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IDF has started and the first benchmarks of Nehalem are going to start popping up. It is without a doubt an impressive architecture with a much better platform to run on, but this CPU is not about giving you better frames per second in your favorite game than the Penryn family. Let me make that more clear: even when the GPU is not the bottleneck, it is likely that most games will not be significantly faster than on Penryn. We, the people behind it.anandtech.com will probably have the most fun with it, more than your favorite review crew at Anandtech.com . And no, I have not seen any tests before I type this. Nehalem is about improving HPC, Database, and virtualization performance, and much less about gaming performance. Maybe this will change once games get some heavy physics threads, but not right away.

Why? Most Games are about fast caches and super integer performance. After all, most of the Floating point action is already happening on the GPU. The Core 2 CPUs were a huge step forward in integer performance (not the least because of memory disambiguation) compared to the CPUs of that time (P4 and K8). Nehalem is only a small step forward in integer performance, and the gains due to slightly increased integer performance are mostly negated by the new cache system. In a previous post I told you that most games really like the huge L2 of the Core family. With Nehalem they are getting a 32KB L1 with a 4 cycle latency, next a very small (compared to the older Intel CPUs) 256KB L2 cache with 12 cycle latency, and after that a pretty slow 40 cycle 8MB L3. When running on Penryn, they used to get a 3 cycle L1 and a 14 cycle 6144KB L2. The Penryn L2 is 24 times larger than on Nehalem!

So is Intel bringing out a quad-core for the IT and HPC crowd? Well, in a way I think the company needs to. While quad-core processors aren’t a fringe product any more, the problem is that we’re living in an era where dual-core is good enough and most software doesn’t deliver when it comes to scaling on a quad arrangement. At the moment no one buys a quad-core to make Microsoft Word run faster. Even gaming, an area that could well benefit from a couple of extra cores, hasn’t been revolutionized by quad-core CPUs.

My take on this is that over the next few years we’re going to see more and more software be optimized for 4 and more cores. Games, I think, are going to need to be built from the ground up to do this (or at least the underlying engines are). This is going to take time, and before game studios put in the effort they’re going to want to see more quad core parts in the hands of gamers of all levels (casual gamers as well as the hardcore enthusiasts).

However, in the short term at any rate, if i7 does end up disappointing gamers this may well leave a gap in the market that AMD could take advantage of. Rather than concentrating on just the CPU, AMD is doing a pretty good job of marketing platforms and here AMD could gain an edge on Intel, especially if it can squeeze more frames per second out of games through streamlining the whole platform.

Intel has released a draft specification revision 0.9 for the Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI). The revision, released Wednesday, comes in support of USB 3.0 architecture, also known as SuperSpeed USB. The draft specification provides a standard method for USB 3.0 host controllers to communicate with the USB 3.0 software stack.

One important factor in adopting SuperSpeed USB products is interoperability between multiple devices from different manufacturers. The xHCI draft specification revision 0.9 aims to make interoperability easier to implement, while also making it easier for developers to create software support for the market.

AMD, which along with Nvidia had complained in the past that Intel was not releasing a revision for the USB 3.0 specification, supported the move in a statement that was included in Intel’s news release. “Lifestyles filled with HD media and digital audio demand quick and universal data transfer. USB 3.0 is an answer to the future bandwidth need of the PC platform. AMD believes strongly in open industry standards, and therefore is supporting a common xHCI specification,” said Phil Eisler, AMD corporate vice president and general manager of the Chipset Business Unit.

Dell, Microsoft and NEC also supported the release.

“Dell welcomes the availability of Intel’s xHCI specification because it provides a single interface standard that will expedite the industry transition to next-generation USB 3.0,” said Rick Schuckle, Dell client architecture strategist. “This interface standard is important to ensure that our customers have interoperable USB 3.0 systems, devices and software drivers.”

“Microsoft has developed driver support for the USB industry standard since its inception and is committed to supporting the latest hardware technologies on the Windows platform,” said Chuck Chan, Microsoft general manager of Windows Core OS. “Microsoft intends to deliver Windows support for hardware that is compliant with the xHCI specification; this is a huge step forward in enabling the industry and our customers to easily connect SuperSpeed USB devices to their PCs for exciting new functionality and usages.”

Intel already has plans on making another revision specification — xHIC 0.95 — available in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Source:http://www.crn.com

VIA’s line of CPUs, developed by its Centaur subsidiary, have focused on delivering “enough” performance at very low power. The Centaur line is also very low cost, due to tiny die sizes relative to Intel and AMD CPUs.

Rather than take Intel head-on, however, VIA’s approach has been to develop a complete platform, based around its tiny motherboards, which are suitable for low power, embedded applications. Some of the more recent products, like the C7 line, have also garnered design wins in low cost “mini-note” laptops and ultra-mobile PCs.

However, the VIA CPUs were also derided as being low performance. “Good enough” was probably good enough for very light duty office applications, “nettop” PCs, and dedicated, embedded applications where power and form factor was critical.

Glenn Henry, Centaur’s chief architect, decided it was time to flex a little design muscle and develop a processor that offered performance good enough to compete in a more mainstream environment.

The VIA Nano architecture certainly has the right ingredients. The CPU is an out-of-order, superscalar design with a substantially beefed-up floating point unit. It is, however, still a very lean design, eschewing enhancements such as simultaneous multithreading. The Centaur team did build in the hooks to build multicore versions of the Nano, but the first CPUs off the fab lines will be single core processors.

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Alas, time and technology march on. Intel has adopted the low power religion, shipping iterations of the Silverthorne architecture. Now known as Atom, Intel’s new CPU seems like a throwback: An in-order design that sacrifices advanced architectural features in order to minimize power usage.However, Atom does have one ace up its sleeve: simultaneous multithreading (SMT), which Intel calls Hyper-Threading. That turns out to be pretty important, as we’ll shortly see.

Intel’s newest version of Turbo Memory is trying to do what Windows doesn’t do: transparently optimize Windows for flash memory storage.

At the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., Intel will be demonstrating its latest version of Turbo Memory based on flash memory to accelerate application performance in Windows.

Intel is offering a “dashboard” for Windows that allows the user to choose and control which applications or files are loaded into the Intel Turbo Memory cache (based on flash memory chips) for performance acceleration. Intel calls this “User pinning.”

Custom pinning profiles can be created to pin applications or files that match the user’s activity, according to Intel. Data intensive programs, gaming, digital media editing and productivity software are examples of applications that will see the most benefit, according to Intel.

Intel is trying to address a longstanding shortcoming of Windows: its inability to take full advantage of flash storage devices. “There are issues related to taking full advantage of the speed of a (flash drive),” said Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel, in an interview at the Flash Memory Summit.

Avi Cohen, managing partner at Avian Securities, said he believes this should be an innate part of the operating system. “The more interesting way is to have it built into the operating system,” said Cohen. “I don’t think it gains much traction because I don’t think users want to sit there and start selecting what goes where,” he said. “It was a valiant effort by Intel to accelerate the move toward solid state on PC,” Cohen added.

Winslow, however, said that Intel “has shipped million of units” of Turbo Memory and that he expects some notebook makers to integrate it into high-end lines.

Interestingly, Windows Vista does have a feature called “ReadyBoost” that can “use storage space on some removable media devices, such as USB flash drives, to speed up your computer,” according to Microsoft documentation. This documentation can also be found in “Windows Help and Support” as part of any copy of Vista.

“When you insert a compatible device, the AutoPlay dialog box will offer you the option to speed up your system using Windows ReadyBoost,” the Microsoft documentation says.

In related news, Intel announced a new Z-P230 PATA (Parallel ATA) SSD drive that comes in 4 gigabyte (GB) and 8GB capacities, with a 16GB version following in September. Pricing is $25 for the 4GB version for 1,000 unit quantities and $45 for 1,000 unit quantities for the 8GB version.

Larrabee will be a stand-alone chip, meaning it will be very different than the low-end–but widely used–integrated graphics that Intel now offers as part of the silicon that accompanies its processors. And Larrabee will be based on the universal Intel x86 architecture.

The first Larrabee product will be “targeted at the personal computer market,” according to Intel. This means the PC gaming market–putting Nvidia and AMD-ATI directly into Intel’s sights. Nvidia and AMD-ATI currently dominate the market for “discrete” or stand-alone graphics processing units.

As Intel sees it, Larrabee combines the best attributes of a central processing unit (CPU) with a graphics processor. “The thing we need is an architecture that combines the full programmability of the CPU with the kinds of parallelism and other special capabilities of graphics processors. And that architecture is Larrabee,” Larry Seiler, a senior principal engineer in Intel’s Visual Computing Group, said at a briefing on Larrabee in San Francisco last week.

“It is not a GPU as many have mistakenly described it, but it can do most graphics functions,” Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research, said in an article he posted Friday about Larrabee.

“It looks like a GPU and acts like a GPU but actually what it’s doing is introducing a large number of x86 cores into your PC,” said Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffer, alluding to the myriad ways Larrabee could be used beyond just graphics processing. In addition to the PC, high-performance computing and workstations are two potential markets that were also mentioned.

Intel describes it in a statement as “the industry’s first many-core x86 Intel architecture.” The chipmaker currently offers quad-core processors and will offer eight-core processors based on its Nehalem architecture, but Larrabee is expected to have dozens of cores and, later, possibly hundreds.

The number of cores in each Larrabee chip may vary, according to market segment. Intel showed a slide with core counts ranging from 8 to 48, claiming performance scales almost linearly as more cores are added: that is, 16 cores will offer twice the performance of eight cores.

The individual cores in Larrabee are derived from the Intel Pentium processor and “then we added 64-bit instructions and multi-threading,” Seiler said. Each core has 256 kilobytes of level-2 cache allowing the size of the cache to scale with the total number of cores, Seiler said.

Application programming interfaces (APIs) such as Microsoft’s DirectX and Apple’s Open CL can be tapped, Seiler said. “Larrabee does not require a special API. Larrabee will excel on standard graphics APIs,” he said. “So existing games will be able to run on Larrabee products.”

So, what is Larrabee’s market potential? Today, the graphics chip market is approaching 400 million units a year and has consolidated into a handful of suppliers. “And of that population, two suppliers, ATI and Nvidia, own 98 percent of the discrete GPU business.” according to Peddie.

“And the trend line indicates a flattening to decline in the business…However, Intel is no light-weight start up, and to enter the market today a company has to have a major infrastructure, deep IP (intellectual property), and marketing prowess–Intel has all that and more,” Peddie said.

Larrabee combines aspects of a CPU and GPU

(Credit: Intel)

Though more details will be provided at Siggraph 2008, some key Larrabee features:

Larrabee programming model: supports a variety of highly parallel applications, including those that use irregular data structures. This enables development of graphics APIs, rapid innovation of new graphics algorithms, and true general purpose computation on the graphics processor with established PC software development tools.

Software-based scheduling: Larrabee features task scheduling which is performed entirely with software, rather than in fixed function logic. Therefore rendering pipelines and other complex software systems can adjust their resource scheduling based each workload’s unique computing demand.

Execution threads: Larrabee architecture supports four execution threads per core with separate register sets per thread. This allows the use of a simple efficient in-order pipeline, but retains many of the latency-hiding benefits of more complex out-of-order pipelines when running highly parallel applications.

Ring network: Larrabee uses a 1024 bits-wide, bi-directional ring network (i.e., 512 bits in each direction) to allow agents to communicate with each other in low latency manner resulting in super fast communication between cores.

“A key characteristic of this vector processor is a property we call being vector complete…You can run 16 pixels in parallel, 16 vertices in parallel, or 16 more general program indications in parallel,” Seiler said.

Source:http://news.cnet.com

If you want the finest PC processor money can buy, look no further than Intel’s Core 2 Extreme QX9770. Or at least that would be true if you could actually buy it, which is still not possible as we write. Intel has been wowing the press for many months with samples. A full retail launch is long overdue.

Pricey but worth it?

Assuming it is available by the time you read these words, can it possibly be worth over £800? Thanks to a higher 3,2GHz core clockspeed and a uniquely quick 1,600MHz bus frequency, it’s clearly the fastest stock-clocked processor on the planet.