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Intel 32/64-bit Nocona CPU
OCGeek writes "A picture of the upcoming Nocona processor of the Xeon family that has 64-bit
extensions known as Intel EM64T has appeared on
VR-Zone website. Nocona will have
604 pins and supports HyperThreading, SSE3, PCI Express, DDR2, Vanderpool
technology."
They made the mistake to have not one, but two featured stories on Slashdot today. No wonder their site is down, LOL
Here is the picture:
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Just for starters, notice that all the hardware sites get their test units from the manufacturers. In other words, they call the manu and say 'please send me a free hard drive to test for a review'. The manu then tries out 5 units to find the one that works best and sends it.
Consumers Reports, on the other hand, goes to the store and buys a random unit, same as you or I might.
Personally, I trust www.storagereview.com, but they do the same thing.
Perhaps you missed the whole DeCSS issue? "Without licensed DVD players for Linux and other operating systems, an entire class of computer users is completely cut off from viewing DVDs."
Phwoar! I'll have some of that.
Slashdot. Pornography for nerds.
EM64T
Remember, it's spelled x86-64.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
... would they call it a "Sno-Cona"?
In anticipation of intel's move away from MHz numbers and confusing names, I predict the nonoca will adopt the name "Intel Xeon Championship Edition."
Why can't I get this to run on my WXP machine? I have XP Pro installed....
You linux geeks get all the good toyz!!
Darn you, Darn you to Redmond!
What do I get?
Well.. I guess I do get all the neat patches.
Here's the skinny on vanderpool.9 94215
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99
It actually seems a really interesting technology. The CPU itself can generate virtual machines that can run different OS's simultaneously. Kinda like hyperthreading but on a much lower level.
A chip technology that will be available within five years, code-named Vanderpool, will allow users to partition the processor inside their computers. In a demonstration, Otellini used a PC to beam an episode of "The Simpsons" to a plasma TV, while another Intel executive booted and rebooted a game with the same machine.
From here
Intel talked about this at the last developers conference. Its the ability to run OSes and applications in partitions that are protected from trashing each other. Here's a blurb from one of the keynote addresses (about halfway down):
You may remember at the last IDF, Paul Otellini in his keynote did a demonstration and introduced a new technology, a new star "T" called Vanderpool Technology or VT. In that demo, he was in a home environment where he demonstrated by creating different stations in a virtualized station. You are able to run your PVR in one partition and the games in another partition without interfering with each other.
VT has applications not just in the digital home but also in the digital office. What are some of these usage models? Let's take a look. VT, likewise, can be used in business computers to create different partitions, to provide an IT partition where the IT mission-critical applications are well protected and not compromised by the user. At the same time, it can create partitions that can provide legacy support. In other words, applications that may not run under the new operating system.
Now, this is the kind of thing that's actually fairly common encountered in both large enterprises as well as more medium business.
An example we see in accounting software or asset tracking software, they're written and validated on an old operating system that have not been reported or validated.
As an example, my sister is a dentist and she has a billing system on her computer. She wouldn't dare to upgrade it because there's no support of porting that billing system to a new OS. And as a result, she continues to run on old hardware, old OSs, that expose herself to productivity and security issues. Not a good situation.
So let's take a look at how this actually works. I'd like to invite Jason Davidson out here to show us how VT benefits the enterprise.
(Demo begins and ends.)
BILL SIU: So in the coming several years, we'll be working with many of our business colleagues, many of you present here, to develop this capability and bring this kind of improvement to the enterprise. We think this is of just great value to manageability, providing both end user benefits as well as IT value.
One assumes the demo shows them crashing an application yet the other application keeps on working.
to the Engineer, the glass is neither half full nor half empty. Its just two times too big.
Quick screen capture of the entire (tiny) article here
The GDM link points to here (japanese)
The Xeon roadmap link points to another vr-zone article here (probably also slashdotted)
Kinda contentless, apart from the pic.
These sites are almost always reviewing products that haven't hit the market yet. They can't just go out and buy a retail unit if there aren't any available yet.
This is also how they can get away with paper launches... Make a few samples available to the reviewers to make it seem like the processor is available. In these cases, usually the review sample is such an early revision that anything a consumer touches probably works better.
This was demonstrated at the fall 2003 Intel Developer Forum. They operated two virtual machines, one running linux and one running windows, and rebooted one of the machines with the other unaffected.
I'm not sure which one they rebooted but I have a pretty good guess.
...on portugal and brasil... just google for cona and you'll see what i mean :-)
Support for PCI Express and DDR2 are dependent on the chipset, not the processor, in Intel CPUs. So saying that the Nocona processors support PCI Express and DDR2 is pretty stupid... Any Intel processor could use them so long as they were running on a chipset that did.
Of course, Intel normally releases new chipsets with a new revision of a processor family, but that is another matter entirely. Since the site is down, I have no idea if this is discussed at all.
If this could be done efficiently, and in a way which allowed users to easily switch between the two OSes, one could run linux and windows simultaneously. Then, instead of having to use a second rate application for those apps which haven't been replicated in the linux world, one could easily switch back to windows for those few necessary apps which were holding one back from trying out linux.
Linux adoption would go up as people find it easier to try it out without abandoning their familiar windows apps, which leads to more linux development, which results in more replacement of those windows apps(since there is still the cost benefit to switching to linux).
I was really worried until the end of the snippet when Intel mentioned Dance Dance Revolution 2 support...
- A software solution like VPC that can be easily added to existing hardware (at a large performance cost)
- IBM's
?That should be, IBM's hardware abstraction technology
Just for starters, notice that all the hardware sites get their test units from the manufacturers. In other words, they call the manu and say 'please send me a free hard drive to test for a review'. The manu then tries out 5 units to find the one that works best and sends it.
...that there's such things as rated speeds. For a CPU that would be something like "This CPU is rated at 3.0 GHz, but it'll overclock to 3.6 GHz". Maybe the average consumer CPU won't overclock to that. But it's a pretty sure thing it *will* work at 3.0GHz, and that's the benchmarks I read.
As for harddisks, I imagine they find one with no remapped sectors (a "perfect" disk) but otherwise, I doubt they can do much either without rigging the specs. There's simply not much room for variability these days. Maybe they have a perfectly balanced/aligned disk that could do more than 7200rpm, but that's a different story.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So who's going to be first to use a cluster of these in a notebook.
;-)
Sure you'll have to use an external keypad and mouse...but you'll also be able to cook cheese and ham toasties with the lid down
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
Virtual PC is emulation, therefore you take a nice speed hit. Vanderpool is hardware based. It uses the actual hardware on your machine.
Buy Opterons .... They scale better. Dual systems.. its about neck and neck with Xeons but go to quads and the Opterons eat Xeons for Lunch. Oh .. and the Opterons are cheaper too. It's a no brainer folks. It wall take alot more then copying AI64 from AMD to put the Xeons on top. Indeed soon with how the Opterons scale they will eat up the Itantics too.
1) The chip interface to the northrbridge has been improved and will allow it to go "Really Fast".
2) The chip has an intergrated memory controller and/or PCI express bridge/controller ala Opteron.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
is it a 64bit CPU that can act like a 32 bit CPU or it's 16bit predecessor (which is, itself based on an 8 bit design).?
I can understand why Intel wanted to go to a clean 64bit CPU implementation, but It's a bit late in the game for them.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
but does it have the proverbial kitchen sink?
:)
Or is the heat sink merely that heavy?
Juuussst kidding.
I prefer to get Opterons over "Xeopterons", if for no other reason than because Intel blatantly ripped off the 64-bit extensions from AMD, and didn't even bother mentioning them in the "ia32e" specification documentation.
Granted, AMD is making designs based on Intel's ancient and decrepit architecture, but at least they acknowledge this and give Intel credit where credit is due. Many of AMD's AMD64 technology papers are published as the differences between Intel's IA32 papers and their design.
Of course, the fact that Opterons scale better due to not sharing all memory bandwidth between CPUs, using HyperTransport for interCPU communication, and having a dedicated and integrated low-latency memory controller for each individual CPU helps in the Opteron-vs-Xeopteron choice as well....
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra