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Intel Harpertown (Penryn) Quad CPUs Benchmarked
unts writes "The Intel Developer Forum is currently running in San Francisco, and Intel is showing off the up-coming Harpertown processors based on the Penryn core. HEXUS got hands on with a test system and ran some performance tests: 'Harpertown is a better quad-core processor than Clovertown: it's as simple as that. More L2 cache will gobble-up larger application data-sets and a higher FSB, on select models, will ensure that per-CPU bandwidth is less of a concern.'"
Throw more core and L2 cache at it. It be having a familiar ring, like when it was all about CPU speed.
I typed Harpertown into Google and I be finding a lot about Intel's processor. I wonder what the folk of Harpertowns (whar ever they be) and other towns feel about their town names be crowded out on Google searches by a bit of silicon. Yarr.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I am stunned.
While invariably the comparisons will bemade between this and AMD, let us not forget that Intel is getting stiff competition from left field as well. The arrival of the SPARC Niagra II processor is about to make the realm of high-end computing a lot more competitive than it has been in years. I, for one, can't wait to see a real head-to-head-to-head, AMD and Intel quads vs the 8-core monstrosty that is SPARC.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
10 years ago called.
They want their meme back.
Avast ye swab! I could indeed, build up some servers and ye could. I be thinking the old gag just not worth bothering with when CPUs be the topic. Perhaps when they be getting around to the Commodore 64 again ...
twelve and a half percent! twelve and a half percent! awk!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The article is extremely thin on the promised "benchmark" and looks like a fairly standard press release.
Information in real CPU benchmarks: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/
Information in the press release "benchmark": about:blank
Give me graphs, comparisons with other models in the same series & other CPUs, information about power draw & heat etc. Not adverts, details I can find out anyway and dont really care about etc.
Those towns should do something worthwhile then maybe they'd be like Broadway.
Why is it so hard to find the Windows Experience Index number on new computers? I am in the market for a new laptop; while I will wipe of windows as soon as I buy it I would like to use the MS's Windows System Assessment Tool (WinSAT) rankings so I can compare apples to apples on different chips and graphics card configurations. I can't find any online sellers that list the Windows Experience Index next to the other specs. Are the manufacturers resisting MS's Windows System Assessment Tool because it makes their hardware brand a commodity that can easily be replaced by another manufacturer's brand.
As someone who still uses Beowulf clusters for different things, I can definitely see value in several nodes equipped with this processor. Every little bit helps.
The game.
Because of the article [er review...] I decided to check around for quad core 775s. Found the 2.4Ghz equiv of what I have already [except mine is a dual] for like 316$ or so [CAD]. Not bad. Then I realized, wtf do I need that for? Even with all the build jobs I do, rendering music (go lilypond!) and what not, the cpu already sits idle most of the time. If the chip was $150 I'd be more willing to shell out for it on a whim just for kicks. But 316 plus tax is around $360 or so. That's nearly a car payment. Can't really see myself doing that.
;-)
Damn it, I want my fast, multi-core, and CHEAP processors already
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
This article goes into some of the juicy technical details about Penryn/Nehalem and covers a lot of ground about what Intel had to show at the IDF.
The article is also relevant to this discussion, "End of Moore's Law in 10-15 years?". FTA:
A much more in-depth review is available at The Tech Report: http://techreport.com/articles.x/13224
Harpertown is a better quad-core processor than Clovertown: it's as simple as that.
Who wants to live in a town named after a weed worshiped by binge-drinking potato-eaters? Living in Harpertown makes you feel like you're one of Tom Sawyer's sidekicks. Maybe not a friend like Huck, but at least you're better than Sid.
Bottomline: The Niagra microarchitecture is meant for a particular niche.
The Raven
Just make a regular die, deposit more silicon on top, put your second processor on top. Interconnect with through silicon vias. Repeat. Now we're scaling in 3 dimensions and Moore's law is safe for 50 years or more.
no worries.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Saw this in the Firehose yesterday and voted it down because there's nothing worth looking at in these benchmarks. The test systems aren't even comparable. I'm looking forward to a complete review of this platform.
Except for one problem. How the heck do you get the heat out? i.e. I can see this working for exactly 2 layers -- a front and back interconnected through the insulating layer. IF --and this is a big one for me [as someone who understands thermodynamics in the macro world not the micro world] -- a penetration (circuit connection) through the insulating layer doesn't just give one side of a chip a heat path that will basically just burn through the 2nd payer on the other side... Thoughts?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Where is the new chipset with DDR 2/3 ECC ram? The high power and heat cost of the them looks bad next to the ECC ram in the amd systems.
Is not to put it in.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm waiting on Intel to take me to Funkytown.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I just thought I would say that the two previous posts are nothing short of artistic, the emotion, tone and energy in each one is perfect, as you read them you can visualise the two people in the discussion, there is apathy, over-confidence, apathy, contempt and a bright spark of intelligence. I shall call these two posts "The Dreamer and the Engineer" Series. I suggest the parent and GP get together and license their use as ornamental wall hangings.
(Strange post I know - but seriously those two posts in quick succession were just perfect.)
I remember reading just yesteday about AMD's 3-core chips.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930
Yeah, maybe it does. But I'm not going to pay for x amount of licenses and have x installs of a bloated OS on hard drives that aren't necessary. PXE boot on diskless nodes is where it's at.
The game.
...just about the time Intel Terascale makes it superfluous.
When you post on your phone.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You can currently get a Core 2 Quad in a reasonably priced desktop system. $1500 will easily get you a system with a C2Q, and $2000 will get you a nice one with enough memory and disk to make a quad core useful. The cheapest I find a Niagara for is $10,000. That's for the version 1 Niagara, 4 cores 8GB of memory. It goes up very quickly from there.
Ok well that's a while different price class. Even if you spec the Intel box with a similar amount of RAM it is still under $3,000.
So even if it was generally faster than the C2Q, well it would have to be as it is much more expensive. The only real competition to the mainstream C2Q parts is coming from AMD. While certainly multi-processor Xeon server boxes may compete with the Niagara and other such things, as a desktop/workstation market, Intel and AMD are it. Other companies just aren't offering anything in that lineup and price class. The Niagara boxes are servers, and pricey at that. IBM's Power architecture, mentioned in another post, is for extremely large servers, mainframes, and supercomptuers.
That's great, but that isn't the principle market for Intel and AMD. They mainly target the mainstream desktop/server market. I just don't see any competition other than those two in that area.
Processors have had multiple layers of interconnect for decades.
Transistors, however, have generally been on one layer since the avent of the planar integrated circuit. Although there have been some advances in putting passive components capacitors and floating gates (for dram and flash, respectively), on top of active transistors, or orienting transitors themselves vertically instead of planar, a general 3d circuit is very much a future technology that's only presently being researched.
As a hack, people have tried "stacking" layers of pre-fabricated planar chips (usually drams or flash memory chips), but there have generally been problems with evacuating the heat from the inner layers from these types of devices which why to date they have been restricted to low-cycle-time devices. Although all parts of a processor are generally doing something all the time, only a small part of a memory devices is active. This allows memory to have few heat issues than a processing type devices and why they are really only working on them first.
Soon people will get 3d circuits going, but they certainly haven't been doing 3d circuits for decades...
Here's an old image which shows Intel's current roadmap: http://img366.imageshack.us/img366/5313/1775largelongtermroadmap7fs.png
Basically, intel releases a new architecture every 2 years and in between that they release a die shrink/derivative.
Penryn is mainly just a die shrink of Merom (codename for the laptop version of the Core 2). Merom was a 65nm chip and Penrym is a 45nm chip using the same architecture. Next they will release a new architecture using 45nm (codename Nehalem), then they will release a die shrink of Nehalem using 32nm, and so on and so forth...
Here's a quick rundown:
2006: Core 2 architecture released at 65nm
2007: Die shrink of the Core 2 architecture from 65nm to 45nm
2008: New architecture (code name Nehalem) released at 45nm
2009: Die shrink of the Nehalem architecture from 45nm to 32nm
2010: New architecture (code name Sandy Bridge, formerly known as Gesher) released at 32nm
2011: Die shrink of the Sandy Bridge architecture from 32nm to 22nm
He blames the poor performance of the Harpertown on the fact that it's running 32-bit Windows xp. But that can't effect any of the tests that were run (all of them easily fit in less than 1gb memory). The real reason is because Harpertown is running on a slower clock frequency. Penryn is only a minor core update, so it won't run much faster than conroe clock for clock. The real advantage of Penryn is the 45nm High-k + metal gate process, which gives lower power consumption and allows faster clock speeds.
1907 called.
They want their 90's reference back.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
How is that redundant? It was first post!
The game.
Just look at thre STREAM benchmark numbers and you'll see clearly that AMD has been way ahead of Intel when it comes to RAM bandwidth. I just benchmarked a dual-Quad-Xeon myself (Dell 2900) and I could not believe the poor results I got. One app running in the system can get up to around 3,500 MB/s. Put just two tasks running together (taskset'ed to different chips), and they will each get around 2,600 MB/s. From there on, total aggregate bandwidth tops at 5,200 MB/s and stays there, no matter how many simultaneous tasks you run (it will of course degrade if you run more than eight tasks, you get the point).
Dual-socket Opteron machines from two years ago can get to 15,000 MB/s aggregate, easily.
So, I'd really like to know if Intel is planning to improve things in this department.
A good cluster system is always redundant.
I submitted a bunch of Harpertown reviews to /. yesterday, and the only one you link to is the lame-assed one at Hexus?!? Oh boy! Let's run Sandra and call it a review! Ghey.
I noticed that some sane person posted links to Anandtech and Tech Report, but 2CPU also had a nice write-up with all sorts of benchmarks, and power usage data for each one.
Niagra is a poorly performing processor that just takes advantage of the fact that on a server, most threads are stuck in disk or net access all the time.
You're being snowed by SUN.
Even SUN realizes their days of hardware are nearing an end. They changed their stock symbol from SUNW (SUN Workstations) to JAVA (a software project).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
You got me there! It's always good to have one, or in my case 20, backups.
The game.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Intel CPUs have to have a lot of L2 cache to make up for the fact that they are still using a decades old shared bus architecture, where the memory controller is on the northbridge and memory transfers have to go through the FSB. AMD's overall motherboard architecture, having a direct line from each core to RAM separate from the FSB and having that on-die memory controller, is lightyears ahead. The fact that the Athlon 64 CPUs, the architecture of which has remained relatively unchanged for the last 4 years, is still competitive at all with Intel's latest, is testament to that.
good job slasdhot.once again u've proven that you are all linux/amd fan boys.
while every bloody site on the internet is flat out calling intel the winner here...pasting images of new sandra world records being breaten...you're all being smart asses and calling the cpu slow.then throwing in some garbage cpu's which can't really hurt intel and ignoring the fact that AMD has been lagging behing intel this year and looking at this demo and the promise from AMD for next year...will continue to lag behind for another year again.
BUT you all seem to be able to read between the lines.
what a blind crowd of ****** you all seem to be.
AMAZING!
Huh? I am lost as to your meaning with the "there is apathy, over-confidence, apathy, contempt and a bright spark of intelligence.quote, especially regarding the first post -- which I assume is the one you are calling the engineer. Given that you could darn near fry an egg on the some of the newer processor's heat sink for a one layer chip, how do you scale in three dimensions and not fry the inner layers?
More credible benchmarks from Anandtech: http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3099&p=1 Harpertown is the clear leader in performance. Barcelona leads the performance/watt bencmarks.