The “Break it Down” Blog

First, thanks to Grant Gochnauer for sending this across, it’s a kick-ass preview of the upcoming (end of year most likely) Nehalem CPUs and Chipsets from Intel. Secondly let’s thank Anandtech for sneaking into the Intel expo and capping off these benchmarks for us.

Quick Tips

• Nehalem is the upcoming CPU design from Intel at 45nm to replace Penryn late this year.
• Nehalem will be based on DDR3 memory
• Nehalem can support up to 8-cores on a single chip
• Nehalem re-introduces HyperThreading
• These preview numbers are based on early un-sanctioned (hobbled) engineering test hardware from a conference. Final hardware at the end of the year may likely be faster.

For a quick recap, Intel is on a 2-year release cycle. The first part of the cycle introduces a new architecture (like Conroe 2 years ago and Nehalem now). The second year of the cycle introduces a refinement of that architecture and a die-shrink; lowering the power requirements and optionally fixing issues found in the initial cut of the platform, it all looks something like this:

We are in the wake of the Penryn Family 45nm stage of the release cycle and working into the Nehalem stage now.

One of the coolest features of Nehalem is the re-introduction of Intel’s HyperThreading technology; more specifically the ability to get two instructions down the processors pipeline at the same time to lessen the latency impact of bubbles incase one instruction cannot execute. For the less CS-minded, it’s that older technology that made your single processor in Windows look like 2… well it’s back now, and it makes quad-cores look like 8-cores baby!

Don’t worry though, there are some serious performance improvements due to it, it’s not just for show. Here is a quick snapshot running Valve’s Source Engine Map Compilation benchmark:

Another eye-busting improvement in speed was the x264 encoding test Anand ran with Insane picture-quality settings enabled:

Yes, you are staring at a 44% increase in performance in x264 encoding times by a Penryn chip that has the identical Ghz speed rating… is that some amazing engineering or what?

In addition to the chip improvements, it looks like Nehalem will finally take complete advantage of the insane bandwidth DDR3 can provide, with memory benchmarks coughing up almost a 100% improvement in throughput and 30% improvement in latency:

Overall the platform is looking very hot, but for folks on the fence between a new build and waiting, I would point out that you aren’t likely to get into a Nehalem chip for cheap.

First thing to consider that Intel always drops their Extreme chips ($1200-1500) first, and then back-fills value-line chips from there that are engineered from the Extreme model. So that is some time you will have to wait unless you want to spent a metric fortune on the chip.

Secondly, consider the new motherboards. The average price for Penryn motherboards is already around $220, I can’t even imagine what these will debut at, let alone performance or gaming boards.

Thirdlier, DDR3 baby… you are going to have to drop the cash for DDR3 ram which isn’t too bad anymore, but for premium can still be a bit expensive.

Fourthly-est, solid-state! Solid state drives are the bomb as far as removing the most notorious system performance bottleneck, but they are horrifically expensive right now. Wouldn’t it suck to drop a fortune on a brand new Nehalem system and not be able to boot it up on it’s own SSD?

I think waiting until next Summer is the start of the good time to buy. Analysts aren’t expecting SSDs to become main-stream affordable until 2010, but it seems that the price of flash-ram in general is dropping like a goddamn rock, so I can’t imagine that we wouldn’t have some viable choices by middle of next year for mainstream SSDs atleast for a fast boot drive.

Then again, they are like $3-7k right now, so who knows.