More Intel News
04.17.07 - 06:59pm
Anyone here ever read The Worth of Women edited by Virginia Cox? 200 pages of boredom, 15th century feminism writers just aren’t my thing. Love women but jeez.. this is similar to reading a two day roundtable discussion about women’s rights, marriage, and abusive husbands. Anywho, there has been a stream of important stuff in the processor market but sadly it all relates to Intel. I swear AMD is working very hard at making their life a living hell, 6 months till K10s launch and not a single leaked benchmark, processor, or even a dead processor to oodle at. So time to rub some more salt into the already gaping wounds that Core 2 has caused.
AMD launched the 4×4 platform in a desperate attempt to get 4 processor cores onto an enthusiast motherboard to counter Kentsfield. Conroe was already crushing the Athlon X2s but Kentsfield was building little walls of X2s and then crushing them with a sledgehammer. 4×4 consumed too much power, was barely effective, and the clockspeed limitations of K8 just didn’t cut it. Intel then released the V8 platform which was a slightly reworked 2 socket Cloverton motherboard, effectively giving Intel 8 processor cores on a single motherboard. I don’t think V8 ever really made it past the press releases but it was really just Intel flexing it’s muscles at AMD. Skulltrail is the successor to the V8 platform and it has the potential to go beyond the limitations that were associated with V8. Information is scarce but 4x PCIe slots, dual sockets, and enthusiast chips all sound like a mound of delicious. I’m guessing quad-Crossfire will be in the works, hopefully we’ll see standard LGA775 chips used with standard unbuffered DDR2 rather than FB-DIMMs used in Intel server-grade motherboards. FB-DIMMs are great but the latencies involved and speed limitations just don’t cut it for an enthusiast platform, if I’m going invest a few thousand dollars into processors, memory, and a motherboard then I’m going to want to push this stuff to the breaking point. FB-DIMMs just don’t permit this with them struggling to hit DDR2-800 with decent timings, with standard DDR2 I’d be able to run DDR2-1000 easily with DDR2-1200 possible for benching and potentially 24/7 operation. I look forward to Skulltrail, too bad the name sucks.
A few weeks back I posted about Intel’s 80 core beast/toy and how it hit a teraflop in computing power. I don’t remember what clockspeed was used to hit this record amount of computing but Intel has destroyed another barrier with the same chip. This time around 2 teraflops of sustained computing was accomplished with 80 cores operating at 6.2GHz. I don’t think we will ever see such a processor in a desktop anytime soon but it sure would be nice to have that thing crunching x86 code for me. Keep an eye out for something similar popping up from Intel in the GPU department, they have hinted as entering the high-performance market and this might be a start.
Change is always good and in the hardware industry it is always happening. Just the other day Core 2 was hitting the market and by tomorrow (err Q4) it’s replacement will be here. Penryn benchmarks from Intel have started popping up from Intel and while they should be taken with a grain of salt, they do give us some numbers. Penryn is based off of Conroe with a few architecture tweaks, 6MB of cache per processor pair (compared to 4MB for Conroe) and an FSB/Clockspeed boost. SSE4 will also be introduced with Penryn and according to Intel’s benchmarks it’ll provide a huge boost in performance for applications optimized to use SSE4. Take these results with a grain bushel of salt but they look promising if they are even slightly close. Notice though, Penryn is at 3.33GHz compared to 2.93 for Conroe.
The price drops are here! Officially there are another 5 days till the drops occur but vendors are already selling chips for the Q2 prices. The Q6600 has been seen in some locations to sell for $600 or so, in a few days it’ll drop down to $515. Just a little while longer and then we’ll be rolling in cheap chips. Never has performance been this cheap, ever. Now back to reading about old women.
Relevant Links
AnandTech IDF Report
Yahoo IDF Report
XS Forum About 2 Teraflops
Will Intel be changing sockets anytime soon?
That’s up in the air right now, I’d like to say current boards could supply the proper voltages as that should be the only interface difference but Intel always seems to require a motherboard update with a new processor. I’m sure we’ll know what, if any, changes need to be made by summer. I’m hoping it’ll be a socket drop-in chip, I’d rather not have to upgrade my entire lineup. On another note though, The new P35 and X35(?) chipsets will launch with Penryn along with DDR3 support, so it might be worth it to upgrade.
Would be nice if they could just keep building upon current sockets but in another life time maybe. Looking forward to what crazy hardware will be coming out within the year.
Price drops are starting to show up. $339 for a E6700. Do you think motherboards that people are most likely to get like an eVGA model will go up in price? If so I better get one now.
Prices should continue to drop on processors and motherboards alike. Current motherboard designs won’t go up in price as the market is saturated with them, if anything they’ll continue to drop.
I feel so bad having neglected this blog, this semester is almost over though.
Lowest so far for E6700 is $337. Think it will go any lower?
Now that I think of it, is it that big of a difference between 6600 and 6700? I know I could OC it to 6700 speeds but does the 6700 have a better chip or something like that?