Intel is sampling Conroe Extreme Edition

[flashdjdan]

Just read This on the inquirer and thought it was quite interesting...

Since Intel is sending out Conroe XEs at 3.33GHz to friends and people buried in NDAs until you can't find any trace of their existence, around the end of this month, we think things are in great shape

Sounds like the Conroe XE is going to be rather Phat.... 3.33Ghz!

 

[NathanE]

3.3

I thought it would take them another year to get it up to those speeds

It's amazing that this chip is sampling already. It's clear Intel wants to ship this chip ASAP. If they play their cards right I really don't think a July launch is out of the question.

 

[marc2003]

is conroe dual core?

 

[NathanE]

Yup

More information on the P8 architecture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Next_Generation_Microarchitecture

 

[flashdjdan]

3.3

I thought it would take them another year to get it up to those speeds

It's amazing that this chip is sampling already. It's clear Intel wants to ship this chip ASAP. If they play their cards right I really don't think a July launch is out of the question.

I thought so too - didn't expect intel to go crazy and release such a monster to start with. Guess they want to make up some lost ground after ditching netburst!

 

[ajgoodfellow]

I'm interested to see what AMD will come up with as a rival to this

It's good to see that Intel is finally pulling its weight after some rather sub standard CPUs of late in all honesty

 

[NathanE]

So far AMD has got some plastic (Socket AM2), DDR2 and virtualization to fend off Intel this year.

 

[Duke]

Should be interesting, hopefully some early benchmarks will hit the net so we get an idea of how good this will be.

 

[ajgoodfellow]

So far AMD has got some plastic (Socket AM2), DDR2 and virtualization to fend off Intel this year.

I'm not at all sure that'll be enough. The FX60 is only at 2.6Ghz at the moment - I'd imagine they'd have to get it up to similar clock speeds (3.3Ghz) to start rivalling the new Intel chip

All speculation of course until we see the benchmarks

 

[NathanE]

Of course.

But I think it's becoming more and more likely that all those years Intel has spent playing with stupidly high MHz may be about to pay off.

Conroe has 14 pipelines IIRC. A64 has 12, right? So judging from past leaks that Conroe has roughly 30% higher IPC than a Yonah (and Yonah itself has a slightly higher IPC than A64 - 5% sound fair?)... add to that a 3.3GHz clock speed. I am willing to bet this sampling chip is quite a darn bit faster than a FX60.

I think you're right. AMD would have to get up to at least the same clock speed to match this chip.

I think the only fly in the ointment with Conroe is the crappy FSB. Although they've pumped it up to 1333MHz so it should be enough to keep both cores happy. Plus both cores can talk to each other without hitting the FSB so that further reduces load in comparison to what we have from Intel today. Far from ideal though. It annoys me that Intel, with all the man power they've got, can't get CSI (their HTT clone) ready for this year.

All speculation though

 

[Sumanji]

Do we reckon AMD can get near those speeds if they get their 65nm shrink right?

Suman

P.S. I'd quite like one of those XE ES chips

 

[mattio1980]

well with the a2 socket coming soon and the 5000+ im sure by the time this is at full retail amd will have a prob 5600+ at about the 3.2 3.4 ghz anyway

 

[NathanE]

AMD won't get those type of clock speeds from its architecture on 90nm. No chance.

 

[Sumanji]

Nathan read post #11

 

[mrthingyx]

Nathan read post #11

I'm sure he did. What he stated was his opinion of AMD's 90nm architecture. Although, I'm sure AMD may be able to get 3/3.2GHz out of their 90nm cores based on some of the overclocking results on this website (i.e. getting their ultra-perfect cores and putting them out at stock voltage) but the power consumption would be epic.

Will they do it on their 65nm chips? Anything is possible but I'm sure the power draw will still be quite impressive regardless of the die shrink. As a matter of fact, if DDR2 does for AMD what it did for Intel, I'm sure they will have to get to 3GHz+ to get their chips to perform on par with this mythical new beast from Intel.

 

[NathanE]

Nathan read post #11

I was replying specifically to mattio1980

He said he reckons AMD will have a >3.0GHz part by the time Conroe ships (which is July-September.) Personally I think there'd have to be a miracle for that to happen

Sure people have OC'd to those speeds I guess. But it doesn't mean AMD will be releasing a retail chip of that spec. At least, not in that time frame and with 90nm.

I may be totally wrong... this is all speculation afterall. So we will have to wait and see

 

[subxero]

Can't wait to get my hands on one of these, shame the only thing to do now is wait
Glad they are getting on track, seems to be a bit one sided at the moment

One thing I read is that they are keeping hyper threading, I loved my P4 with HT, everything felt much 'smoother' and although I know there are two cores, having two extra virtual cores can only make things better

 

[Boogle]

3.33Ghz, thats beastly fast. 2.6Ghz is AMD's fastest, and it runs hot and sucks helluva lot of power - although its 90nm vs. Conroe's 65nm.

However the A64 architecture is mature... Conroe is the first in a brand new line of CPUs. I would say AMD should be quite worried at this point. 3.33Ghz, thats like a 3.5-3.6Ghz Athlon 64.

 

[NathanE]

I think the Conroe Extreme Editions have 8MB L2 cache too. Regular Conroe's "only" have 4MB

 

[hogfather]

8mb?!

How much are these cpus costing intel to make? Cache is expensive, and that's a huge amount of the stuff. Are these cpus going to stupidly priced? (I mean the standard 4mb ones, obviously the EE one is very pricey by definition).