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Intel Nehalem Processor Details Leaked

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Apr 12, 2001
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DailyTech provides screenshots from Intel slides detailing their upcoming Dunnington and Nehalem architectures.

First, the slides detail Dunnington, a 45nm six-core (three dual-cores) Xeon processor and successor to Tigerton. The Tigerton procesors were launched in September of 2007 and are aimed at very high end servers. Apple has not yet adopted these processors in either its Mac Pro or Xserve line.

More interesting are details of Intel's Nehalem processors which will be the successor to Penryn. While Nehalem is also a 45nm, SSE4, quad-core chip, it will introduce a number of other new technologies. In Nehalem, Intel will replace the front-side bus model with "QuickPath Interconnect" (similar to Hypertransport), add on-die memory controllers, and tri-channel DDR3. All these changes will reportedly increase the available bandwidth to the processor, allowing it to interact with the computer at faster speeds.


152334-7355_large_nehalem-estimate-2_400.png

Longer is faster, X5482 is Harpertown processor found in Mac Pro

Based on early estimates, the Nehalem processor is expected to benchmark 144-203% faster than existing Harpertown Xeon processors (X5482).
The Nehalem processor more than doubles the floating point performance of its current Penryn-family processors. Ou adds, "We’ll most likely know by the end of this year what the actual scores are, but I doubt they will be more than 5% to 10% off from these estimated projections."
Click to expand...
The first Nehalem processors are not expected to be launched until Q4 2008.

Article Link
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2008/02/25/intel-nehalem-processor-details-leaked/
Wow! That's first the first MAJOR performance gain and not just performance/watt gain have seen from Intel in awhile. Cheers!!
 
Wow.... gr8!

Interesting thing about Intel and its roadmap.... far more "educated guessing" about future Macs.

OTOH...
Boring thing about Intel and its roadmap.... far more "educated guessing" about future Macs than rumors and speculation.
;)
 
MacsRgr8 said:
Wow.... gr8!

Interesting thing about Intel and its roadmap.... far more "educated guessing" about future Macs.

OTOH...
Boring thing about Intel and its roadmap.... far more "educated guessing" about future Macs than rumors and speculation.
;)
Click to expand...

To be fair, it means a lot less "Motorola/IBM processor divination" threads (will we ever get a faster chip?!) and a lot more "When the hell are we getting the new Intel chips in updated Macs OMGOMGOMG?!" threads.

You decide which is better. :p
 
Oh well, still getting my Mac Pro in a few weeks :)

8-cores w 8 GB RAM and 512 MB Graphics card just got to be fast enough for a while dammit. :)
 
killmoms said:
To be fair, it means a lot less "Motorola/IBM processor divination" threads (will we ever get a faster chip?!) and a lot more "When the hell are we getting the new Intel chips in updated Macs OMGOMGOMG?!" threads.

You decide which is better. :p
Click to expand...

Yep. Or will we ever get the G* {censored} in a PowerBook...? :D (sorry)

Less fun, but far better. It is much easier this way to plan ahead.
 
zapp said:
And I just bought my first desktop a mac pro 2.8 octo
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Congratulations, you'll have a lot of fun with it until this new beast becomes available and you can always switch just when the new one comes out.

I've got the same machine on order. It will be a blazing machine compared to my Dual 1.8 GHz PowerMac, that's a safe bet!
 
zapp said:
And I just bought my first desktop a mac pro 2.8 octo
Click to expand...

I wouldn't worry too much. Seems like they won't be available until mid '09.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but won't it take some time for software to be available to make full use of the new architecture's capabilities? I mean, quad core chips have been around about a year (?) and not all pro software (i.e. Photoshop) makes use of all cores yet.
 
zdobson said:
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but won't it take some time for software to be available to make full use of the new architecture's capabilities? I mean, quad core chips have been around about a year (?) and not all pro software (i.e. Photoshop) makes use of all cores yet.
Click to expand...

I depends how you use your computer.
Sometimes you use batches of multiple Photoshop actions which can use a couple of Cores at a time.

Simple (non-PS) example:
Take one QuickTime movie. Convert it to iPhone format: you will notice 2 Cores in use.
Now start a second QuickTime movie and do the same thing at the same time: Two Cores are used twice, i.e. 4 Cores used at once... and so on.

Or you can have one app use 4 Cores, while another app uses 2 Cores, and you still can iChat too. :cool:

EDIT:

Example of CPU time and CPU monitor when converting 2 QuickTime movies:
 

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Glad I sat out the most recent "speed bump" upgrade to the Mac Pro. This Nehalem upgrade will be worthy of the wait. It will also have a significant negative impact on the resale value on the current Mac Pros when the Nehalem Mac Pros are released.
 
MacRumors said:
Based on early estimates, the Nehalem processor is expected to benchmark 144-203% faster than existing Harpertown Xeon processors (X5482).
Click to expand...

I think this should read 44-103% faster or benchmark at 144-203% of X5482. The chart does not show 144-203% faster.
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A93 Safari/419.3)

This will make for a nice Mac Pro!
 
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