Previews - Intel Nehalem benchmarked: muscling to victory

[armistitiu]

sorry about that i meant 'Intel's new BOARDS don't support....' . And about that AMD switching to DD3 that won't happen until 2010

[compres]

sorry about that i meant 'Intel's new BOARDS don't support....' . And about that AMD switching to DD3 that won't happen until 2010

Hello?

The memory controller is now integrated in the CPU...

[compres]

The reason DDR3 was used was down to the fact that it's running on an X58 chipset board for the LGA1366. If Intel had a DDR2 board available I bet it would have been tested, but seeing as it's all going to DDR3 I can't see them bringing a DDR2 supporting board out. Also, don't forget that the Nehalem is TRIPLE CHANNEL hence the 6 memory slots and this helps with the memory performance scores as well

I cannot see AMD coming close to the performance of the intel processors for a while now. They already pulled their ace out of the sleeve a few years ago with the 939 series of processors, but now intel have learnt from their mistakes and appear to have the market sewn up for what could be a few years to say the least judging from their roadmaps.

Oh and if you feel the need to retort to this post with the immortal words "Intel fanboi", please take a look at my system configuration over on the left

WTF

The chipset has nothing to do with memory now, since the controller is on the CPU just like AMDs. ONLY DDR3 will be supported on Nehalems because of this.

[shaithis]

WTF

The chipset has nothing to do with memory now, since the controller is on the CPU just like AMDs. ONLY DDR3 will be supported on Nehalems because of this.

Its a shame they didn't do what AMD have done and makes the on-die memory controller support DDR2 and DDR3. The uptake will be a lot more gradual because of it.

[digit]

http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=480

well, well, so nehalem sucks at games

Not quite ....

i7 will destroy all in games, this is surefire.

Using the aforementioned article actually it seems this won't be the case:

Nehalem is about improving HPC, Database, and virtualization performance, and much less about gaming performance. Maybe this will change once games get some heavy physics threads, but not right away.

Why? Most Games are about fast caches and super integer performance. After all, most of the Floating point action is already happening on the GPU. The Core 2 CPUs were a huge step forward in integer performance (not the least because of memory disambiguation) compared to the CPUs of that time (P4 and K8). Nehalem is only a small step forward in integer performance, and the gains due to slightly increased integer performance are mostly negated by the new cache system. In a previous post I told you that most games really like the huge L2 of the Core family. With Nehalem they are getting a 32KB L1 with a 4 cycle latency, next a very small (compared to the older Intel CPUs) 256KB L2 cache with 12 cycle latency, and after that a pretty slow 40 cycle 8MB L3. When running on Penryn, they used to get a 3 cycle L1 and a 14 cycle 6144KB L2. The Penryn L2 is 24 times larger than on Nehalem!

So therefore I can see how tom came to his conclusion, but not sure I'd call the gaming performance terrible, just not a big increase or anything to do a song and dance over. Could it be relating to the above another reason why the hexus article had unexpected results?

[KingORoff]

Well I'm not really buying an i7 purely for games - its mainly for work, which is 3D modelling and animation. With 8 threads and loads of memory bandwidth I see Bloomsfeild/Nehalem/Core i7 being a favourite for 3D amateurs and professionals.

That being said lets hope AMD's Deneb delivers a good if not comparible performance.

[morda8]

i hope the deneb will atleast be good or even better be able to compeat with the nehalem

[kalniel]

i hope the deneb will atleast be good or even better be able to compeat with the nehalem

It won't

[maxwilson]

Does anyone have a rough idea of the pricing of nehalem upon release?

[shaithis]

Does anyone have a rough idea of the pricing of nehalem upon release?

Almost bordering on insignificant compared to the cost of an x58 motherboard and DDR3 RAM

[=TcQi=]

Hats off to Intel, they seem to have made significant progress since the Netburst saga. Maybe games like Alan Wake will expose Nehalem's true gaming potential?

Edit: scrap that idea - I had thought Alan Wake was going to implement real-time weather systems alongside other innovations that make use of multiple cores, however I've just read that its coming out on the Xbox