"One of the primary differences between these IC's and all others is that they use copper interconnects as opposed to aluminum, resulting in higher clock speeds at lower voltages. I wonder where we have heard that use of technology"
IIRC, copper interconnects was invented by IBM & probably used on their PowerPC cpus.
AMD also used Copper interconnects for the Socket A K7 Athlons (for those made in Dresden fab).
It was probably necessary to use copper interconnects for the K7 to scale >1ghz with reasonable voltages on the 0.18nm process tech then.
Seems like with the Nehalem/Lynnfield the memory controller is much more important than the memory itself.
Anyone buying the crippled Lynnfield with high quality memory is probably making a mistake. It would appear the i7 and poor memory would easily outperform it, possibly not vary much in cost, and is much more upgradeable.
Or maybe Intel has planned the Tylersberg platform to last long enough to support future CPUs. Tylersberg is server-oriented, so triple-channel on desktop is probably somewhat wasteful at least for now.
Well, first of all, the i7 in dual channel mode is faster than the Lynnfield, at least on the benchmarks we have seen. So, it's not really correct to assess the differences as just being that of dual channel to triple channel. The Lynnfield is either performing badly because it is pre-released silicon, or Intel crippled it intentionally.
If it's the latter, I'd very seriously doubt force the entire non-server segment to buy a brain-damaged processor. More likely, they'd used this sloth to feed the bottom-feeders, and by virtue of it's relatively poor performance, keep the i7 as the premium brand.
If you really think about it, if the i5 weren't intentionally crippled, the performance delta between the i5 and i7 would be so minor it would fade to insignificance. It's one thing to make a processor a niche product, and entirely another to make a whole platform a niche platform. Intel has created a lot of niche processors, like the Pentium EEs, but they work in normal platforms. I don't think they'd be willing to make the entire i7 platform perform just a bit better, and be really only for a very few extreme high end gamers. Platforms are too expensive for that.
So, they probably want the i7 platform market to be somewhat broader than the old EE processor market was. Maybe like the "good" Core 2 market is now; the ones with 3M per core. The problem is, if they only made the Lynnfield the same but with a few less PCIe channels, and dual-channel memory, there would be a much smaller market for the i7 than the current good Core 2s. There is a real and significant performance difference between the 3M Core 2s, and the 1.5M ones, and that keeps the high end chips selling. This was done correctly, the big chips are more expensive to make. The Lynnfield, if not properly sodomized by Intel, would be much closer to the performance of the i7, so they had to create an artificial performance boundary, like they often do with the Celeron.
It's still more than good enough for most people, and still represents, generally, a nice bump up from the Core 2, and easily outperforms the AMD chips, so it's still attractive from that perspective. However, the brain-damage it suffers from prevents it from being real competition for the i7 for people that really care about performance. It's big enough to be significant to a small, but not super small market, but at the same time, good enough for the rest of the folks.
So, I don't think i7 is going away on the desktop. I think the lobotomized Lynnfield is proof Intel is going to keep it, assuming Lynnfield doesn't perform much better when it's a golden. With the changes Intel made to the Lynnfield, it could perform very close to i7, and if they were getting rid of i7, it would have. Remember, the i7 in dual channel mode actually has better latency than in triple channel. So, the only thing that makes sense is they emasculated the Lynnfield so the i7 would remain. Or the Lynnfield will perform better when released.
Forgive me if this was stated in the article -- it's late here and I might have missed it. Are the memories in the chart all overclocked/underclocked OCZ DDR3 2133 chips? Or are the different clocks and timings taken from other tests at default timings and speeds?
For the type of pics that are being shown, png is about equal to jpeg, particularly if you want a clean, readable picture. Once you start talking about photos, things get a bit different.
So I suppose that I'd agree, PNG > Jpeg in quality, too, at least for these types of pictures.
I think he means for the charts. Using high quality JPEG for a 3 color chart is just terrible. The JPEG is 90 KB but a PNG could probably do it for under 10 KB for equivalent image quality.
Don't mind me though. Im a bit more effected being on dialup!
Its not nearly as bad as when I goto a video-compression forum (doom9) to learn all the tricks of codecs and whatnot and some guy makes a huge article about PSNR video quality settings going in real detail about it and has low color charts in horrible 30quality jpeg. Thats a major face-palm moment!
But I digress... looking forward to the next bit about the RAM!
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cnfzinfo - Monday, June 22, 2009 - link
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ghanz - Monday, June 15, 2009 - link
"One of the primary differences between these IC's and all others is that they use copper interconnects as opposed to aluminum, resulting in higher clock speeds at lower voltages. I wonder where we have heard that use of technology"IIRC, copper interconnects was invented by IBM & probably used on their PowerPC cpus.
AMD also used Copper interconnects for the Socket A K7 Athlons (for those made in Dresden fab).
It was probably necessary to use copper interconnects for the K7 to scale >1ghz with reasonable voltages on the 0.18nm process tech then.
TA152H - Thursday, June 11, 2009 - link
Seems like with the Nehalem/Lynnfield the memory controller is much more important than the memory itself.Anyone buying the crippled Lynnfield with high quality memory is probably making a mistake. It would appear the i7 and poor memory would easily outperform it, possibly not vary much in cost, and is much more upgradeable.
lopri - Sunday, June 14, 2009 - link
Or maybe Intel has planned the Tylersberg platform to last long enough to support future CPUs. Tylersberg is server-oriented, so triple-channel on desktop is probably somewhat wasteful at least for now.TA152H - Monday, June 15, 2009 - link
Well, first of all, the i7 in dual channel mode is faster than the Lynnfield, at least on the benchmarks we have seen. So, it's not really correct to assess the differences as just being that of dual channel to triple channel. The Lynnfield is either performing badly because it is pre-released silicon, or Intel crippled it intentionally.If it's the latter, I'd very seriously doubt force the entire non-server segment to buy a brain-damaged processor. More likely, they'd used this sloth to feed the bottom-feeders, and by virtue of it's relatively poor performance, keep the i7 as the premium brand.
If you really think about it, if the i5 weren't intentionally crippled, the performance delta between the i5 and i7 would be so minor it would fade to insignificance. It's one thing to make a processor a niche product, and entirely another to make a whole platform a niche platform. Intel has created a lot of niche processors, like the Pentium EEs, but they work in normal platforms. I don't think they'd be willing to make the entire i7 platform perform just a bit better, and be really only for a very few extreme high end gamers. Platforms are too expensive for that.
So, they probably want the i7 platform market to be somewhat broader than the old EE processor market was. Maybe like the "good" Core 2 market is now; the ones with 3M per core. The problem is, if they only made the Lynnfield the same but with a few less PCIe channels, and dual-channel memory, there would be a much smaller market for the i7 than the current good Core 2s. There is a real and significant performance difference between the 3M Core 2s, and the 1.5M ones, and that keeps the high end chips selling. This was done correctly, the big chips are more expensive to make. The Lynnfield, if not properly sodomized by Intel, would be much closer to the performance of the i7, so they had to create an artificial performance boundary, like they often do with the Celeron.
It's still more than good enough for most people, and still represents, generally, a nice bump up from the Core 2, and easily outperforms the AMD chips, so it's still attractive from that perspective. However, the brain-damage it suffers from prevents it from being real competition for the i7 for people that really care about performance. It's big enough to be significant to a small, but not super small market, but at the same time, good enough for the rest of the folks.
So, I don't think i7 is going away on the desktop. I think the lobotomized Lynnfield is proof Intel is going to keep it, assuming Lynnfield doesn't perform much better when it's a golden. With the changes Intel made to the Lynnfield, it could perform very close to i7, and if they were getting rid of i7, it would have. Remember, the i7 in dual channel mode actually has better latency than in triple channel. So, the only thing that makes sense is they emasculated the Lynnfield so the i7 would remain. Or the Lynnfield will perform better when released.
vol7ron - Wednesday, June 10, 2009 - link
Forgive me if this was stated in the article -- it's late here and I might have missed it. Are the memories in the chart all overclocked/underclocked OCZ DDR3 2133 chips? Or are the different clocks and timings taken from other tests at default timings and speeds?lez - Wednesday, June 10, 2009 - link
all of them are the same ocz ramsvol7ron - Wednesday, June 10, 2009 - link
That's what I thought. I just wanted to make sure this wasn't any substandard benchmark. I'm curious how these findings will be with Nehalem-Exdragunover - Thursday, June 11, 2009 - link
This kit isn't supposed to be used with servers - Nehalem EX is a server platform. This is for your gamin i7 desktop.aeternitas - Tuesday, June 9, 2009 - link
Thanks for the read. One thing though; png > jpeg please!erple2 - Wednesday, June 10, 2009 - link
For the type of pics that are being shown, png is about equal to jpeg, particularly if you want a clean, readable picture. Once you start talking about photos, things get a bit different.So I suppose that I'd agree, PNG > Jpeg in quality, too, at least for these types of pictures.
Ecmaster76 - Wednesday, June 10, 2009 - link
I think he means for the charts. Using high quality JPEG for a 3 color chart is just terrible. The JPEG is 90 KB but a PNG could probably do it for under 10 KB for equivalent image quality.aeternitas - Wednesday, June 10, 2009 - link
Don't mind me though. Im a bit more effected being on dialup!Its not nearly as bad as when I goto a video-compression forum (doom9) to learn all the tricks of codecs and whatnot and some guy makes a huge article about PSNR video quality settings going in real detail about it and has low color charts in horrible 30quality jpeg. Thats a major face-palm moment!
But I digress... looking forward to the next bit about the RAM!