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Intel 3.40EE & 3.60E - LGA Arrives
MBR writes "MBReview has taken a quick look at Intel's
new high-end LGA775 processors, the 3.40GHz Extreme Edition, and the 3.60GHz
'E,' now known as the 560. They've covered some of the questions about pin
frailty of the new LGA socket, as well as cooling issues that might arise
from these new processors." ("LGA" stands for Land Grid Array, which moves pins from the processor to the socket it sits in.) Update: 06/19 20:50 GMT by T :
Reader Chi-Energy points out that besides the new processor packaging, Intel has also just released its i925X and i915 chipsets, PCI Express and DDR2 DRAM for the desktop, and links to this review showcase with benchmarks at HotHardware.
here's a couple of pictures.
For a more comprehensive overview of the whole BTX, DDR2, Socket 775 and PCI Express malarkey, I'd recommend having a look here. Interesting stuff.
Not only does AMD have the only desktop 64-bit offering right now, but their chips are much faster than Intel's at the same clockspeed, even in 32-bit mode. Whereas Intel's engineers are just running their chips at insane clockspeeds, AMD's are actually designing better processors. For the price of a 3.4GHz "800"MHz FSB P4EE ($989 on pricewatch right now), you could buy two Opteron 246s ($441 each) with cash to spare. If you want to talk raw, meaningless numbers, the Opterons still beat the P4EE (4GHz and 2MB cache total). Of course, SMP isn't simply additive like that, but consider the advantages of 64-bit and multiprocessing, and the fact that AMD chips are /much/ faster than Intel's at the same clockspeed (even on 32-bit code), and there's no contest. All halfway-modern Windows versions and Linux kernels can support SMP, and the latest support amd64, too.
It's about time they catched up and started to use the LGA connection! The NEC VR10000 MIPS chip had LGA in 1998, as well as LGA contacts on the motherboard. To connect the LGA on the proc against the LGA on the board, a plastic holder with wads of springy gold wires was used. There was no issues with bent pins, etc. The only problem was lossing those wads of gold...
That 103W figure of yours is bullshit - at least how you've understood it. That's the typical maximum power consumption, or what Intel call the "Thermal Design Power". While web browsing or reading email, power consumption is down around 30W. You need difficult-to-design test vectors to push the CPU beyond the TDP, and unless you know what you're doing, you're unlikely to get more than a couple of watts beyond it.
One way to prove this to yourself is to simply remove the heatsink from a running Pentium IV Prescott system. Shock, horror: it will continue to run, only slowly. That's the same slowly the system silently goes into and out of depending on the CPU load (it takes about 10000 CPU cycles, or about 3 millionths of a second, to get into or out of this state.) Now: try web browsing or reading email while it's running like this. Tell the difference? Didn't think so. You might notice a _slight_ slowdown (when rendering a complex page, for example): that's because without the heatsink on, the CPU won't go back into the "normal" S0 power state.
So, just as a Pentium 4 doesn't dissipate 103W without a heatsink installed, so to does it not dissipate 103W if you're not doing anything.
This can all be found in http://developer.intel.com
Handy, that.