Nehalem Webcast Discussion

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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All Slides and Video have been place on one page now for easy access.

The biggest points to take away from the presentation are:
  • Nehalem is an entire family of products that span from Server to Mobile.
  • Fast by design with quicker connects between cores and greatly improved memory bandwidth.
  • Hyperthreading greatly improves efficiency.
  • Power Management has been GREATLY redefined from previous chips both through new techniques as well as physical transistors being changed.

A couple of you have sent mails about the new "Turbo Mode” as well. It is not like that old button we had. With Nehalem's Turbo Mode, if the processor is in a power saving state on 1, 2, or 3 of the cores, it can actually ramp up the speed of the core(s) that are needed for the application that is being given priority. So given a situation where running ALL cores at speed X creates an unreasonable TDP, running speed X on 1, 2, or even 3 cores may not be an issue.

On Production Times

The company's first desktop PC chips branded Intel® Core™ i7 processors and initial energy-efficient, high-performance server products (codenamed "Nehalem-EP") will be first to production. Intel is also planning to manufacture a second server derivative designed for the expandable sever market ("Nehalem-EX"), and desktop ("Havendale" and "Lynnfield") and mobile ("Auburndale" and "Clarksfield") client versions in the second half of 2009.
Click to expand...
 
Power Gate looks interesting. Depending on how much it scales up the active cores we might eliminate the "faster dual is better than quad" problem on less threaded apps.
 
flogge said:
Power Gate looks interesting. Depending on how much it scales up the active cores we might eliminate the "faster dual is better than quad" problem on less threaded apps.
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Intel discusses being able to shut off not only transistors, but the leakage that has become the biggest waste of power to the cores. They can completely shut off cores and the leakage associated with them dynamically.

Good talk about it in the video coming up if I caught it all, which I think I did get the most important parts.
 
This looks awesome, even if it is just a slideshow :) Can't wait to see the [H] real-world benchmarks, especially how much difference Power Gate makes to lower threaded apps.
 
"Turbo Mode" is very similar to what appeared in the Santa Rosa chipset: Intel Dynamic Acceleration, also called DAT.
 
I'm getting excited about this. Time to start saving for a new build.:cool:
 
Wow. That is some serious technology right there. Very impressive.
 
Thanks for preparing those. I have been looking around for IDF coverage of the architecture... and there it was, in a youtube video of a screencast of an intel video slideshow :)
 
I thought Intel was going to release some desktop CPUs right away? I still have a socket 939 X2 and was planning on upgrading this fall but from what the slides say the desktop (or at least ones around $300 USD) will are about a year away.
 
Everything looks very impressive there. Makes my good ol C2D looks like an ancient CPU

I'm really interested in seeing how the Turbo Mode works out in performance benchmarking.

Certainly looks like it'll be the most efficient multi-core CPU to date by a significant margin to older architecture.
 
Intels commitment to power saving is pretty staggering, but did anyone else feel Nehalem's QPI looked fairly disappointing. Hopefully there is more to come, and it the slides only showed really simple setups. The only relevant slide was a dual slot config, showing two 25.6 GB/s connections on each CPU to an shared IO-hub and a second CPU.
 
I have doubts on how shutting down unused cores is going to work out, considering that one of the main task of a modern OS is loading every core it can lay hands on evenly.
 
n3g471v3 d3c1b3l said:
This could be awesome. Interesting; to say the least.

Still waiting for Kyle to get his hands on one
Click to expand...

We are doing our best to get a part(s) that is representative of what will be close to a consumer product.
 
MH Knights said:
I thought Intel was going to release some desktop CPUs right away? I still have a socket 939 X2 and was planning on upgrading this fall but from what the slides say the desktop (or at least ones around $300 USD) will are about a year away.
Click to expand...

This leaked slide still shows "Nehalem/Bloomfield" processors to be released this year on the desktop. We will see what makes it to market.

bloomfield_1.png


If the Flagship 3.2GHz Bloomfield sells for the expect $999, We can suggest the 2.93 will not be far behind with the 2.66GHz variant around the $450 street level...but given the part looks like it will have no true competition, there seems to be very little reason to scale clock right now rather than EOL parts that were running hot anyway. Just my 2 cents, you may need change.
 
Sorry if I'm asking a dumb question but I haven't been following Nehalem too closely. Are these new chips that are coming for the desktop quad core only or are there going to be dual core parts too? Thanks.
 
Pixelated said:
Sorry if I'm asking a dumb question but I haven't been following Nehalem too closely. Are these new chips that are coming for the desktop quad core only or are there going to be dual core parts too? Thanks.
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If you watch the video Rajesh is very careful to describe Nehalem as a scalable technology rather than a processor alone. He explains that products based on Nehalem will be marketed from mobile to server given its modular nature in that Intel can pick and choose which components are important to the particular market they are to be sold into. So I would guess that it is very possible we will see 2-core Nehalem processors down the road.
 
Does anyone have a audio snippet that actually tells how to pronounce "Nehalem?" I know that sounds stupid, but I've been getting people in my gaming clan to ask me about it and I think I am butchering the name everytime I say it LOL.
 
With the kind of resources Intel has, why couldn't they get someone easier to understand?
 
BillParrish said:
Intel: "Na-hay-lum"
Oregon: "na-HAY-lem"
Various Hardware Enthusiast Messageboard Users: "Neh-ha-lem," "Nee-Ha-Lem," "Napalm"
AMD: "Oh $!@#"

Stolen from http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=28&threadid=2172637

(it is the name of a tribe of Native American Indians and a river in Oregon. That whole river basin was used by Intel for processor code names. I use na HAYlem if anyone cares.)
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Thanks, I apologize to Oregon and that tribe for butchering the name LOL. I'm not sure if AMD had enough time to go "Oh $!@#" before they passed out.
 
ir0nw0lf said:
Does anyone have a audio snippet that actually tells how to pronounce "Nehalem?" I know that sounds stupid, but I've been getting people in my gaming clan to ask me about it and I think I am butchering the name everytime I say it LOL.
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Just go with "i7" and you will be safe.
 
They seem to be rallying for power efficiency now. I wonder how the static CMOS logic will impact performance over using the domino datapath. The 8T SRAM is also interesting.

Removing the Vcc to the unused cores is interesting. This requires a switch on core that will dissipate some energy when it is in the On position to run that core. I wonder how much this extra dissipation this will add.
 
Hypernova said:
I have doubts on how shutting down unused cores is going to work out, considering that one of the main task of a modern OS is loading every core it can lay hands on evenly.
Click to expand...

No they do not! The schedulers in both Windows and other OS'es have changed to max cores 1st, then move on to others, to keep them in low power as long as possible.

Its a trade off, always... There is a latency to power/speed transition. So you have to keep some history on thread execution so you know what to do.

But there are always trade offs and if you must you can code your application to put threads on which core (or pseudo core) to best serve your code.
-R
 
Everything I have read previously states that gamers will not see any benefit from switching to Nahalem until it comes out with a higher clock speed.. Has anyone heard anything differently? After listening to the presentation it seems that the higher memory bandwidth would give a performance boost to many games, and turbo mode may help as well. :confused:
 
Exciting stuff! I've got a while to wait as I'm planning on building for the 32nm "tick", when the motherboards and DDR3 have had plenty of time to mature. Still, this is some awesome technology to look forward to. Now we just need to see some performance and overclocking reviews!

 
Well it looks like all AMD has to do to compete is to resurrect the 939 opterons with a die shrink.:D Other then the name change and adding Integrated Memory Controller the presentation could be describing one of their older chips. The presentation just seemed to be so familiar.:D
This might be the chip that puts me over the edge for a system upgrade.:eek:
 
to me it's all bla bla bla till I see benchmarks.

This technology seems cool and all but so has every cpu ever made, and lets be honest none of us have any idea really what this means.
 
All of this sounds great to me. But not in the way Intel would hope.
My P965 motherboard (P5B Deluxe wifi/ap) is phenomenal, and I cannot be happier with it. My Q6700 oc'd to 3.3ghz runs cool and quiet, and fast enough that I do not think there are any games out there (other than Supreme COmmander) that would be bottlenecked by it.

I just do not see enough MOAR SPEED talk to warrant replacing or upgrading from my current rig. Sure it may help my electric bill, but that's under $70 a month in the summer anyway...
 
rflcptr said:
"Turbo Mode" is very similar to what appeared in the Santa Rosa chipset: Intel Dynamic Acceleration, also called DAT.
Click to expand...
DAT only applies if you boot sans the second (or etc) cores. Turbo mode is dynamic (aka, realtime)
 
Very interesting to see that it's using all CMOS logic. I didn't think that it was possible to get such high clock speeds with CMOS. Everything must be pipelined with extremely short stages.
 
Anyone want to fathom a guess why they chose the name "Turbo mode"? From what I've seen, its a way of intelligently deciding whom to slow down; it doesnt actually improve performance anywhere (v. running all cpu's full speed all the time).
 
myren said:
Anyone want to fathom a guess why they chose the name "Turbo mode"? From what I've seen, its a way of intelligently deciding whom to slow down; it doesnt actually improve performance anywhere (v. running all cpu's full speed all the time).
Click to expand...

From what I've heard, it will actually Overclock automatically as Thermal Headroom Allows in addition to the underclocking functions.
 
turbo mode gives 1-2 speed bins (133-266Mhz) of addition CPU speed when cores get shutoff, from what Im reading.

The interesting thing to me is we're hearing a lot about bloomfield but almost nothing regarding gainestown's clock speeds or release dates, and nehalem is primarily a server CPU arch.
 
I haven't seen any mention of the octa core chips... I really wanted one of those on launch day

But I did see some mention of a 6 core xeon bloomfield cpu, anyone got any info on that chip?
 
so this loomfield is still a year away then. my brand spanking new bloomfield will last me quit a while then hehe
 
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