Intel has announced the brand for its high-end line of Nehalem processors. Meet the Intel Core i7—quad-core CPUs, HyperThreading capability, and all in a nifty green and white can. Read More...
ASUS recently started sampling their Intel X58 Express based P6T Deluxe motherboard to partners and reviewers and it seems to have started a fire storm thanks to one little label on the board. With sites across the internet jumping on the band wagon in an attempt to get traffic by striking fear into enthusiasts we clear the air and tell things how it really is.
We have always advocated larger memory capacities over higher memory bandwidth to improve a PC's real-world performance. The effect of high memory bandwidth have always been overhyped by memory vendors, because it makes good business sense. This is the situation we now see with the introduction of the new Intel Core i7 processor. The Core i7 processor supports up to three DDR3 memory channels. Using DDR3-1333 memory, triple-channels would give you a memory bandwidth of 64 GB/s. That is a tremendous amount of memory bandwidth. But do we really, really need that kind of bandwidth?
Intel had a number of Nehalem systems up and running at IDF. Clock speeds are unknown but there are tons of threads being spawned.
The desktop platforms feature X58 motherboards with 6 DDR3 DIMM slots for Nehalem's 3 channels. Also on display was a Nehalem server with 144GB of DDR3 memory thanks to MetaRAM's 8GB DDR3 memory modules.
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The Intel Core i7 is a new line of desktop processors based on the new Nehalem microarchitecture, which evolved from the Core microarchitecture which powered the highly successful Intel Core 2 line of microprocessors. Like its predecessors, the new Core i7 processors is manufactured using Intel's 45 nm fabrication process with high-k (hafnium) dielectric and metal gate technology.
The result? A quad-core processor with 8 MB of L3 cache, integrated memory controller and QPI support, all with the same TDP of 130 W of a quad-core Core 2 processor. Amazing, isn't it?
It may have gone virtually unnoticed amongst the other announcements, but Intel has launched a new series of ultra small form factor CPUs based on its 45nm technology. Read More...
Two years ago we previewed Intel's Conroe core and to our surprise it blew away its closest competitor by 20 - 30% easily. Today, Intel is without competition at the high end but that hasn't stopped it from topping its performance by 20 - 50% with its brand new architecture. Intel's Nehalem processor is due out at the end of this year but we previewed its...
Intel gave us a few morsels of information on its future microprocessor plans, including details on the architectural enhancements to its first desktop CPU with an integrated memory controller: Nehalem.
In a bold move, Silicon Graphics has decided to see how much crap many cores they can shove in one box. The Molecule is 10,000 core rackmount machine designed to leverage low cost consumer CPUs like the Intel Atom. It emphasizes high memory bandwidth and throughput between CPUs. While this sort of space efficiency is interesting it’s certainly going to take some serious cooling to get designs like this off the ground.
