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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: PR-elude to the afternoon of a processor Mommy! Look, No Pins DDR2 Briefs Power Plays Sandra vs. Aida Cachemem 2.65 A Neat Analyser Intermission... Give Us Some Feedback to Help Us Improve our Reviews
Intel LGA775 SocketT New and (Un) improved?
(Review by MS, July 28, 2004)

Intermission

I arbitrarily pulled the plug on this review here, there are too many aspects of the new platform to cover to put it all into a single article, at least when it comes to a more in-depth coverage of the different features and performance profiles. By no means does this reflect our opinion about earlier "complete" coverage of the 9xx platform. It is just that we are still only scratching the surface of the technology and its capabilities - or lack thereof.

What it all comes down to is that there is a wealth of new features that needs to be evaluated over time, a prime example is the new LGA 775 SocketT. We had a look at a number of mainboards as early as Cebit in March 2004 where about everybody voiced their concerns about the reliability of the new interface and the wear and tear on the mainboard. There may be some truth to that but for what it is worth, in practice, these drawbacks will hardly cause any real problems. More of a concern from a manufacturing standpoint are the additional traces that need to be routed across the mainboard and that hits the manufacturers where it hurts most, namely on the level of the production costs.

Power consumption of DDR2 is up, as well, likewise, the new Intel CPUs consume about as much power as a reasonably sized air conditioning window unit. Even though this issue is played down compared to the thermal management problems, they add dramatically to the total cost of ownership. And then, the question is: for what?

We have only looked at memory benchmarks and DDR2 performed better than expected but only in the raw bandwidth exercises. In more sophisticated, real life benchmarks, the performance in general lagged behind the established DDR platform. We have heard the argument that this is a new platform and it will require some time to get optimized but frankly, it is not true. DDR2 technology has been around since 1998, at least in theory and even in practice, the over and over experienced delays have provided ample opportunity to optimise the product and platform since the one thing DDR2 is not, would be "rushed to market".

It appears clear even from preliminary results that DDR2 is limited by the host or Processor-System-Bus (PSB). Even on the i875 "Canterwood" chipset, the PSB could only be utilized by about 75% under optimal conditions. On the i925 platform, this number drops to 56% and on the i915 chipset only a meager 54% utilization of the total bandwidth is achieved. In other words, there is really nothing new, at least no new horizons in performance.

There are other aspects of the new platform, though, primarily the PCIe and NCQ enabled SATA interface that have some very promising outlook and we will cover those in the next articles.

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