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The socket and package are about 5cm wide, the chip is much smaller.

And it has to be, because at 3 GHz speed of light is only 10 cm per cycle. And electrical signals don't move at speed of light. These five cm are about one processor cycle at the speed of an electrical signal.
 
shuddup...

shuddup...

some of us still have G4s....dabnabbit...

Oh man !! 3.33GHz!! Thats amazing ! That makes me feel even worse about being on my G5, though i love it :D.


lol, all in fun.. Actually I am expecting my MacPro 8core to be supposedly delivered tomorrow--a few days late because evidentually FedEx pilots wont take off in the rain over in China--boo hoo..heh.
 
There is some interesting stuff coming out the next year. Just a couple of examples (don't have the links handy but they are all over the net):

- Blu-Ray burners
- High capacity NAND flash HDs 64-128GB
- 802.11n "final" spec products
- high res LED screens
- 300GB HDs
- Harware encryption of data within the HD itself
- etc.

2008 is definitely going to be an interesting year hardware-wise not just because of Penryn. :)
 
I Am Trapped In The Wait For SS & Penryn Sink Hole

Look at poor MultiMedia - he was drooling over the prospect of a octo-core, but then he heard of the next Stoakley-Seaburg chipset. Suddenly, the octo is untenable, and he needs an SS. I wouldn't be surprised if, after this IDF, he decides the SS is just a stopgap, and he should wait for a Penryn octo-core with "real" quad chips.

Don't fall into the trap that's claimed MultiMedia !!
Exactly right. I want all the brains that the 8 cores of power need and I'd rather have that bigger 12MB cache in Penryn as well now that Leopard is delayed.

I fully respect your superior knowledge on all things technical Aiden. Are you saying that the confusion that Bare Feats finds among those cores in the "new" 8 core MP won't be mollified with SS & Leopard to a significant degree of improvement? I'm thinking that the delay in shipping Leopard is reason enough to wait for SS with Penryn as it will be shipping before end of year about the same time as Leopard. Is that stinkin' thinkin'? :confused: :eek:
 
Exactly right. I want all the brains that the 8 cores of power need and I'd rather have that bigger 12MB cache in Penryn as well now that Leopard is delayed.

I'm thinking that the delay in shipping Leopard is reason enough to wait for SS with Penryn as it will be shipping before end of year about the same time as Leopard. Is that stinkin' thinkin'? :confused: :eek:

What I'm saying is that you may be far better off getting the current system and crunching at high speed, rather than poke along on your quad for a year waiting for Penryn Xeons.

Cinebench scores from BF:

Quad G5: 1105
Quad Xeon: 1601
Octo Xeon: 2323​

The current octo is 2.1 times faster than the quad. By January or so, there may be a Penryn that's 2.3 or 2.4 times faster. (I'd suspect on your multi-threaded workflow, Clovertown would do pretty well - so that Penryn would be less of a boost.)

You have to decide whether it's better to wait a year at 1X, or run 2.1X faster for that year.

If you don't push the buy button, I can only assume that you really don't need the added speed. Otherwise, you'd buy.

http://www.barefeats.com/mvdcpc.html
http://www.barefeats.com/octopro1.html
 
Hopefully we'll be seeing product refreshes soon. Jobs went from Core Duos to Core 2 Duos pretty fast, but there hasnt bee anything since. Hoping with new iMac looks come fast processors..whenever that happens.
 
Exactly right. I want all the brains that the 8 cores of power need and I'd rather have that bigger 12MB cache in Penryn as well now that Leopard is delayed.

I fully respect your superior knowledge on all things technical Aiden. Are you saying that the confusion that Bare Feats finds among those cores in the "new" 8 core MP won't be mollified with SS & Leopard to a significant degree of improvement? I'm thinking that the delay in shipping Leopard is reason enough to wait for SS with Penryn as it will be shipping before end of year about the same time as Leopard. Is that stinkin' thinkin'? :confused: :eek:
I think what Bare Feats refers to as a memory bandwidth bottleneck is not a FSB bottleneck as people tend to point to but a memory controller bottleneck. In truth, a 1333MHz FSB is perfectly sufficient for all but the most extreme cases for a quad core chip. If you compare a 1.8GHz E4300 on a 800MHz FSB to a 1.86GHz E6300 on a 1067MHz FSB, there is actually very little performance difference despite the smaller FSB. Similarly, even comparing a 667MHz Merom to a comparable clock speed 1067MHz FSB Conroe yields very similar results. The Merom architecture is simply a lot more memory bandwidth agnostic than Netburst was and the 4MB L2 cache certainly helps.

The problem though is with the FB-DIMMs. They have terrible scaling and tests have shown that a quad channel DDR2 533 FB-DIMM setup with 4-4-4 timings performs like a dual channel DDR2 667 setup with 5-5-5 timings. This is why Conroes tend to outperform Woodcrests in dual threaded applications despite Woodcrest having a bigger FSB.

Seaburg will introduce a 2nd gen MC that should improve things. Sadly, there won't be DDR2-800 FB-DIMMs so any performance increase will have to be from the architecture. Intel has stated that they've been focusing on reducing memory latency which is good. Their tests have shown that Seaburg provides a 5% performance increase using the exact chips compared to Blackford/Greencreek. Seaburg also has a larger snoop filter optimized for quad cores to reduce cache coherency traffic which will help.

Penryn will bring 1600MHz FSBs, but in light of the memory controller bottleneck that will still remain with Seaburg, I don't see that as being a big feature. Besides, with only quad channel DDR2 667 FB-DIMM support, there isn't enough theoretical bandwidth to fill dual 1600MHz FSBs anyways. I'm not sure how beneficial the bigger caches will be anyways. Intel's actually skimping since they're only going with a 50% increase instead of the usual doubling so that already limits improvements. The major benefit of Penryn though ironically seems to be SSE4. The Divx demo they used that was rewritten with SSE4 support shows Penryn more than doubling the performance of Kentsfield. I'm sure most video applications will add support for SSE4 whether on Mac or PC, so that will definitely provide a nice boost.
 
Hopefully we'll be seeing product refreshes soon. Jobs went from Core Duos to Core 2 Duos pretty fast, but there hasnt bee anything since.
..because other then Quad-Core processors not much new stuff is available at this time... soon.
 
Hopefully we'll be seeing product refreshes soon. Jobs went from Core Duos to Core 2 Duos pretty fast, but there hasnt bee anything since. Hoping with new iMac looks come fast processors..whenever that happens.

Not totally true, the Mac Pros went from quad core's to 8 cores. But I dunno if that's what you're talking about...

still new proccessor = bada$$.
 
What I'm saying is that you may be far better off getting the current system and crunching at high speed, rather than poke along on your quad for a year waiting for Penryn Xeons.

Cinebench scores from BF:

Quad G5: 1105
Quad Xeon: 1601
Octo Xeon: 2323​

The current octo is 2.1 times faster than the quad. By January or so, there may be a Penryn that's 2.3 or 2.4 times faster. (I'd suspect on your multi-threaded workflow, Clovertown would do pretty well - so that Penryn would be less of a boost.)

You have to decide whether it's better to wait a year at 1X, or run 2.1X faster for that year.

If you don't push the buy button, I can only assume that you really don't need the added speed. Otherwise, you'd buy.

http://www.barefeats.com/mvdcpc.html
http://www.barefeats.com/octopro1.html
There are other factors that enter in though-- cost and software being two of the big ones. You're quoting the Cinebench test results, but MM seemed most interested in video encoding performance. The BF tests show no improvement on Quicktime export performance between the 4 and 8 core machines (unless you're running 6 simultaneous jobs exporting the same file to the same format...).

I don't know what's holding up QT, it's probably the applications' treading performance, but it doesn't make sense to pull the trigger on an upgrade until the new system does better at what you want to use it for. Rather than dumping a chunk of cash and then waiting for the software to catch up, or finding that there's a critical bottleneck in the system preventing it from performing your task efficiently, sometimes it's better to wait. The hardware will keep advancing while the software people make the changes they need to.
 
Not totally true, the Mac Pros went from quad core's to 8 cores. But I dunno if that's what you're talking about...

still new proccessor = bada$$.

Was mainly talking about the iMac's and Mini's. But lookin on how fast we got the Core 2 Duo's and Octo cores, we should be get these chips aswell pretty fast (lets hope). I wonder if the iMac & mini refreshes could be tied in when they processors come out
 
Was mainly talking about the iMac's and Mini's. But lookin on how fast we got the Core 2 Duo's and Octo cores, we should be get these chips aswell pretty fast (lets hope). I wonder if the iMac & mini refreshes could be tied in when they processors come out

yeah the mini is looooooooooooong overdue for a proccessor upgrade. They should have put the core 2 duo in it! maybe they'll just put a quad core xenon in it!! haha.
 
I wonder if Apple has any Cell Processor or Power 6 based prototype Macs in their labs :D

B

You can count on that. Just as they always had secret intel macs, they will have prototypes running on any other significant processor, AMD included.
As soon as one of the technologies is proving to be better than the current intel roadmap, then we could well expect another 'transition'.

Hence, it will not happen overnight, Apple will look for the bigger picture, and need to know a roadmap that is worth investing in, not just for 2 years and we switch again, it will have to be solid info, worth at least 5 years if not longer.:apple:
 
..., but MM seemed most interested in video encoding performance. The BF tests show no improvement on Quicktime export performance between the 4 and 8 core machines (unless you're running 6 simultaneous jobs exporting the same file to the same format...)..

MM's typical task is multiple parallel rip/encode/decode jobs.... The 8 simultaneous jobs (or four that can do 2-way threading) is what he'll be doing.


Rather than dumping a chunk of cash and then waiting for the software to catch up, or finding that there's a critical bottleneck in the system preventing it from performing your task efficiently, sometimes it's better to wait. The hardware will keep advancing while the software people make the changes they need to.

This makes sense, as long as you don't need the performance.

If you *need* the performance, then you hit the buy button regardless.

For example, if it takes you 28 hours to encode a day's worth of video work - you hit the buy button. If it takes 20 hours, then you can contemplate different purchase choices.
_________

Anyone who is considering waiting for Stoakley doesn't need the performance. Anyone who considers waiting for Penryn clearly doesn't need a Penryn.

They might want the extra performance, or some extra longevity - but they don't *need* the few extra percent.

On the other hand, though, I'm going to hit a big "buy button" when Stoakley arrives, because I have some projects that *need* VT-d and PCIe.V2. These can't even start until the new systems show up.
 
This makes an upgrade of the current MBP line even more imminent. The longer they wait the closer they come to the Penryn release. My bet is on May or June for the new MBPs and February 08 for the Penryn MBPs.

Agree but I add one more month, Santa Rosa is available in May, so Apple may adopt it for Jun, July.

For the Penryn I would add 2 months, say April 2008.
 
Maybe it is because I just finished a thesis on scanning tunneling microscopy, but 45 nm is absurdly small. Does the die size mean that the entire chip is 45 nm x 45 nm, or that the smallest feature size is 45 nm? I wouldn't think that it could be the former, because that would mean that the length of the chip is only about 200 atoms. Does anyone know the smallest die size that has been done in the lab? Is this it or are they working on yet smaller versions that are just not in a preproduction phase?

Not an expert on this but I saw claims of 32 or 34 nm for the next round of chips.

To my knowledge that is the process size and not the size of the chip. Intel has the actual chip size on their web site under their technical specifications.

No need to correct me, I know I know little to nothing about this subject, just quoting stuff I read previously (and probably badly at that).
 
Actually, that's incorrect. Although you're right, Penryn is not a chipset, neither is Nehalem! In fact, neither is Santa Rosa!

Santa Rosa = Centrino Platform with Crestline Chipset
Processors supported: Merom 800MT/s (Socket P), and Penryn (Socket P)
Santa Rosa Refresh = around beginning of 2008- for Penryn stuff

Montevina = Next Centrino Platform after Santa Rosa. Cantiga Chipset, Socket P, improved Penryn support with faster FSB (1066MT/s), improved integrated graphics, DDR3 memory likely.

Penryn= Next generation chip of Intel Core Microarchitecture, 45nm, SSE4, Socket P for mobile variants.

Nehalem = Successor to Penryn, New Architecture. Due date is around 2008, and will likely be the architecutre that sees the next die shrink to 32nm.




I doubt it'll be that late, really. Recent reports indicated that Penryn was on track for an earlier release than expected. Apple could afford to wait on the Core 2 mobile chips, but they offered only a mild improvement and they had to milk the Core Duos for what they were worth. Penryn, however, provides just as much incentive as Santa Rosa, if not more to update the lineup when the time comes. First of all, it'll probably be near the end of the year, coinciding with the next likely update of the MBPs after the imminent Santa Rosa update. Penryn's advanced SSE4 instructions, 45nm design, and larger cache make it more attractive than just the FSB boost of the Merom-800MT/s from a processor standpoint... especially at some tasks Macs are quite often tasked to accomplish.

I may settle for Santa Rosa for my next portable, or I may hold out for Penryn refreshes or even Montevina penryns, but I know that from the pure processor capability POV, I'll be waiting for Penryn Mac Pros for sure.
Errr.... my bad.

But you are right from a purely processor standpoint Penryn is worth more overall, but as a general update I think Santa Rosa will allow for faster speeds even if just on a processor bases Penyrn will be better.
 
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