hows does one get on the band wagon to test out these newer processors from intel?
On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 4:19 AM, Bill Broadley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ellis Wilson wrote: > >> Joe Landman wrote: >> >>> Kilian CAVALOTTI wrote: >>> >>>> Do you, by any chance, have any substantial performance figure to make >>>> us drool? :) >>>> >>> Intel has asked that no benchmarks be published by people with units. >>> >> >> One wonders why they distributed them in the first place if they didn't >> intend to excite people about their performance prior to releasing them. >> > > Heh, well they want to excited people... important people... who in > exchange sign NDAs. Not to mention providing feedback on performance, > stability, bios compatibility, operating system, drivers, compilers, > applications etc that intel couldn't hope to replicate all the variations of > in the lab. > > With processors I don't think it's for "debugging" or stability checks >> since that should be well simulated (owing to the high cost of CPU molds >> costs millions itself). >> > > It's hard to predict when a show stopper will show. Nvidia, AMD, and Intel > (and likely most everyone) has had learned hard lessons in this area. > Indeed companies do spend big $$$ trying to make sure that each silicon > revision is bug free... hardly a guarantee though. > > In any case if you google around there's a fair bit of performance > information on nehalem chips. Stream performance has been mentioned, > unlabeled charts with relative performance on Spec CPU among other > benchmarks, and preproduction benchmarks on a variety of things. Public > info and fuzzy IDF slides seem to conclude: > * 2.6, 3.0, and 3.2 clock bins or so > * slightly 5-25% higher IPC (per thread) on many workloads > * Dramatically better memory system > * 4 cores/8 threads first, more variations later. > * 3 memory systems per socket. > * On chip memory controller > * lower memory latency than current intels or opterons. > * slightly HIGHER power use per socket than current intel. > > So nothing really earth shattering for the single socket market, but very > healthy competition (unlike the current CPUs) in the 2-4 socket market. > > Of course that leaves tons of interesting questions, pressure your favorite > vendor if you can't wait. Although there is some info at: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Nehalem > http://www.intel.com/technology/architecture-silicon/next-gen/index.htm > http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3326 > > Personally I'm most interested in when hyperthreading helps (hopefully it's > a better implementation of SMT than the P4 had) and exactly how the memory > system works. Things like how fast does 1,2,4,8,16 threads fetch a random > cache line? Sequential? From L1, L2, L3, and main memory. Things like: > > http://cse.ucdavis.edu/~bill/numa3-smooth.png<http://cse.ucdavis.edu/%7Ebill/numa3-smooth.png> > > Current rumors claim the desktop chip (core i7) is due in week 46, but > recent news claims week 47 around Nov 17th. No idea when the > workstation/server version will be out, at least is should give a good idea > where the server version should be performance wise. > > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > -- Jonathan Aquilina
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