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.

Comments

New pins

[Deltawolf]

Oh wow! Now if your pins snap you have to replace your mobo instead of your processor. Sounds like its begging for trouble.

Re:New pins

[Naffer]

Most home motherboards are cheaper then the processor. Motherboards run around $150 while newer processers run above $200

Re:New pins

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather replace a CPU with a broken pin than tear apart my case and pull out the tray to replace a motherboard.

A CPU can be replaced in just a couple of minutes. A motherboard would take much longer, depending on your case type, how many cards you have, and all the various types of things you're going to have to unplug from it and plug back in.

Re:New pins

[Oculus Habent]

Why don't they make a pin grid insert? That way you can just replace the pin set if you bend some, and both the motherboard and th processor are immune from that type of damage.

The only problem you might experience with this is if you break off pins in the socket or the processor, but it seems like a (mostly) unlikely situation.

Re:New pins

[Bishop]

A pin insert would connect to pads on the mainboard and pads on the cpu. I worked with some SGI systems that used this kind of setup. It is a good idea.

I am a little disapointed that Intel did not go with a pin insert. However it would have cost more which would have been hard to justify to the mainboard makers and their razor thin margins. In the long run I think that a pin insert would have been a smart move. Judgeing by the reported fragility of the socket 775 I won't be surprised if Intel moves to a new socket as early as next year. I am sure we will see an outcry from the (wanabee) enthusiast crowd due to the shear number of socket 775 mainboards that they will trash. A pin insert may have eased that problem.

Pin inserts could even have been a lucrative revenue stream. It would not take much to convince the enthusiasts that a new pin insert was needed whenever a cpu was upgraded to insure maximum performance. In some respects computer enthusiasts are as bad as audiophiles.

Re:New pins

[JPriest]

A few points: $150 is reasonable for a motherboard, the above listed processors are likely to run closer to $450 and $900.

If 6 minutes of your time is worth $300 - $750 then you obviously make way more than I do.

AMD is going to start using the same technology. When Intel does it, it is a pain in the ass, when AMD does it, it's innovation.

Besides, you have to be pretty careless with your hardware to break a pin.

Re:New pins

[Too Much Noise]

There are some points you're missing about this.

Who's paying for the RMA? if the natural life span of the pins is about 8 insertions (as the mobo producers seem to claim), then there would be a large number of legitimate breakages that get sent back to the mobo manufacturer. Now, they can either replace the CPU socket (not very funny, I think) or throw away the whole mobo, including the rest of the perfectly good components on it[*]. As oppose do just discarding a defective CPU if its pins break.

[*]like the spankin' new and expensive Intel chipsets. I doubt $150 will happen anytime soon as a mobo price, as even the chipset estimated price seems to be above that. I also doubt mobo manufacturers getting too many returns due to bent socket pins will be very happy about all this - remember, their margins are quite slim these days. The least hurt by this is probably going to be Intel itself.

Your AMD jab is a troll. As far as they stated so far, the Opteron socket stays put for the foreseeable future (meaning at least one year). They will have no incentive to move to a pinless package unless it shows some solid advantage. Even Intel might have to back down on this if the hw producers get to unhappy (and they already have enough grief with the BTX form factor).

Finally - pins break. It's called mechanical stress. How many times do you think you can 'carefully' insert and remove a CPU in its socket before some pin gives in? At least, for the old sockets, all you had to do is match pins and holes ; now, with only point contacts, bending can come so much easier.

Is not

[Milo of Kroton]

Faster importantless? With 64 bit processing power for all available by athlon 64 made available that works with 64 bit yes immdiately we would switch.

These chip make futiliity. Why make processors of like these new when you can improve on 64 bit? The battle is to will be lost to Athlon without 64 bit competition by.

Re:Is not

[NanoGator]

"These chip make futiliity. Why make processors of like these new when you can improve on 64 bit? The battle is to will be lost to Athlon without 64 bit competition by."

Are you running 64-bit apps I'm not aware of?

Re:Is not

[Alexis de Torquemada]

A higher clockrate is ALWAYS better from a performance standpoint. ALWAYS. ALWAYS. ALWAYS. If you know anything about synchronous logic design you would know there is no debate about this.

True, provided that you are comparing processors with identical design that only differ in clockrate. But of course this is by far not the case, the P4 and Athlon 64 are implemented in fundamentally different ways. For example, in order to achieve the high clockrates with which they want to market their products to the uninformed (obviously), the Intel guys have increased the pipeline length beyond good and bad, with the consequence that mispredictions for out-of-order execution cost some real time. HyperThreading was introduced as sort of a hack for reducing the negative effect of their long pipelines, at least for multi-threaded applications. Running only a single thread, the P4 just has trouble keeping its functional units busy.

The speed of a processor is not measured in GHz. It's measured by the amount of work it gets done in one second. This depends on the application, but it's no secret that AMD CPUs perform substantially more work per processor cycle than Intel CPUs. E.g. my Ahlon XP 2400+ operates at "only" 2GHz. However, I took a the results from comparative Benchmark tests from the German computer magazine c't, and averaged (over all tests) the clockspeed that a Pentium 4 would need in order to be as fast as the Athlon. The result was 2800MHz, so the Athlon XP is on the average 40% faster than a Pentium 4 operating at the same speed. In other words, clockrate isn't everything.

The main problem with your analysis is that there exist algorithms that mathmatically CANNOT be solved in parallel, making SMP, hyperthreading, clusters all useless.

Actually, that's a good argument against Intel's hyperthreading, though there's a problem with it anyway: In practice, the question is not "Is this problem serial or parallelizable?", but how well it can be parallelized. For example, going from 1 to 8 CPUs may allow you to speed up computation of a certain problem by factor 7, however going from 128 to 512 CPUs may give you a speed increase of only 3%, because the communication and syncrhonization overhead becomes the bottleneck.

Oh, and 64-bit only buys you a larger memory space.

First of all, this "only" is misleading since even desktop machines will soon reach the 4GB boundary (actually, the 4GB limit virtual memory, which is often required in substantially larger quantities than physical RAM). You can use PAE for up to 64 gigs, but it's a performance killer.

And second, this is not true. AMD64 allows you to use wider adresses as well as wider integers, and this is a great boon for certain types of application, most notably cryptography. I've seen a benchmark that showed an 2GHz Athlon 64 outperform a P4EE 3.4GHz by factor two in AES encryption. Obviously, 64-bit integer operations benefit AES greatly. On 32-bit machines, they have to be split up into sub-operations - e.g. a 64-bit multiplication (discarding the upper 64 bits of the result) requires 3 32-bit multiplications plus several additions. For comparison, the Athlon 64 requires 3 clock cycles for a 32-bit multiplication, but only 4 for a 64-bit multiplication! Compare this to about 11 or more cycles the CPU would have spent on an equivalent sequence of 32-bit operations, which also would have increased code size (more cache misses) and forced you to use more of the already scarce registers (AMD64 doubles the size and number of the general purpose registers, some of which aren't even that general-purpose...).

Pictures of the socket

[athakur999]

Every review I've seen on these chips has pictures of the CPU and the socket with the CPU in it. I haven't seen one with some good pictures of an empty socket.

Anyone have any links to any? Does this new chip just rest on the pins or is there some more positive mounting method (besides that cover that goes over the CPU)?

another crap review

[phrasebook]

I'm sick of reading reviews that compare new products with other new products. Example on MBReview: comparing P4s that are all pretty much brand new, all expensive, hardly any difference between them. I want to see how it stacks up against my P3-866, not another P4 that I've never even seen. At least throw an older proc in there for comparison. Same with video card reviews. I don't give a hoot how the Radeon 9600 compares with the 9500... how does it compare with my GF3? FFS these reviews suck. At least throw in an older chip just for a relevant comparison. And stop mentioning how Quake 3 is getting old but is still useful: "this benchmark is slowly progressing towards an archaic stage". STFU. Who keeps regurgitating this crap.

Re:another crap review

[Sgs-Cruz]

He's not considering buying a new P3 or something. He's wondering if the new processors give the 2x (or 4x, or 10x, or 1.1x, or whatever...) benefit that would convince him to upgrade. You can't even use the old specs because the spec programs change every year in order to keep up with the latest featuers (at least with graphics spec programs).