New processors and chipsets

[Peter Nelson]

Intel's next products are well on the way.

For example Gigabyte just announced a 975 based board which they say will be in your local shop in about 2 weeks time (we expected to see these in January).

975 supports the upcoming processors Presler and Conroe etc.

The board can also split its x16 pci-express slot into two x8 slots.

See details in "news" on the Gigabyte website www.gigabyte.com.tw

ALSO

Intel's next chips are the 9xx to repace current 8xx dualcore.

They will have virtualisation, TWICE the L2 cache, and are made on the 65nm process so should be cooler.

www.Anandtech.com got hold of some 9xx and compared HEAT (which relates to power consumption) against 8xx processors.

I'm impressed by their results. Something like 3.4Ghz 9xx ran as cool as a 2.8GHz 8xx chip.

This should all be good news for GIMPS.

The extra L2 cache might speed up the fft, and the cost to leave a machine running 24x7 will come down (or we can have a faster processor for the same consumption).

If anyone gets their hands on one of these please post results to the perpetual benchmark thread.

[Jeff Gilchrist]

Is the dual-core design the same as the 8xx series, just two P4s sandwiched together or does this CPU have the modified design now that Intel keeps promising?

[Peter Nelson]

Originally Posted by Jeff Gilchrist

Is the dual-core design the same as the 8xx series, just two P4s sandwiched together or does this CPU have the modified design now that Intel keeps promising?

AFAIK, the design of the core is similar, each having its own cache (and twice as much of it).

However I believe they are made using two separate dies adjacent rather than all made on one. This will make better yields in manufacture. Also the 9xx cores have the VT feature added.

The two cores do NOT have SHARED L2 cache between them, as is planned for the next-gen architecture 2H 2006 ie "Conroe", but those processors should still be supported by the 975X based motherboards.

[Dresdenboy]

Since this thread doesn't seem to be for x86 only, I'll link to a collection of fresh presentation slides regarding the very promising PA Semi CPU (seems, it will have a really good performance/watt ratio - much better than Cell,.. and the rest anyway ):
http://www.ppcnux.de/modules.php?nam...ticle&sid=5840

It is compatible to PowerPC. So Glucas and Mlucas might be the first GIMPS clients running on it.

Most interesting for us here might be the mentioned performance of 24 GFlop/s FFT performance (resulting from their simulations) at 2 GHz, which means 13 W typ. TDP ("Intel TDP") or 25 W max. TDP ("AMD TDP"). The difference between these numbers is greater than usual, because the chip has much more control over what to switch on and of (it's a CPU designed for performance/watt from the ground up).

[T.Rex]

Hi,
Probably many of you already know about it ...
For the others, Sun has recently (and sooner than expected) delivered a new Processor named UltraSparc T1 providing 2 to 8 cores per chip and 4 threads per core: a maximum of 32 threads on 1 chip !
I guess other constructors (Intel, AMD, ...) will also increase the number of cores per Chip in the next future (in 2 years I think) from 2 to much more.
Sooner or later, mprime should move to multi-threading, I guess ...
Tony