Intel/AMD current platform unimpressive

[gongo]

Those with quad cores CPU, do hold off your upgrades till 2011...imho.

Just FYI guys, i found out that Intel 32nm 'tick' - Westmare, is all kind of lame! There is only one performance upgrade, Gulftown 6C, LGA 1366/EE only, probably cost a grand....it doesnt even seem to have much microarchitecture improvement ala Penyrn. 2C + IGP MCM Clarksdale make up the rest of Intel Nehalem 'tick'...2 bloody cores? are we back to 2005?? You have to wait till 2011 for 32nm Sandy Bridge to get any kind of perf upgrades..and thats a 'tock', a new microarch. meaning a whole new platform upgrade..even so it comes at 4C + IGP....

AMD is no better, their current K10.5 Shanghai is at its microarch. limits.....they may have some multi-C server chips codenamed Istanbul and Magny Cours..that do not work with AM3 upgraders... their roadmap shows no consumer version. AMD only involvment with consumers until 2011, is to refresh with their Leo platform next year...consisting of an IGP upgrade...

whats with the IGP love and what happened to throwing more cores at the problem? x86 CPU progression seem to be slowing down and Nehalem is to be Intel shortest-lived platform, mid-life perf. upgraders are screwed. How depressing...

MOD EDIT: Title trolling is still trolling. . .

 

[2senile]

AMD Thuban.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/its_official_amd_confirms_hexacore_thuban_cpu

Eat that Gulftown: AMD officials have not only confirmed that it will release a hexa-core processor next year – but it will be backwards compatible with existing AM3 and AM2+ motherboards.

Although heavily reported as a rumor that an AMD six-core was coming to consumer desktops, the company had not confirmed rumors. That is until Monday, when AMD officials told Maximum PC that the chip was a done deal.

EDIT: I can't spell Thuban.

 

[Scali]

Intel's ticks generally aren't very interesting from a performance point-of-view, as they focus only on the new manufacturing process, not on the microarchitecture.
Penryn wasn't spectacularly faster than Conroe either. I stuck with my Conroe for the same reason.

The 32 nm processors will probably draw considerably less power though, and as a result they may overclock better (just as Penryn was an overclocker's dream).

As for two cores... yes I think that may prove to be quite interesting... namely, they are cores built on the new architecture, and include HyperThreading. These dualcores with HT might outperform all other triplecores and quadcores on the market (except ofcourse Nehalem-variations), while using less power. I think they will be very interesting for office and gaming machines. Lots of performance at a decent price, and with low power.

As for Thuban... I'm afraid its 6 cores might not even be enough to catch Intel's 4 cores + HT. Another part to compete on price/performance only.

 

[gongo]

Conroe came out in the middle of 2006, E6600 is the most popular chip AFAIK. Today we can get Q9550 as a good perf upgrade. Between these 3 years, there were also numerous Core 2 cpu and Penryn provides 20% upgrade over Conroe. This level of longevity is not what i am seeing with Nehalem. I expect...4C/6C/8C 32nm Westmare by next year...affordable perf upgrades....nope, not on Intel roadmap..they rather go backwards with 2C + IGP....how unusual....nothing new from Intel till 2011....is it because the lack of competition from AMD?

 

[Scali]

Conroe came out in the middle of 2006, E6600 is the most popular chip AFAIK. Today we can get Q9550 as a good perf upgrade.

Well, Kentsfield came out in 2006 aswell if I'm not mistaken. Only a few months after the dualcores anyway.
If you had an early Q6600 or better, there's not much of an upgrade in the Q9550.

In fact, I have an E6600 myself, which I bought in 2006, and I didn't even go for a Q9550 or Q9650. It's faster, but not all that spectacular, and the E6600 still works well enough.
I'd rather just save my money now and go for a whole Core i5 or i7 system in a short while, and get more of a performance boost out of my investment.

 

[Davros]

@scali dont even think you should get an i5/7 unless you transcode and you get one with a high clockspeed

 

[2senile]

My previous post mentioning Thuban was merely to reply to ...

..... they may have some multi-C server chips codenamed Istanbul and Magny Cours..that do not work with AM3 upgraders.

I have absolutely no intention of buying one.

@scali dont even think you should get an i5/7 unless you transcode and you get one with a high clockspeed

In fact, I have an E6600 myself, which I bought in 2006, and I didn't even go for a Q9550 or Q9650. It's faster, but not all that spectacular, and the E6600 still works well enough.
I'd rather just save my money now and go for a whole Core i5 or i7 system in a short while, and get more of a performance boost out of my investment.

One of the things that made me change my mind about the i5 750 was the built in PCi Express controller. PCI Express v3 spec' is due 2011. There is also USB 3 & Sata III due.
I've decided to get a (very) cost effective Quad system to hold me over until I see how things develop.
Frankly, if Scali is just talking about a home PC I think he should get the Q9650, if he needs a Quad, to hold him over as well.

As for Thuban... I'm afraid its 6 cores might not even be enough to catch Intel's 4 cores + HT. Another part to compete on price/performance only.

Damn, if they really can't beat an Intel 4 core with HT & AMD have to price it accordingly I might buy one after all!

 

[gongo]

Well, Kentsfield came out in 2006 aswell if I'm not mistaken. Only a few months after the dualcores anyway.
If you had an early Q6600 or better, there's not much of an upgrade in the Q9550.

In fact, I have an E6600 myself, which I bought in 2006, and I didn't even go for a Q9550 or Q9650. It's faster, but not all that spectacular, and the E6600 still works well enough.
I'd rather just save my money now and go for a whole Core i5 or i7 system in a short while, and get more of a performance boost out of my investment.

If you board support it, i think a Q9550 will give you quite a perf boost today...multicore encoding if you into those ...or pc games where i seen 4C having almost twice the fps of 2C!

 

[Scali]

@scali dont even think you should get an i5/7 unless you transcode and you get one with a high clockspeed

Yea, I'll have to see how it goes.
At this point my main concern is my aging GeForce 8800GTS. I'm going to upgrade my graphics card to something DirectX 11 soon, and then I'll have to see if the E6600 still has what it takes, of if I get too CPU-limited.

 

[Scali]

If you board support it, i think a Q9550 will give you quite a perf boost today...multicore encoding if you into those ...or pc games where i seen 4C having almost twice the fps of 2C!

Yea, my board supports everything up to Q9650. I was about to order a Q9650 when the prices dropped shortly before the launch of the Core i7... Then the i7 920 was launched, and it was cheaper than the Q9650 while being considerably faster...
I just have this thing about spending more on a CPU that performs less. Now that the P55 chipsets are out, the motherboard costs have come down considerably, so it's less of a premium to pay when upgrading the whole platform.

Now I'm just going to ride out my E6600 longer. I'll bother upgrading when I feel the need. Currently the need just isn't there.

 

[Grall]

I've got a Core i7 920 rig (running right now at ~3.5GHz, no voltage increase), and it's got an incredible amount of sheer grunt when it comes to processing. It just refuses to slow down.

On my older Core2 Quad box it was enough to run a distributed computing client in the background at lowest priority to screw with the performance of foreground tasks - I suspect that's because of the shared bus between processor cores. The i7 however doesn't react like that at all. It's just rockin' and rollin', and giving excellent performance seemingly regardless of how much stuff I dump on it. Right now it runs 6 folding at home clients (4 CPU, 2 GPU), a million background tasks including winamp, messenger client, skype, virus killer, mobile phone sync client, and a half-dozen systray utilities. If I were to start up a game on top of all that, it would still give 100fps easily.

Then there's also the much increased power efficiency compared to the old Core2 chips, etc...

So I don't really agree the current platforms aren't impressive.

 

[mczak]

Just FYI guys, i found out that Intel 32nm 'tick' - Westmare, is all kind of lame! There is only one performance upgrade, Gulftown 6C, LGA 1366/EE only, probably cost a grand....it doesnt even seem to have much microarchitecture improvement ala Penyrn. 2C + IGP MCM Clarksdale make up the rest of Intel Nehalem 'tick'...2 bloody cores? are we back to 2005?? You have to wait till 2011 for 32nm Sandy Bridge to get any kind of perf upgrades..and thats a 'tock', a new microarch. meaning a whole new platform upgrade..even so it comes at 4C + IGP....

There's no quad westmere on the roadmap, but there was some speculation that intel might introduce one (but later). Dunno though if that's really true... I think this might be a manufacturing problem, since intel converts only some fabs (and not all at the same time neither) to 32nm, only doing 2C (which should be seriously tiny) and 6C parts (very low volume compared to 2C / 4C parts hence chips/wafer doesn't matter much) on 32nm initially gives them the ability to still sell 45nm 4C parts.
Remember the current 45nm C2D chips, it took intel quite a long time to convert the whole lineup (those quads especially were quite a bit more expensive than the good old q6600 for a long time probably to not generate more demand them).
Penryn didn't have much architecture improvements (got SSE 4.1 and a couple of tweaks), so Westmere is very similar in that regard (got AES-NI plus some tweaks).