Guest post by InfoWorld’s Paul Venezia put Intel’s new Nehalem to the test and found the technology a “game-changing development”. Using an HP ProLiant DL580 with four quad-core Intel Xeon X7350 CPUs running at 2.93GHz per core as a baseline, Venezia’s Nehalem system – which ran two quad-core Intel Xeon W5580 CPUs at 3.2GHz per core with HyperThreading enabled – performed roughly 60 percent faster across a battery of tests, including gzip compression, WAV-to-MP3 encoding, MPEG-4 to Flash Video conversion, and mysql-bench. Even more impressive, Venezia found, was that the Nehalem system did all that while serving double-duty as his workstation. “At the same time the Nehalem was executing my battery of tests, it was driving a 30-inch and a 24-inch monitor off an Nvidia Quadro FX 5500, playing an MPEG movie in full-screen on the 30-inch monitor, and running more than 500 processes across four virtual desktops, including dozens of terminal sessions, Firefox browser sessions, Java applications, and streaming audio — and it still put up these numbers.”
…and relegated to the budget market. Unless they come up with something big soon, it’s game over
Will there be notebook versions of these Nehalem CPUs?
Yes, but pretty power hungry with TDP of 45W. At least in 45nm process.
Edited 2009-03-31 02:28 UTC
The memory controller is now on die, so it isn’t really a fair comparison. Overall power use and TDP should be lower.
IIRC I don’t think it’ll come out until the end of this year, by that time I’d say they’ll be using a more efficient process.
Scary enough intel just released a bunch of the i7 xeons.
I just priced 2×2.0GHz nahalems, motherboard and 24GB ram for $1200 on newegg.
Needs case, power, drives and UPS and you’re good to go. And definitely price comparable with the core2 xeons.
AMD had price problems with dual quad configurations compared with the dual core2 quads already (bought late last year). They’re dead in the server market.
Edited 2009-04-03 04:56 UTC