Codename Nehalem

[etha]

Any thoughts?

[Robbie]

Monster chip. Monster platform. And I would class myself as a big AMD fan. Congrats Intel.
Nice review as always.

[Robbie]

Wonder when the Xeon version is out? These will be really nice in a blade environment.
How hot does the memory get?

[scovich]

Nice article. Now I'm regretting the quad core xeons we just barely bought last month

Once question though: in the MPG to AVI conversions, it looks like the SSE4-enabled version is significantly slower than stock, especially for the non-Nehalem processors. That poor 6850 jumped from 13 seconds to 22, and even the Nehalems all went up by at least one second. About the only thing that sped up was the FX74 (from 37 to 35 sec), but it's half as fast as the leaders anyway.

I'm not so sure that SSE4 making "all the difference" is a good thing here... or am I missing something?

[M_S]

Nice article. Now I'm regretting the quad core xeons we just barely bought last month

Once question though: in the MPG to AVI conversions, it looks like the SSE4-enabled version is significantly slower than stock, especially for the non-Nehalem processors. That poor 6850 jumped from 13 seconds to 22, and even the Nehalems all went up by at least one second. About the only thing that sped up was the FX74 (from 37 to 35 sec), but it's half as fast as the leaders anyway.

I'm not so sure that SSE4 making "all the difference" is a good thing here... or am I missing something?

The SSE4 enabled recoding is a higher quality recode compared to the non-SSE4-based process. So you are correct in a way, in a lower quality mode, the Nehalem or any SSE4 enabled CPU may be outperformed by other processors but as soon as you go to high quality mode and use SSE4 instructions to speed up the operations, then there is a real benefit.

Hope this explains it.

[M_S]

Wonder when the Xeon version is out? These will be really nice in a blade environment.
How hot does the memory get?

There was really no issue with memory getting more than hand-warm under the operation conditions for this article. Load on the individual DIMMs seems to be relatively low, courtesy of the "distributed" access to the memory space and just by hand / touch, I would estimate the chip surface temperature (Micron D-Die at 1333 and 1.65) to hover around 30-35C.

[Robbie]

My Bl360's are showing 50-55C in the memory region in a fully turbined up C7000 enclosure. Then again there are 8 FB Dimms for a total of 16GB. Those things get more than hand hot
Thanks for that, good to know.

[Cain]

Excellent review.

I do have a question though, could you explain what you mean by

DVD DVD-Shrink does not run under Vista, therefore the resuls were obtained under XP only.

Thanks.

[M_S]

Excellent review.

I do have a question though, could you explain what you mean by

DVD-Shrink does not run under Vista, therefore the resuls were obtained under XP only.

Thanks.

Vista with its DRM has locked out certain programs because they (supposedly) violate copyright / copy protection. DVD Shrink is one of these programs, likewise, older versions of Nero that would allow certain cop modes (up to Nero6) are locked out from use in Vista. Even with Nero 8 or 9 you need to get specific licenses for some of the features that are otherwise not working in Vista (Blu-Ray) whereas the same versions support all locked-out features in WinXP

Then there are some other programs that are not working in Vista, for example Cachemem but that is just for technical reasons, whereas the DRM stuff is part of the legal policing heralded by Microsoft

[KTE]

Can't tell you how glad I am that you're back up.. one way or another

Any domain/data recovery from the old site yet?

As mentioned at the ending section here, your Barracuda was a little hyperactive with my addy

Excellent review MS from what I read. Keep it up. I've only skimmed sections and won't have time till next weekend to read up properly. That said, there's no surprises here at all though. Some aspects are quite phenomenal especially due to a total Cache/Mem/IO subsystem design change over.