissappear just like Socket 940 did back in the A64 days leaving only LGA1158 as being the widely adopted platform which will have less peformance, and poorer overclocking than bloomfield does.

Then what does this say of K11 when it arrives sometime late next year? Multi-thread or not if they dont get the peformance up they are going to get whomped by whatever AMD has to offer come next year.

This is the same arguement made about physics cards. Oh its wonderful this, oh its next-gen that. Bottom line is that it didnt deliver. Sure it may be future-proof but what good does it do if no one programs for it?

Hell 64bit procesors have been around over 5 years now and we have still yet to see any widespread adaptation to the new format. So what does that say to this philosophy of "more cores?"

Believe you me Ive got no axe to grind here, hell I argued that Pentium Ds were a better buy back in the hay-day of the A64s because of the early issues with AMD flawed initial mem-controllers and said that Conroe would *destroy* any market share AMD had gotten once it was released and I was ridiculed for it.

In this occassion I just dont see Intel as viable anymore. The heat dissapation issues with Nelhalem and its lack of ability to scale is going to ultimately doom Intel unless they can fix this with the 32nm process.

The only way that Intel is not going to get overrun next year is if they can get some serious clock scaling because if AMD makes any substantial changes to their arch they will quickly catch up to Intel and we will be right back to where we were back in the Netburst days. Intel will once again have a bloated chip that is only competitive due to its enormous cache size because it was made on a smaller fab process.

We are pretty much at the same exact apex right before the release of Clawhammer back in 2002. Intel had a faster chip that had significant heat dissapation and cost significantly more than the AMD equivalent. AMD chips were cheap as hell and when on certian combinations could come very very close to their Northwood counterparts. AMD was left with an ageing arch and were thought left for dead since they were a good 10-20% IPC below current HT enabled P4s.

Then AMD after many many delays finally got a viable new arch and then everyone hopped back on the bandwagon.

Only difference is I'm hopping on now while I can get top dollar for my existing C2D equipment