Conroe in july

[Nutbusta]

Thanks guys

Gashman, I hope you didn't take my comment at the start of my first post to be offensive, it wasn't meant to be

I must say that I've not paid much attention to most of this for the last couple of years, Conroe is the first thing that's really sparked my interest in a while (I'm actually still currently running a 2.4c northwood as my main rig), and that's a good thing in my mind.

I think I must be pretty sad at points, I read this sort of thing for fun

That may be so, be we are reading your comments with absolute intrigue.

Are you sad? I think not...

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing...

To be well informed???

 

[Gashman]

yeah, you have what i see as a rare gift, lol the ability to comprehend and understand just how processors work, and don't sweat it, your comment was far from offensive, processors just do my head in how complicated they are, lol. hell im useless when it comes to most **** about computers, advanced weaponary, gauss guns, lasers, particle weapons, now thats the stuff i read a lot about

 

[Scoobie Dave]

Yup... I'll still be waiting for Kentsfield (Intel Quad core gaming chip) or whatever AMD roll out to combat it before upgrading again though!

Will be interesting to see how the Conroe performs, although I wont be ditching my Opty just yet (I love my Opty to much on such low volts! ). Like Cyanide said, I would not upgrade til there was something like quad core out.

 

[Gashman]

i will be looking into new computer or upgrade late this year/early next without a doubt, with direct X10 and R600 coming around. i would definately buy a conroe, but im gonna have to wait and see the performance of the production models, just incase these early specimens are something special. more interested in the new xeon chips to be honest, especially if they can still be used in dual processor systems, in which case its like having dual conroes, which has got to be something interesting. another consideration is AMDs offering at the time, AM2 most people are kicking down not giving it a second though, and understandibly it looks a bit grim for the boys over at AMD at the moment. but hey AM2 could be altered before release and could turn out to be a real contender. lastly i would want to see a comparison between conroe and a highly overclocked presler processor, i have heard of preslers running as high as 4.25Ghz without any issues at all, completely stable which is a good run especially considering how bad netburst turned out to be, these overclocked ones are really powerful processors, you'd be stupid not to notice, but anyways, role on conroe, role on AM2, role on direct X10

 

[Kamakazie!]

i have just been wondering...
does Conroe support 64bit (IT64 or whatever it is)?
if not, when we see Vista out with supposed true 64bit support, wont this push up the performance of the K8 to somewhere around that of the Conroe in 64bit supported apps?
i've seen comments of 15-25% improvement in performance with K8 and 64bit apps floating around.

 

[AMDPower]

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2748

So is it game over for AMD? Well, if you read the previous pages, it is pretty clear that there are some obvious improvements that should happen in AMD's next generation. However, there is no reason at all to assume that the current K8 architecture is at the end of its life. One obvious upgrade possibility is to enhance the SSE/SIMD power by increasing the wideness of each unit or by simply implementing more of them in the out of order FP pipeline.

To sustain the extra (SIMD) FP power, AMD should definitely improve the bandwidth of the two caches further. The K7 had a pretty slow L2-cache, and the K8 doubled the amount of bandwidth that the L2 could deliver for example. It's not unreasonable to think a 256-bit wide cache bus could be added to a near-future AMD design.

Finally, there is also a lot of headroom for increasing integer performance. The fact that Loads can hardly be reordered has been a known weak point since the early K7 days. In fact, we know that engineers at AMD were well aware of it then, and it is surprising that AMD didn't really fix this in the K8 architecture. Allowing a much more flexible reordering of Loads - even without memory disambiguation - would give a very healthy boost to IPC (5% and more). It is one of the main reasons why the P-M can beat the Athlon 64 clock-for-clock in certain applications.

Those are just a few examples that are well known. It is very likely that there are numerous other possible improvements that could take the K8 architecture much further.

 

[Dolph]

i have just been wondering...
does Conroe support 64bit (IT64 or whatever it is)?
if not, when we see Vista out with supposed true 64bit support, wont this push up the performance of the K8 to somewhere around that of the Conroe in 64bit supported apps?
i've seen comments of 15-25% improvement in performance with K8 and 64bit apps floating around.

Conroe supports the x86-64 instructions just the same as the A64 (and indeed several of the existing Intel Pentium 4 chips). I-64 is something entirely different relating to the Intel Itanium chip and is incompatible with x86 code at all.

 

[killer_uk]

What is the chance of the Conroe being available to buy July/August time?