Intel Pushes Back with Xeon 5100 140
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece on Intel's newest chip, the Xeon 5100, which many consider might be the chip that will llow them to stop losing ground to AMD. From the article: 'During the presentation, Intel ran the now-standard comparison test against AMD's highest performing chip, handily beating the system in a speed test. And in a jab at AMD execs, who handed kill-o-watt meters to analysts at the outfit's recent technology day, Intel execs used the same device to measure the new Xeon 5100 system's performance — gauged to be 7 watts better than that of the AMD-based system.'"
Keyword... (Score:2, Insightful)
Shilling (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Shilling (Score:2)
Except, if you use Google, you can find hundreds of people who've used all three Core 2 chips, who have published benchmarks at both base levels and overclocked, including power usage. Furthermore, their "Paper Launch" as you call it is the best they can do; they're already taking orders
Keyword: dumping? (Score:3, Interesting)
There can be no argument that, if AMD were back on the K5 and Intel's lead were comfortable, these chips would never be priced so aggressively. This is designed to erase AMD's market share.
Since Japan has alrea
Re:Keyword: dumping? (Score:2)
No. According to Wikipedia dumping is the act of a manufacturer in one country exporting a product to another country at what some perceive as an unreasonably low price. It might however be regarded as 'predatory pricing'.
But, as both AMD and Intel are highly profitable companies, it would be better described as good old fashioned competition. This isn't going to put AMD out of business; it isn't even going to push AMD into losses. But it might just mean cheaper processors
Re:Keyword: dumping? (Score:2)
How can you claim dumping? All chips of a given processor line cost the same to make, regardless of speed. The final speed rating is determined at the very end of manufacturing, partly by chip capabilities and partly by market demand. A processor costs in the around $50 to produce (number pulled from memory of an article I read years ago, so not very accurate, but probably still close enough for this discussion). You
Re:Keyword: dumping? (Score:2)
http://economics.about.com/library/glossary/bldef
kill-o-watts are nice. (Score:2)
Re:kill-o-watts are nice. (Score:2)
They'll like them so much you'll probably never get it back.
Similar processes? (Score:2)
Re:Similar processes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, sweet irony, forgive them! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Oh, sweet irony, forgive them! (Score:1)
Re:Oh, sweet irony, forgive them! (Score:3, Interesting)
Road Map (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not that they had anything that was all that much better than IBM or AMD at the time they were making their pitch to Jobs. It was the fact that their immediate future was being prepped with some impressive technology, both in terms of speed and speed-per-watt, which turned the Steve's head.
No. (Score:5, Interesting)
True (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No. (Score:2)
I doubt it was production issues caused the switch (Score:2)
SirWired
Re:I doubt it was production issues caused the swi (Score:2)
Yet Intel looked at those exact same numbers and said, "yes, please!!! Let us fly somebody out to you right away to pitch our entire next two years of plans to you."
Re:I doubt it was production issues caused the swi (Score:2)
SirWired
Re:No. (Score:2)
Re:No. (Score:4, Insightful)
What a thoughtful and insightful post. Clearly IBM does not have production and yield problems, because they are courting three major game console manufacturers with their wonderful, efficient chips.
Oh wait. Of these three, only two of them are actually available. Hrm.
Oh yeah, and I seem to recall something about a shortage of XBox360s. Something about a chip company not making as many chips as they promised. Must've been the wifi card or something.
WAIT, I DO recall a time when a company - think it was IBM - didn't produce enough G5 chips and people were backordering their Power Macs for months! Perhaps there is something to this after all.
What's that? Your XBox360 consumes so much power that the PSU caught fire and burned a hole in your carpet? Guess there is a performance-per-watt issue after all. You know, that really does matter to a lot of people. There are data centers, especially in downtown locations, that can't grow their business any more because the power company won't sell them any more wattage. And if you remove the excess thermal paste, MBPs aren't all that hot.
So yeah. Troll somewhere else.
Re:No. (Score:2)
The rumor going around is that it was DDR3 RAM chips causing the shortage.
WAIT, I DO recall a time when a company - think it was IBM - didn't produce enough G5 chips and people were backordering their Power Macs for months! Perhaps there is something to this after all.
The word going around on that was that Apple would submit c
Re:No. (Score:1, Flamebait)
You're Cringley, aren't you? BTW, you forgot to link to your nasty little troll site. Remember, it's:
Just FYI.
Woodcrest: good processor but not sufficient ? (Score:5, Informative)
Just to recap things, the Xeon 5100-series, aka "Woodcrest", is the very first released processor family that is based on the new 8th generation, Intel Core Microarchitecture, technically inspired from the 6th generation (PPro, PII, PIII), instead of the 7th generation (P4). As a side note, Intel has been using the "Core Solo" and "Core Duo" denominations for some processors but this is just a marketing usage of the term "Core", because such processors are NOT based on the Intel Core Microarchitecture. Anyway, Woodcrest is the first to represent this all-new Intel Core Microarchitecture that is supposed to save Intel from the very competitive K8 design (Opteron, Athlon64...).
So, Woodcrest seems indeed to be a very good processor, as shown in this preview [gamepc.com] (the less-biased, more technically accurate I have been able to find up to this day). Intel claims that Woodcrest is "80% more performant at 35% less power" compared to the original dual-core Xeon processor, and most benchmarks seem to confirm this claim. It may seem technically impressive, but in fact considering the very poor design of the original dual-core Xeon processor, such an improvement HAD to be expected and was almost a prerequisite for Intel to even start thinking about taking back Opteron's market share.
Here is a quick fact list I have assembled from my own research and from the review linked above:
At equal clock frequencies, Woodcrest is about 5-15% more powerful than Opteron on traditional workloads (common x86 and arithmetic instructions), and much more powerful (30% and more) than Opteron on multimedia workloads (mostly SSE, SSE2, maybe FPU I am not sure).
At equal clock frequencies, Opteron is still much more powerful (30% and more) than Woodcrest on memory-intensive workloads due to its integrated memory controller (leading to better latency) and ccHT links in SMP cases (where memory throughput increases with the number of ccHT links).
At equal clock frequencies, Woodcrest consumes less power than Opteron, but Woodcrest's memory (FB-DIMM) requires more power than Opteron's memory (DDR400). So overall, a Woodcrest-based system consumes about as much power as an Opteron-based system (as shown in page 3 of the review).
At equal clock frequencies, Woodcrest is cheaper than Opteron, but Woodcrest motherboards (socket 771) are more expensive than Opteron motherboards (socket 939 and 940) and FB-DIMM memory is twice the price of DDR400. These pricing differences are so large that Opteron is still preferable to Woodcrest in most cases: Opteron is cheaper for any single or dual-cpu server config with 4 GB or more of memory, Opteron is cheaper for any entry-level server config (about $1500 and below) whatever the amount of memory is, Woodcrest seems to only make sense when the high-end processors (Xeon 5140, 5150 and 5160) are used with NO MORE than 4 GB of memory (else Opteron's cheaper memory has a price advantage).
Of course, in the high-end server market (4, 8 or more processors), Opteron is still the clear technical leader because Intel STILL hasn't switched to a CPU interconnect similar to HT and STILL isn't using an integrated memory controller.
In conclusion, I would say that when comparing only the processors, Woodcrest is superior to Opteron in many aspects (such as instruction throughput), and Opteron beats Woodcrest in other aspects (such as memory accesses). But when comparing a whole Woodcrest-based system versus an Opteron-based system, other factors come into play (such as price and scalibility), which make Opteron superior to Woodcrest in a lot of cases.
Re:Woodcrest: good processor but not sufficient ? (Score:2)
Since there doesn't even exist an Opteron running at 3GHz (at any price), wouldn't such a large-cached Xeon beat the Opteron in both -- speed and memory access?
I can buy a dual (4-core) Xeon system from Dell right now with 8Gb of memory for just over $5K. Or are those a different kind of Xeon or memory?
Re:Woodcrest: good processor but not sufficient ? (Score:2)
My $5265 quote (which includes Windows 2003 Server R2/64 — another $800 — regular WinXP/64 not available) is for two dual core Xeons. For the same price I c
Re:Woodcrest: good processor but not sufficient ? (Score:2)
That's been my take on it. The newer Intel processors have closed the gap (within
Duh (Score:2, Flamebait)
In other news, my XBox360 runs way faster than your PS2 =P
Seriously, can we at least attempt to compare apples to apples on /. instead or regurgitating marketing BS.
Re:Duh (Score:2)
Re:Duh (Score:2)
"Intel has the (apparent) fastest chip out there"
"who cares, it's on 65 micron, we should'nt talk about 65 micron until all suppliers use 65 micron"
Just trying to figure out how what you wrote wasn't Fanboyism, please prove me wrong.
I just hope then that when AMD releases a c
Re:Duh (Score:2, Insightful)
I think what he means is that we should compare Intel's not-buyable new chips with AMD's not-buyable new chips. When end-users start taking delivery of Woodcrest servers in, what, August maybe?, then maybe Intel can boast for perhaps even several weeks until AMD's new server chips are
Re:Duh (Score:3, Informative)
Intel isn't getting leapfrogged anytime soon, as AMD is a full 1 year behind Intel in the 65nm race. Intel, on the otherhand will be leapfrogging AMD even firther as their 45nm ramp appears to be happening sooner
Re:Duh (Score:2)
Too bad for Intel that AMD is going to start producing 45nm chips 18 months after they ship 65nm chips, which is only months away now. AMD will claim the price/performance crown back when they go to 65nm. Then they will catch up with Intel on smaller processes when they move to 45nm.
Re:Duh (Score:2)
Re:Duh (Score:1)
Re:Duh (Score:2)
Intel is miles ahead of AMD in their process technology. It is not Intel's fault if AMD is still stuck with 90nm technology. As of now, Intel's best chip (woodcrest) is better than AMD's best chip (opteron). Accept it, and stop whining like a baby.
Who knows what will happen in future? AMD may come with a faster chip, and Intel retaliate with even faster chip (Nehalem)
Re:Duh (Score:1)
I don't know that it is, I just consider it a possibility, given the comparison.
They only have 2 of the 3 key components to win (Score:1, Interesting)
Who cares is Intel is a few mips faster?
Re:They only have 2 of the 3 key components to win (Score:3, Insightful)
The cost of procurement of a server is a tiny percentage of its TCO.
Re:They only have 2 of the 3 key components to win (Score:1)
Re:They only have 2 of the 3 key components to win (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They only have 2 of the 3 key components to win (Score:1)
Now don't get me wrong, I like AMD and use it in my gaming machine. But you got your facts mixed up. It's wintel, not winamd.
Re:They only have 2 of the 3 key components to win (Score:2)
Actually they probably have all 3 (Score:2)
I doubt it. I'd bet that Intel fabs spit out processors at a much lower unit cost than AMD.
Re:Actually they probably have all 3 (Score:1)
Re:Actually they probably have all 3 (Score:1)
Re:They only have 2 of the 3 key components to win (Score:1)
Who cares is Intel is a few mips faster?
Well... on many tasks, it's more than a few mips faster. However, this "great advancement" is (or will be) priced quite nicely, if you've actually bothered to look up the price lists that have been available on the web for the past few months. There's your 3rd of the three.
Preemptive strike (Score:5, Funny)
I'd say the odds of that are llow.
Re:Preemptive strike (Score:1)
Crap, Intel better hurry, AMD already stole their A.
Fantastic (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I have no preference in the whole AMD vs Intel debate, I just use whatever seems to give me the most value for money / required performance. I am currently using AMD chips in kit 4 years old or younger and Intel chips in some of my older hardware, and haven't yet even looked at AMD64 or IA64 chips). but it is really good to see some serious competition between two industry giants. Long live the competition, its better for the consumer.
Re:Fantastic (Score:1)
Me too. Except Intel's love for DRM has me worried. And all this processor X is 1% faster than processor Y reminds me of a classical joke. It goes something like this:
A science teacher introduces a guest speaker to the class to talk about the Sun. In his talk he says, "The core temperature of the Sun is 15,000,000 degrees". The teacher interrupts and says, "Is that Celsius or Fahrenheit?". The guest speaker looks at him dauntingly and says, "
Re:Fantastic (Score:1)
Re:Fantastic (Score:1)
Although 15,000,000 sounds awfully high...
Re:Fantastic (Score:2)
15000000 Celsius == 15000273 Kelvin == 27 000 492 rankine = 27 000 032 Fahrenheit
The point of the original poster is that 15M degrees is darn hot, whether it's C or F (or K or r).
IA64 == Itanium (Score:2)
This is already pretty well documented. (Score:4, Informative)
Toms Hardware has a review of the New Intel Chips. [tomshardware.com] I know, the page came out a few days ago, but the information is the same, and much of it has been available for many months.
Toms also has the AMD AM2 Socket [tomshardware.com] and the incremental upgrades on the other side of the house.
Re:This is already pretty well documented. (Score:2)
Re:This is already pretty well documented. (Score:2)
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2004May/bch2004
Re:This is already pretty well documented. (Score:2)
With such a large lead time, it is impossible for any superconductor manufacturer to respond quickly to market pressures. They guess what the market is going t
And if you want 64-bit Linux server benchmarks... (Score:1)
great for the market but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:great for the market but... (Score:2)
That AMD doesn't use 65 nm yet doesn't make the results skewed - if they had 90 and 65 nm versions shipping now and the 90 nm was worse and the one featured in the test, it would be. At the current state, it's just another option for AMD to improve their product.
90, 65, 45, 32 nm--where do these #s come from? (Score:2)
Re:90, 65, 45, 32 nm--where do these #s come from? (Score:2)
Re:90, 65, 45, 32 nm--where do these #s come from? (Score:2)
180^2/130^2 = 1.9
130^2/90^2 = 2.1
...
45^2/32^2 = 1.98
32^2/22^2 = 2.1
Numbers skewed? (Score:2)
Wouldn't this be an important thing to note? Perhaps later this year would be a better time to compare
Re:Numbers skewed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Numbers skewed? (Score:2)
Corporate customers tend to do things like plan their purchases ahead of time.
If the Corporate customer doesn't have a pressing reason to make a new purchase right now, maybe they can sit back for another 6+ months while AMD preps its next chips.
Re:Numbers skewed? (Score:2)
If the Corporate customer doesn't have a pressing reason to make a new purchase right now, maybe they can sit back for another 6+ months while AMD preps its next chips.
Or they can wait another 12 months until Intel starts shipping their 45nm chips (according to the roadmaps). Any way you slice it, Intel seems to be a year or more ahead in their ability to bring die size improvements to their fabrication, but we all new Intel was ahead in that department anyway. The issue is, AMD has thus far been unable
Re:Numbers skewed? (Score:2)
A 3ghz 65nm P4 will be just as fast (or slow) as a 3ghz 90nm P4 (yes both exsist).
And the new Intel chips are actually running lower speeds (in ghz) than the AMD chips they are beating.
-Lazn
Re:Numbers skewed? (Score:2)
Competition (Score:2, Insightful)
That's how you get good products at low prices - comeptition, plan and simple. The thing that is unfortunate with markets like PC and server processors (or even operating systems) is that there are only two major market share holders, and one of them is much larger tha
Ah.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Competition? (Score:1)
Does this include... (Score:4, Insightful)
Does this include the required Intel Northbridge chip (22W), or are we only looking at the CPU itself? And does the NB need a fan?
Or is this the entire system motherboard, in which cases this is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison.
Re:Does this include... (Score:2)
Re:Does this include... (Score:2)
Re:Does this include... (Score:2)
more then 2 cpus (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:more then 2 cpus (Score:1)
The coprocessor stuff AMD is doing is a lot of hot air. Different companies talk about "coprocessors" every few years and nothing has *ever* come of it for the consumer and very few things for the typical IT department. The PhysX coprocessor is the first thing that's come c
The key question (Score:2)
Is this new chip AMD compatible?
Details? (Score:2, Insightful)
But the peripheral requirements -- particularly FB-DIMM -- are interesting, too. And maybe a little scary. Anybody got a clue how these FB-DIMM units are gonna be priced per GB? We haven't seen any details on mobo pricing, either.
I like the idea of lower power consumption and greater throughput. But if I can't afford to build the system, it doesn't do me much good.
This announcement does sorta smell like marketing hype; I guess the implementations wil
Re:Details? (Score:2)
Re:Details? (Score:1)
A 1GB FB-DIMM of Crucial DDR2 533 is $147.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16820146584 [newegg.com]
Another stick of the same RAM from Crucial in traditional format is about $110, although this is OEM, so it's probably a little cheaper.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16820161400 [newegg.com]
It's not that horrible of a difference,
Re:Details? (Score:2)
Yet another technology accepting higher latency in favor of higher throughput (like Rambus, but less restricted). DDR2 is higher latency than DDR1.
Motherboards may become cheaper, as the traces for memory are much simpler for FB-DIMMs than traditional DIMMs.
Re:Details? (Score:2, Interesting)
When will they... (Score:1)
Intel: Long live the Front Side Bus! (Score:2, Interesting)
Dodgy benchmarking (Score:2)
Re:Dodgy benchmarking (Score:2)
Unreleased [hp.com] product [hp.com]?
I wonder... (Score:2)
It's Kill-A-Watt, thank you. (Score:2)
Seriously, I find mine coming in handy for more than just treehugging energy audits. It helped me diagnose a UPS whose charging circuit wasn't slipping into trickle mode, and was damaging batteries as a result. It lets me know whether certain devices will really run from the car's inverter, and once I plug them in, it lets me monitor the inverter's voltage drop.
What startled me when I first
Ah Grammer Nazi...the arch nemesis of... (Score:4, Funny)
Thank goodness you were here! Many of us may have missed that one.....
Regards,
The Amazing Sarcasmo
Re:Ah Grammer Nazi...the arch nemesis of... (Score:2)
Re:Still feature limited (Score:1)
Re:Still feature limited (Score:5, Interesting)
The Optron's scaling issues beyond 4P is not "worse then expected," because it is entirely expected of the architecture.
The high-end Opteron has 3 HT links. This means it can work with up to 8 sockets "gluelessly," but it really performans much better with 4-socket systems. The architecture for a 4-way Opteron server uses the extra HT link to reduice the number of hops [linuxsoft.cz], so only one case has two hops.
But you can imagine that the 8-way configurations have a much higher average number of hops between processors, PLUS much more data flowing over the same HT links. No, the K8 Opteron is not really designed well for 8-socket systems.
But K8L IS designed for 8-socket systems.
Take a look at a page on this in the K8L preview article on Real World Technologies [realworldtech.com]. Adding a 4th HT link will really make a difference.
4-socket K8L systems benefit because they take advantage of the 4 HT links to provide 1-hop latency to all sockets in the mesh, and can now have external I/O hooked up to ALL processors.
8-socket K8L systems take advantage of two things: the extra HT link is beneficial, and the advanced mesh created by splitting up the HT bus widths means MUCH better performance for 8-way systems.
Woodcrest is impressive as hell, but I will tell you one thing: there's no way in hell it's going to scale well beyond 4-socket systems. This is for the same reasons that have been holding back performance on 4-way Xeon syetems (reduced bus speeds with 4 processors on the bus, too much traffic). The Dual-Independent Bus allows Intel to scale well to 4-way, but no higher. K8L will allow for glueless scaling to 8-way, and will still provide a a cheaper solution than Intel's Dual-Independent Bus for 4-way chipsets and motherboard designs.
Re:Still feature limited (Score:2)
Recent reviews of the Core 2 Duo have mentioned that Intel avoided this because it would limit their future chip designs, and they instead relied on Moore's Law to catch up. Word is that AMD is now limited to a certain design strategy that isn't as efficient as Intel's because of that memory controller (which doesn't provide improved performance over Intel anymore...Intel's new chips stomp the AMDs).
Incorrect. (Score:1)