Nehalem Part 3: The Cache Debate, LGA-1156 and the 32nm Future
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 19, 2008 8:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
What’s Next: A Preview of Westmere and Sandy Bridge
Conroe was designed to address a deficiency in the desktop and mobile markets and Nehalem to tidy up the workstation/server space, so what’s next? Westmere and Sandy Bridge are the 32nm followons and Intel has already hinted at the major changes coming in that generation: power consumption and floating point performance.
Westmere will be little more than a die shrink to 32nm, we may get some more cache but I wouldn’t expect significant performance improvements other than from clock speeds. Westmere will take Nehalem’s power efficiency and combine it with a pure power reduction to be quite a threat.
Sandy Bridge will add support for AVX:
By the end of 2009 we should have support for both OpenCL and DirectX 11 by GPUs from all vendors, including Intel with Larrabee. These APIs in combination with the highly parallel nature of the GPUs that will be able to run them, should allow for some incredible speedups on highly data parallel applications. While most of these applications are currently limited to the scientific field, we’ll start to see them appear in the consumer space (we’re starting to already with video transcoding and Photoshop).
Not all applications are data parallel enough to run well on a GPU, but they may require more than what present day CPUs can offer in terms of floating point throughput. Intel’s AVX instructions are designed to bridge the gap between the CPU and the GPU, offering an alternative to developers who could stand the gain performance from running some of their code on a GPU but would rather keep the work on the CPU itself to make programming simpler. Developers will move their code off to the GPU if the performance is worthwhile, but if you can get similar performance gains without recoding, that’s the preferred avenue. Make sense?
Eventually I’m guessing we’ll see the Larrabee and Nehalem lines of the x86 ISA merge, AVX is merely the first step in that direction.
Final Words
Another day, another chapter on Nehalem comes to an end. I’m back from 10 days in Texas and California, visiting the usual suspects and there’s much more to write about. We’re finally getting wind of X58 motherboards at well below $300, have much more to talk about with overclocking and there’s still that issue of multi-tasking performance.
Nehalem may have launched, but our work is far from done this year. Stay tuned.
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blyndy - Thursday, November 20, 2008 - link
Yeah I think that Intel has failed to be consistant between Penryn/Nehalem, or at least bit off more than it could chew...I mean, tick-tock is fine and all, but Penryn has really held up as an ideal architecture, as something to grow off, not as something that should be immediately succeeded by 'the biggest architectural redesigns since the Pentium 1'. After all Core/2 IS the fruit of the P3/Pentium M. Nehalem on the other hand smells unpleasantly P4-like, due in large part to hyperthreading.
HT's something that you either see as 'reduces single thread performance, consumes transistors adds arch bloat and adds heat' or as 'OMG MOAR CPUs IN TASK MANAGERZOMG!!!'. And it's funny because at the end of the day it still runs into the same question as the core-count issue --'are these additional execution units adequately utilisable by a DIVERSE set of applications (i.e. NOT JUST vid encode...)?'. Because we know threading is HARD.
OK I'll come clean-I just what to know when are they going to dust off the wolfdale masks and shrink 'em onto 32nm? :D
esgreat - Thursday, November 20, 2008 - link
Well tell me where does the mainstream user want for in performance other THAN video encoding and image processing?Games? Games have shown to be much more limited to GPU side. Most CPU enhancements can't really make huge impacts on games nowadays. This is unless they try to utilize more cores, which is what they have done: provide the hardware so that software could use it. The software is fast right now because things like SSE were introduced years ago (although they weren't beneficial then).
As for video encoding, cutting down encoding time from 30 minutes to 10 minutes IS A BIG DEAL. And this is one application where many users (non gamers) would really use.
Enabling of multicore now means fantastic applications in the future.
cocoviper - Thursday, November 20, 2008 - link
Pretty good read.I'm hoping we can get some more detailed info about Intel's 32nm process in the next couple months- especially what they're planning to do with Atom and 32nm.
CEO Ballmer - Wednesday, November 19, 2008 - link
AMD is still in the game?I had written them off!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com">http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Derbalized - Thursday, November 20, 2008 - link
AMD is still in the game.AMD is designing Intels next chip.
Probaly with an integrated memory controller also.
Derbalized - Thursday, November 20, 2008 - link
I probaly should have spelled probably right. LOLpiesquared - Wednesday, November 19, 2008 - link
Nope, don't give a shit. But do want to know what keeps happening to all these AMD and ATI reviews you keep promising over and over.chizow - Thursday, November 20, 2008 - link
LOL. There was a brilliant post on DT that basically claims AMD has now shifted their focus to producing Roadmaps. A bit harsh, but honestly pretty accurate.Wait til AMD actually releases a new product before getting all emo about a lack of AMD reviews.
whatthehey - Thursday, November 20, 2008 - link
You want an AMD review? Here's one for you: AMD's current products suck for the vast majority of users. The only place they're worthwhile is in the 8S server space; otherwise, they cost too much and deliver too little. Their dual-core parts were awesome when all they had to do was beat Pentium D, but Intel has progressed substantially since then and all AMD has got is a bloated, buggy, slow POS known as Phenom. At least the name is right: it's a phenomenal failure.Or maybe you mean the various ATI reviews posted during the past couple months?
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3441">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3441
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3437">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3437
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3420">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3420
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3415">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3415
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3405">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3405
Oh, but that's not good enough for the AMD fanboyz! Everyone needs to baby AMD and talk about how awesome they are, when AMD is busily circling the drain and getting ready to spin off their fabrication to a separate company. ATI is doing pretty well, and AMD made some good hardware in the past; unfortunately, it doesn't look like they were able to continue to compete.
And honestly, it's no big surprise. Even Intel is having a tough time competing with their own products. Nehalem is a nice design, but as I've told others we are at the point where 95% of people don't need anything more than a three year old Athlon 64 X2. Quad-core only matters to a small number of desktop users at best, and here Intel and AMD are both looking to hex-core and octal-core in the not too distant future. That's great if you do video work or 3D rendering, but pretty much useless for everyone else.
I lust after the new Nehalem upgrades as much as the next guy, but invariably I come back to the realization that my pathetic Q6600 @ 3.00GHz (yes, I backed off from 3.6GHz when I realized that the extra voltage and stress on the system wasn't actually improving performance in any of the applications I use on a regular basis) was more than fast enough for any current program. About the only thing I need right now is an upgrade in the video card department, and I don't need Nehalem for that!
Griswold - Thursday, November 20, 2008 - link
After reading"AMD's current products suck for the *vast majority* of users"
I knew that your entire posting would have less substance than a steaming pile of cow dung. Why is it that the most clueless people always type up the biggest shitstorm of incoherent garbage..?