8-Core Intel Nehalem-EX To Launch This Month

MojoKid writes "What could you do with 8 physical cores of CPU processing power? Intel's upcoming 8-core Nehalem-EX is launching later this month, according to Intel Xeon Platform Director Shannon Poulin. The announcement puts to rest rumors that the 8-core part might be delayed, and makes good on a promise Intel made last year when the chip maker said it would release the chip in the first half of 2010. To quickly recap, Nehalem-EX boasts an extensive feature-set, including up to 8 cores per processor, up to 16 threads per processor with Intel Hyper-threading, scalability up to eight sockets via Intel's serial Quick Path Interconnect and more with third-party node controllers, and 24MB of shared cache."

Comments

Re:Balance

[vivek7006]

Does it have the memory I/O bandwidth to keep up with the CPUs?
Yes
When will I be able to actually buy a mother board with 8 of these 8 core CPUs
When you move out of your parents garage.

Finally!

[sardaukar_siet]

The end to "can it run Crysis?" jokes!

Re:Balance

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given that the Nehalems all have integrated memory controllers, I'd assume that the memory I/O situation wouldn't become substantially worse as you scaled up.

From TFS's mention of "up to 8 CPUs or more with third-party node controllers" I'm(perhaps optimistically) assuming that that means all the RAM in an up to 8 socket system wouldn't be more than one hop away from any core.

They almost certainly didn't go with 24MB of cache because their main memory situation is perfect; but intel's bigger chips are substantially improved from the old "Hey, let's hang a bunch of super expensive Xeons off a dubiously adequate northbridge through a shared front-side bus, let them starve for memory access, and then get curb stomped by cheaper Opterons!" days.

IBM Power7 also has 8 cores

[karvind]

If it is matter of core-war, IBM's latest Power7 also has 8 cores. It is actually based on 45nm technology compared to Intel's latest 32nm. What makes Power7 exciting is that it has on-die 32MB L3 cache. They achieved this by introducing eDRAM (embedded DRAM) in the technology. Both Nehalem-EX and Power7 are targeting low-end server market, so it should be interesting battle.

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/09/ibms-8-core-power7-twice-the-muscle-half-the-transistors.ars

Re:Balance

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes... on Friday nights, me, her, and your mom do threesomes.

Sun Ultrasparc T2 has 8 cores... and 64 threads

[IYagami]

http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T2/

And the future Ultrasparc T3 will have 16 cores and 8 threads per core for a total of 128 threads per chip

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/02/two-billion-transistor-beasts-power7-and-niagara-3.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

AMD's competitor, Socket G32

[yuhong]

In other news, AMD has a blog article on it's soon to be launched competitor to this, Socket G32 8-core/12-core Opterons:
http://blogs.amd.com/work/2010/02/22/magny-cours-is-right-on-schedule-and-shipping-to-customers/

Re:Hyperthreading

[jcupitt65]

Hyperthreading used to suck, but it works pretty well now. In the benchmarks I've done with my code I see about a 60% speedup.

http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=Benchmarks#Results_summary

Re:It's obvious

[ickleberry]

This makes me sad. Web 2-point-Oh is such a waste of a perfectly good 8-core processor.

10 years ago if you had told me about an 8-core processor I would have imagined using it for kick-of-the-ass games, immersive virtual reality, editing 3D video and simulating newer, more deadly designs of chainsaw chain.

But noo, instead they are used to pump out inefficient JavaShit-based versions of the Desktop software we had in '93 with a shiny new rounded corner interface to web browsers around the world. Great.

Somebody's gotta ask...

[unitron]

So, how soon until newegg.com has the fake ones in stock?

Re:Actually...

[vertinox]

It will improve gaming performance if you happened to be running something like Quakes Wars in ray tracing.

Intel put together a demo on a workstation system with two Nehalem quad-core CPUs getting about 15 - 20 fps.

Since ray tracing is embarrassingly parallel, all one needs to do to improve performance is to throw more cores at it.

Keep in mind ray tracing is much more cpu intensive than gpu intensive...