The Nehalem Preview: Intel Does It Again
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 5, 2008 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
First keep in mind that these performance numbers are early, and they were run on a partly crippled, very early platform. With that preface, the fact that Nehalem is still able to post these 20 - 50% performance gains says only one thing about Intel's tick-tock cadence: they did it.
We've been told to expect a 20 - 30% overall advantage over Penryn and it looks like Intel is on track to delivering just that in Q4. At 2.66GHz, Nehalem is already faster than the fastest 3.2GHz Penryns on the market today. At 3.2GHz, I'd feel comfortable calling it baby Skulltrail in all but the most heavily threaded benchmarks. This thing is fast and this is on a very early platform, keep in mind that Nehalem doesn't launch until Q4 of this year.
One valid concern is with regards to performance in applications that don't scale well beyond two or four cores, what will Nehalem offer us then? Our DivX test doesn't scale well beyond four cores and even then Nehalem's performance was in the 20 - 30% faster range that we've been expecting. The other thing to keep in mind is that none of these tests are really stressing Nehalem's integrated memory controller. When AMD made the move to an IMC, we saw an instant 20% performance boost in most applications. I suspect that the applications that don't benefit from Hyper Threading, will at least benefit from the IMC. We've only scratched the surface of Nehalem here, looking at the benefits of Hyper Threading and its lower latency unaligned cache accesses. We've hinted at what's to come with the extremely well balanced and low latency memory hierarchy of Intel's new baby. Once this thing gets closer to launch, we should be able to fill in the rest of the puzzle.
Over six years ago I had dinner with Intel's Pat Gelsinger (back when he was Intel's CTO), and I asked him the same question I always do: "what are you excited about?" Back then his response was "threading", Intel was about to launch Hyper Threading and Pat was convinced that it was absolutely necessary for the future of microprocessors.
It was at the same dinner that Pat mentioned Intel may do a chip with an integrated memory controller much like AMD, but that an IMC wouldn't solve the problem of idle execution units - only indirectly mitigate it. With Nehalem, Intel managed to combine both - and it only took 6 years to pull it off.
Pat also brought up another very good point at that dinner. He turned to me and said that you can only integrate a memory controller once, what do you do next to improve performance? Intel has managed to keep increasing performance, but what I really want to see is what happens at the next tock. Intel proved its ability with Conroe and with Nehalem it shows that the tick-tock model can work, but more than anything looking at Nehalem today makes me excited at what Sandy Bridge will bring.
The fact that we're able to see these sorts of performance improvements despite being faced with a dormant AMD says a lot. In many ways Intel is doing more to improve performance today than when AMD was on top during the Pentium 4 days.
AMD never really caught up to the performance of Conroe, through some aggressive pricing we got competition in the low end but it could never touch the upper echelon of Core 2 performance. With Penryn, Intel widened the gap. And now with Nehalem it's going to be even tougher to envision a competitive high-end AMD CPU at the end of this year. 2009 should hold a new architecture for AMD, which is the only thing that could possibly come close to achieving competition here. It's months before Nehalem's launch and there's already no equal in sight, it will take far more than Phenom to make this thing sweat.
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SiliconDoc - Monday, July 28, 2008 - link
Crysis- etc. :Pete, you can be very happy knowing it will do folding like mad, and you can fantasize that you've cured cancer while you spend your money for some tax subsidized already to the hilt University program, because you're such a good and loving person.
( I know YOU didn't mean anything like that - see sarcasm! )
In the mean time, the OLD HT single core chips will do just fine cranking most games, and dual core or core2duo or 2180 or some other then $40 chip will be a few percentage pts. shy.
My gawd, they've got our number.
I bet they "unlock it !!!!! " OMG ! for like 2 grand if you're cooooool you can get one!
Crank the Planet - Thursday, June 5, 2008 - link
I know it may be exciting but the article sounds fan-boyish. For most of the marks it shows what intel is claiming 20-30% boost. He gets one mark to go 50% and now it's 20-50% boost?? He compares in another mark AMD 21 and nehalem 14 and says it's almost 50% faster!!! and then compares penryn 18 and nehalem 14 and says it's 28%. I think the AMD mark was more like 35%.As I've said before everybody knows AMD was going to hurt themselves in the short run by buying ATI. If they didn't buy ATI I think things would be very different. Now that the last year of payments is being made for buying ATI AMD will be able to get back into the game.
Intel has only now integrated the memory controller. Everybody knew as soon as they did they would see a nice bump. They haven't had any significant innovations in a long time. AMD is in the same position they were before K8. Just give them some time to finish absorbing ATI, then watch out- fusion is just around the corner :)
hs635 - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link
Fuck off retardmasouth - Friday, June 6, 2008 - link
What kind of idiot fan-boy drivel is this?"He gets one mark to go 50% and now it's 20-50% boost??"
Ummm, yes?
1, 2, 3, 4, 8
What is the range of those numbers? 1-8, right?
Does the majority of them being being in the 1-5 range somehow negate the fact that the actual range is 1-8?
THINK PEOPLE!
michael2k - Thursday, June 5, 2008 - link
You're the one that sounds like a fanboy.What makes you think Intel's CPU-GPU integration won't be as fabulous as their IMC or quad-core components? Intel doesn't need "significant innovations" (nor does AMD), they just need higher performance, lower power, and lower cost, which is exactly what they have.
Innovations only exist to serve those aspects.
Justin Case - Sunday, June 8, 2008 - link
Wrong.AMD64 (the instruction set) isn't about "more performance". Virtualization isn't about "more performance". Hardware no-execute flags aren't about "more performance". SATA's hot-plug ability isn't about "more performance".
Your statement shows the kind of lack of vision that brought us the Pentium 4.
I for one am far more excited about technology that allows me to do something new or different than "technology" that simply lets me do the same stuff faster. 99% of CPU cycles in the planet go unused anyway.
zsdersw - Thursday, June 5, 2008 - link
Given the overall tone of your reply, the criticism of the article as "fan-boyish" is, really, the pot calling the kettle black.Visual - Thursday, June 5, 2008 - link
so you agree as well? yeah, me too.they are both black. they are both fanboys :)
zsdersw - Thursday, June 5, 2008 - link
I've said nothing about agreeing with anything. What I have said, though, is that a fanboy calling someone else a fanboy is perhaps not indicative of any objective truth.Jynx980 - Saturday, June 7, 2008 - link
It will be a great day when I can read any CPU discussion without the word fanboy in it.The close up of the chip has waaaaaay to much thermal compound on it.
Is it just me or is the first pic of the Intel roadmap rather... phallic?