Intel E2140 spotted (by me)

[Azza]

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/127249

[chuckskull]

£50 wow. Thats a bargain. Especially if it overclocks even remotely like the rest of the C2D family. Also the final nail in the coffin for AMD's current line up.

[Azza]

£50 wow. Thats a bargain. Especially if it overclocks even remotely like the rest of the C2D family. Also the final nail in the coffin for AMD's current line up.

Hopefully it is in stock some time this month becuase then Ill have a nice little chip to go under my new watercooling, get overclocking it and it will keep me happy until Q3.

[Azza]

£50 wow. Thats a bargain. Especially if it overclocks even remotely like the rest of the C2D family. Also the final nail in the coffin for AMD's current line up.

Oh its not £50!

Its £40 really with that £10 off over £30, if it released before the dead line.

[chuckskull]

If it comes out at £30 i'll buy one just to see how well it clocks.

[dave87]

and there was me about to build a rig around an x2 3800, or 5600 depending on funds. bah, humbug. more choices

[Madafwo]

Some sites say it gives the E4300 a run for its money, for £50 I will buy one for my second rig

Benchies

Should clock well, good for 3.2Ghz with DDR2 800 without pushing the memory.

[tigerboyce]

surely going from 1.6 to 3.2 would have issues? thats like double

[aidanjt]

Not really, the silicon design is mostly the same, just with differing cache. But the 1Mb cache will be a limitation compared to say the E6600 in large complex algorithms used by modern games, video transcoding and the like.

[kalniel]

Not really, the silicon design is mostly the same, just with differing cache. But the 1Mb cache will be a limitation compared to say the E6600 in large complex algorithms used by modern games, video transcoding and the like.

No it won't. My 3800 only has 512k cache - game performance is near identical to equivalent 1mb cache processors, and far better than 2-4mb pentiums.

[aidanjt]

There are no 4Mb Pentiums. Core 2 Duos however do, and outperform X2's. Might have something to do with less cache misses dont'cha think?

[kalniel]

Don't think so in the slightest to be honest Core 2 Duo's advantage is mostly explained by 4 IPC to X2's 3. Better mem-prefetch is in addition to that, but the way that's improved actually means you could get away with less cache - it's the way it's fetched, not the volume of cache, that's made the difference.

Sure, more cache provides some small benefits in some circumstances, but in the volumes we're talking about it's not going to be limiting, given such tasks fit perfectly fine with 512k cache of AMDs chips.

[aidanjt]

I agree, and you could get away with less cache in x86 compiled apps (which most people tend to use these days), however x86_64 compilers will make use of more optimisations because they are aware that x86_64 CPUs have heaps more registers and cache.

It's hard to say with absolute certainty of course until someone writes performance benchmarks that are designed to test cache. But I am fairly confidant that Intel gets away with it's lower memory bandwidth thanks partially due to it's larger cache on top of better modern pre-fetching hardware and software.

[kalniel]

The point about registers is interesting. There aren't all that many new anyway, but some of the earlier results comparing AMD X2 to Core 2 Duo showed that there was a bigger boost in performance for the X2 going from 32 to 64bit than doing the same with the Core 2 Duo.

What was actually happening had nothing to do with cache size - even 64bit intructions fit fine within 512k cache, but the length of them actually means you can't fit so many in the 16bit instruction fetch/predecode of core 2 duo, meaning it dropped back to 3 IPC.

So infact the cache size has no special importance for 64 bit processing, especially not L2 cache, but infact it's the width of the instruction fetch/predecode that's important, and in this regard the E2140 should be identical to the E6600.

[Azza]

death_metal posted this in the XS thread that I made.

http://fanboyreview.blogspot.com/200...clock-for.html


100% overclock. Looks good. Stock cooling and everything.

[shaithis]

Engineering samples are 99.99% of the time a lot better then the final product.

Take that with a pinch of salt.