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Tuesday 09 Dec 2008, 12:01am
Intel Nehalem “so fast it’s almost silly”
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The dual-socket server variant of the Intel Nehalem Xeon architecture is "so fast it's almost silly", according to TechRadar.
The tech website got a quick taste of Nehalem Xeons for some "guerrilla benchmarking" in a dual-socket system running at 2.8GHz with 24GB of memory. The system scored a scorching SPECfp value of 160 - compared with 90 for the current Penryn-based Xeons running at 3.4GHz. Since the speed will be up to 3.2GHz by the time the processors are commercially available, the eventual speed will be even better.
The big improvement is in the new QuickPath bus, which replaces the front side bus, and the integrated memory controller, replacing a discrete one in current architectures. As a result, the memory bandwidth is "borderline biblical", says TechRadar, "clocking up 35GB/s in SiSoft Sandra's quick and dirty bandwidth benchmark".
By comparison, AMD's Shanghai gets only 105. It reaches 190 if you run four sockets, but the Nehalem two-socket score is likely to improve. "In other words," says TechRadar, "as good as AMD's new Shanghai chip is, it appears that Nehalem EP will slap it around with a wet fish."
There's a longer comparative posting at Anandtech, but Johan de Gelas there admits he is comparing desktop Nehalems with server Shanghais.
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