Intel Nehalem Preview/Benches - Slaughters Core2

[FatRakoon]

Oh god, you are not getting what I am saying at all.

Those celerons no longer cut it just like the PCs before those couldno longer cut it and just like the PCs that are replacing those, will some day no longer cut it, but thats not at all what I am saying...

 

[Vertigo]

Well i have just ordered my Q9450 and won't be upgrading for another two years and while some will say thats too long it does at least gaurantee i feel i have got something for the money. Beuing honest most people that buy Nehalem when it comes out will be doing so just to have the latest thing as most software and games doesn't use the power most users have now let alone buying more powerful kit.

Oh the hypocrisy!

You've just bought a quad, which is still hardly utilised outside of specialist applications such as rendering or encoding, then criticise those who'll dare to buy Nehalem for just wanting to "have the latest thing".

When Nehalem arrives, how will those buying it be any different than you are buying a Q9450 now!?

 

[easyrider]

Oh the hypocrisy!

You've just bought a quad, which is still hardly utilised outside of specialist applications such as rendering or encoding, then criticise those who'll dare to buy Nehalem for just wanting to "have the latest thing".

When Nehalem arrives, how will those buying it be any different than you are buying a Q9450 now!?

Agreed.

 

[easyrider]

Oh god, you are not getting what I am saying at all.

Those celerons no longer cut it just like the PCs before those couldno longer cut it and just like the PCs that are replacing those, will some day no longer cut it, but thats not at all what I am saying...

What are you saying then?

 

[FatRakoon]

What are you saying then?

Ok, how can I explain it clearer then...

Lets go back a few years...

Lets get perhaps a 500MHZ P3 or K6... Let us install Windows 98 and Office 97 perhaps? - These are about the O/S and Office Package at the time are they not?

We did our tasks on those PCs and lets say for example, we had to write a small database in access , link it in excel write a covering essay on it and then write a powerpoint presentation about it all complete with the figgures we have obtained from excel and pie charts etc etc etc... You know what I mean.

Now, come back to todays PCs, can todays PCs do that any faster? It can if there is several gigs of data for sure, but not one of us truly needs to have control of that much data for home use... not one, unless we run our own business and have dozens of people working under us, and even then, the price hike of a new PC might not truly be justified.

Hang on Im losing track again now...

What I am saying is that back then if the example PC ran at 500MHZ and the tasks given to it were entered at the speed the user could enter the information. The PC did the job near instantaniously.
Using todays PC, the user cannot enter the information any quicker and the PC even though its processing power is not just 3000Mhz but many times that and yet the tasks that the PC is asked of are not really all that much quicker.

Am I any clearer?

 

[-iceblade^]

FatRakoon, the fact is, PCs are getting more powerful, and software gets heavier - look at the install sizes and lengths of say Microsoft Office 2007, etc... I tried installing it on a 4 gig HDD, 128 mb ram copy of XP with some AMD processor, and i couldn't cos of a lack of free space that occured when i needed to also install XP SP2...

I'm pretty sure Vista with it's unneeded services and all of that will boot up faster than a windows 95 pc...

for example, look at Vista's minimuim requirements. And compare them to the minimum requirements of Windows 98... What does it say to you that i can apparently run windows 98 on my phone (HTC wizard, go to XDA_developers.com for proof, it's somewhere there) but i can't run windows vista?

As new software comes out, it becomes heavier and heavier and needs more powerful to run. Game install sizes can explain this easily. Not to mention, as Easy says, we are getting more PC savvy and starting to multitask more.

 

[FatRakoon]

Thats only told us what we all know, and it has only validated my point.

 

[RizlaKing]

I bought the quad for one thing and one thing only and that is too save time on video encoding but as far as anything else goes then it is not needed but a saving of half an hour per encode is quite an improvement. If i had bought it for the latest game then i would be a complete hypocrite. I have stuck with an Amd 4400X2 so your saying i won't get any practical improvement over that with this quad ??. I said in all of the above comments that some people have a need for more power and until recently i didn't believe i would gain that much switching to core2 if it was a "have the latest thing" how long since the release of core2 have i waited. My comment about buying it for the sake of having the latest thing i should have elaborated on a little more as we are all manipulated by the comapnys to keep spending more and more money for gains that are either great or in some cases not so great. Why your taking things so personally easyrider i have no idea but each to their own i guess.

 

[Corasik]

Nehalem could be a good choice for many people. The first benchies are indicating a real clock for clock gain over core 2's. Going from a 2.66Ghz dual, to a 2.66ghz quad only gives performance gain with software that bothers to use the additional cores, but going from a 2.66 Conroe to a 2.66 Nehalem gives real benifits to all software a much more "meaningfull" upgrade for the average joe than getting a Penryn.

PS. I dont mean to say Penryn's bad. Its a good quad core processor. But most software just isnt ready for quads yet.

Of course if all a computer is used for is Wordprocessing, and Web browsing, then clearly a Nehalem is overkill. For video encoding the Nehalem will toast the Penyrn unless all the leaked benchies are faked.

 

[easyrider]

I bought the quad for one thing and one thing only and that is too save time on video encoding but as far as anything else goes then it is not needed but a saving of half an hour per encode is quite an improvement. .

And shaving 1hr of an encoding time with Nahelem is also reason for people to upgrade.


Your post's contradict each other.

 

[kppanic]

If your going to disagree with me please get your facts right

The Alpha started life at 66Mhz not 500Mhz - at 66Mhz it was still immensley more powerful than Pentium/Pentium Pro (floating point on the Alpha was at least 3x Pentium) - even today i think it would beat Intel's design at similar clock speed - but we'll never now and no Alpha was not six times the price of a pentium

ARM core is in a different league to Intel's Atom, for example at idle ARM designs can power down to a couple mW whereas Intel Atom is around 100mW !!

I really don't know...

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is_n2123_v42/ai_18449855

I do agree that a DEC Alpha was 2x - 3x floating point perf compared to a Pentium II... but then..... imagine trying to... run any kind of software that was available back then on this RISC... as a matter of fact... today... ewwww...

Yeah, I'd expect a $30,000 Alpha system to outperform a $3,000 Intel system, yup.

 

[NickK]

As new software comes out, it becomes heavier and heavier and needs more powerful to run. Game install sizes can explain this easily. Not to mention, as Easy says, we are getting more PC savvy and starting to multitask more.

Yet as time moves on I can still write and draw with a pencil or fountain pen..

There's a large percentage of bloat from bad software design/implementation. The sheer breadth of genericism of operating systems also adds to the bloat, closely followed by additional requirements such as DRM..

True some is driven by the size of media too - photos are larger, require more addressable memory.. that adds to the code size.

To my mind that it really - there's not much information people create domestically themselves (ie documents, spreadsheets etc)..

I think that a lot of software houses are now at the point where they're being forced to look at efficiency rather than just additional features. The 'internet development time' bubble has popped and people have realised that they need to take a breather and make things work for less power.

 

[FatRakoon]

it's a real shame we're stuck with Wintel... imagine a world running Power5 4.7Ghz based Linux PC's - my world anyway, thats what we run at work (ok servers not pc's) this stuff absolutely slaughters what Intel can bring to the table! its a shame they don't put them in PC's anymore

In a slight detour from this. My main computer is an Atari Falcon. Its original design is a 16Mhz 68030 CPU and 68882FPU with up to 14MB RAM. It is now living its dream of having a 90MHZ 68060 CPU ( Been higher too ). It started life in 640x480x256 colours and now its displaying a useable 1280x1024x65K on a Radeon 7500 ( Yes, the resolution can be the same as a PC can do and at the same speed too ) and that humble near-20 year old Atari can do almost anything that my PCs can do.

What it cannot do, is in truth, only video work, and 3D Gaming and annoyingly raytracing / rendering, but for everythign else, the Atari is quite possibly either the same speed or in some cases quicker.

 

[Corasik]

More and more and more processing power doesnt really equate to greater performance in the long run. It means cheaper to develop software with more and more features added, with shorter development times, as programmers are no longer required to worry about code optimization (or at least not to the level that is required on a slower less powerfull computer).

The atari for instance isnt running Windows XP/Vista.

The DEC & Power PC arguments are pretty weak too. If the performance of the PowerPC was all important, then why arnt we all using Apple Macs. At the end of the day the majority of people were mostly interested in faster computers, but with 100% guaranteed compatibility with their old software, without the need for a poor performance software emulator making their shiny new computer slower than their old one.

You can still boot a brand new Intel PC (not Intel not Wintel), with PC-DOS or MS-DOS. Even early versions will boot up just fine, because all AMD/Intel processors can run in "real mode" which is a perfect hardware emulation of the humble i8086 processor. (although it wont recognise our massive hard drives naturally).

Even intel suffer from this, the itaniam is a very powerfull processor, but it lacks software compatibility, and its smaller market limits its development.

SpecINT at 1.5Ghz Itanium2 is a match for a 1.9Ghz Power5 or a 1.89Ghz UltraSPARC V processor and faster than an Athlon64 3200.
And the Itanium 2 does even better at SpecFP. But nobody wants an Itanium for their PC because its not X86 compatible.

Of course like Power, Alpha and Sparc, Itanium is a true RISC design, and it shows when it comes to raw performance. But it does take more programming to actually make full use of that potential power, so many software houses will simply stick with tried and trusted X86 code. It may not be the fastest, but its fairly consistant, and faily easy to get moderatly optimized code to work "fast enough".

 

[FatRakoon]

The atari for instance isnt running Windows XP/Vista.

No, and thankfully I would not want it to, but then under MiNT I can run most Linux software... Alongside my Atari software!

The problem with many is that they assume the humble Atari has a desktop like this

http://www.fatrakoon.co.uk/fatrakoon/atari/screens/tosdesktop.png

When in fact these days many of us run Linux software alongside our native Atari software like this

http://www.fatrakoon.co.uk/fatrakoon/atari/screens/swe_2.jpg

2 OpenGL Demos running inside a window, and Frozen Bubble ( From the Mandrake 9.2 RPM ) playing on the system too... and still everything giving over 60FPS on a 20 year old 16Mhz machine???

And the Amiga is no different either... The people who have stuck with the Amiga and its clones can also do many things that PCs do and every bit as quick as the PCs do it.

You dont need the latest and greatest.

 

[Corasik]

Im not saying that Power hasnt scaled. Simply that clock for clock Itanium is very good indeed. But considering the vast majority of intel sales are X86 the development of Itanium is much slower than it could have been. Thats consumer pressure. Intel were all in for pushing Itanium as their 64bit architecture. Cant blame Intel for supplying the chips we demand, rather than what they wanted us to have. (As AMD would have crushed intel in the desktop markets, if the EM64T extensions had not been added to intels X86 processors (personal opinion)).

Your so right about interpreted code, so much visual basic, and even in gaming, the frankly abysmal performance of games like Civilisation IV, which uses a Python interpretter for its AI for .... sake.

Didnt know that Itanium 2 was VLIW, as I seemed to remember that it was co developed by intel and HP and used PA-Risc as its starting point.

But then again, and a micro-op level X86 processors have been risc processors with a hardware based cisc decoder converting the cisc instructions into risc micro-ops. (Since Pentium, perhaps even 80486. I dont remember when they switched to a micro-op core)

At least they are improving though, look at Nehalem, which is reputed to be offering us 30% more in flight micro-ops at any given time.

Considering the limitations demanded by the industry (x86 compatibility), I dont think that AMD or Intel have done anything to be ashamed of really.

 

[Corasik]

I didnt mean why arnt apply using PowerPC rather than Intel. The answer to that I believe was IBM didnt have a lower power offering for use in laptops, and intels "Core" was able to give better overall performance than the lower clocked lower powered Power chips for the laptops. And switching the desktops to Core at the same time, just simplified software development for them I suspect.

What I acually meant was why we the consumers didnt all reject PC and use Power based Apples. Infact I do recall for a short time there were even "PowerPC" based "PC's" but they had limited software support. (of course it never helped that apple did, and still do... have a tendancy to overprice their hardware). Even the MacMini was fairly expensive once you added all the "Optional" extras like a keyboard

But the vast majorty of end users demand an IBM PC combatible (Ok im oldschool and dont like the phrase Wintel), and the likes of Intel and AMD will follow the money trail and supply what we demand. (Although with Prescott it did feel like intel was pushing what ever junk they wanted to us).