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 to Buy: Mainsteam vs. High End Nehalem
With two sockets targeted at desktops, how will the Core i7s that launched this month stack up to the mainstream Lynnfield and Havendale parts?
The absolute highest frequencies will only be available in LGA-1366 packages and I’d expect this is where we’d see 8-core/16-thread Nehalem parts first (if not exclusively). We’ve already shown that the three DDR3 channels don’t really help for most desktop applications, but this could change when Nehalem moves to 8 cores. Overclockability may also be better on LGA-1366 as the CPUs themselves will be higher bins.
Intel’s roadmaps show three pricepoints of Lynnfield processors in 2009. The top end Lynnfield part looks to be something that’s similar in price/frequency to the i7-940 (or whatever replaces it in Q3 2009). If I were to guess I’d say that’d be a $562 3GHz+ Lynnfield with performance somewhere in between an i7-940 and i7-965.
There will be a midrange Lynnfield, most likely priced/clocked similarly to the i7-920 or its eventual replacement. I’d guess a 2.66GHz - 2.93GHz CPU priced at around $284. Finally the low-end Lynnfield will be somewhere near $200 and probably weigh in at 2.4/2.53GHz. With Havendale not arriving until 2010, it’s currently absent from all Intel roadmaps.
Intel is going to support both platforms, LGA-1366 and LGA-1156 for the long term, the difference will be in the type of processors enabled. LGA-1366 may end up being more of a high end enthusiast play, Intel indicated that LGA-1366 CPUs would be binned higher so you can expect higher overclocks and obviously higher top end frequencies.
At the same time you should be able to get pretty far with LGA-1156, simple 500MHz overclocks shouldn’t be a problem but the 1GHz+ overclocks we’re used to on LGA-1366 and LGA-775 may not be as possible - at least not at 45nm.
Intel isn’t going to do anything to limit overclocking on LGA-1156 platforms, the same current limit bypass that’s on LGA-1366 boards will be optional on 1156 boards should the motherboard manufacturer choose to support it.
The breakdown seems pretty simple: if you’re the type of person who bought the Q6600/Q9300, then Lynnfield may be the Nehalem for you. If you spent a bit more on your CPU or are more of an enthusiast overclocker, the current Core i7 seems like the path Intel wants you to take.
The issue with Lynnfield is that it’s a good 6+ months away, and if Core i7 can speedup your workloads a lot today then you’ll be tempted to make the upgrade now. In notebooks we’ll see Lynnfield in the larger machines and Havendale in most of the platforms.
Without mainstream mobile Nehalem until Q1 2010, next year will be a very long wait for a serious mobile upgrade. But if you can wait it out, or buy something cheaper today, the time to upgrade will be in Q1 2010. I’m going to go ahead and revise my Apple notebook recommendation given that we probably won’t see a Nehalem based MacBook until 2010. Buy the cheapest MacBook you can today and make it last, upgrade again in 2010. Ooh, that rhymes.
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whatthehey - Thursday, November 20, 2008 - link
Okay, my first sentence or two was off base, I admit. It's because piesquared made an assinine comment about an article. Anand gives an interesting piece about cache sizes, and some prick responds with, "nope - all I care about is hearing about AMD's same-old same-old designs!" Most of us like to think about the ramifications of cache sizes and CPU architectures, and frankly AMD doesn't have a lot to discuss in that area right now. Nehalem is a pretty major change to Intel's recent architectures, and as such it's worth discussing.If you'd climb off your high horse for a minute and read the rest of my post (rather than getting your "I Love AMD" dander up, oh great and noble Griswold, defender of AMD), you'd see a lot of facts that are hard to argue with. Performance wise, AMD is sucking Intel's dust in pretty much every area except 8S heavily loaded servers, and there the bigger deal is they do better in performance per watt. Pricing on their CPUs is good, but only because they need to lower prices in order to compete - and Intel has been matching them quite well.
That said, anyone that doesn't see MASSIVE problems for AMD right now has some serious blinders on. This new Foundry Company split is going to put a stake in their heart, mark my words. I only hope someone steps in to fill the void when AMD inevitably fails and disappears, because you just can't compete with Intel by breaking your business into smaller pieces that will have more problems working together than they do when they're all under the same umbrella. If AMD is already behind schedules repeatedly with the current setup, how are they going to do better when they become fabless and have to go through a third party for the various stages of production?
Regs - Thursday, November 20, 2008 - link
AMD's primary problem in the industry is setting a tangible goal/dead line and actually meeting that goal or dead line. "Well at least they won't release it all buggy en' what not". Maybe that line works for video games, but not in this cut throat industry. Intel has been beating AMD to the punch time and again in the CPU market and eroding AMD's sales and market share. Which is why AMD has to retool, reorganize, and follow through with their roadmaps or else they'll have to figure out what products they can actually compete with. Shanghai, even though a little 18 months late, is a good sign of execution by AMD; delaying a CPU/GPU combination platform for a notebook until 2011 is not. Notebooks are a big source a revenue AMD will be passing up in the next 2 years to Intel and they're really going to need something highly competitive if they wish to earn any market share back by 2011.Lonyo - Wednesday, November 19, 2008 - link
If the Lynnfield has x16 PCIe, and the diagram shows no SB/MCH, does that mean the P55 will be a single chip design and include the extra PCIe slots, and might it be possible to do triple SLI if manufacturers use the PCIe slots from the CPU as well as the chipset?