August 23, 2005 General 4

The Inquirer:

There are some shades of old Intel technology in the new chip such as:
On the baggage side, the lower integer performance is more due to the shorter pipe length, and it looks like Merom cores will be faster than Opteron+’s in int, but lose a little to them in FP, quite the change.

A lot of this is due to bandwith to the cores, and that is the weakest link for Merom. They keep the current infrastructure, can keep the chipsets, and keep the FSB. The target for Woodcrest, the server version of Merom is a 1333MHz FSB. The quad core MCM Clovertown will drop down to 1066, and Conroe will sit on 1066 also. I think that Conroe will end up on a 1333, but officially, it isn’t. Merom will be lower due to power constraints.

So the shared FSB is still here. If Intel would only ditch this ancient tech then with all of the other things they are doing they can roast AMD erformance-wise, however I am not sure they will do it with these chips. However there is some excellent news:
(from theregsiter.com)Not only is the garbage HT gone from the new chips:

(quoting the inquirer)” How much power does it take? Merom is listed at 35W TDP, with a 1-2W average consumption. Intel is supposed to be binning on power consumption as well as power, so the higher speeds may end up to actually use less power. Conroe sits at 65W for the desktop, and Woodcrest is at 80W. Conroe and Woodcrest are substantial improvements over their predecessors, and Merom is slightly higher outright, but vastly more efficient as far as performance per watt is concerned. It should end up more efficient overall because it can do more in less time more efficiently, but I will wait for samples before I say that for sure.

How fast are they? Well as far as raw clock speeds, Merom will be in the low 2Ghz range, Conroe and Woodcrest in the 2.5-3GHz range and Clovertown a couple of bins down from Woodcrest. Clock for clock, look for a 30% improvement. This chip is going to give AMD quite the run for its money. ?”

We’ll see. I think power dissapation vs. performance is going to be a problem for AMD as their dual cores are beginning to touch the 110 watt mark. If that is the case AMD is going to have a real problem with Intel’s new chips. I await the new chips release and the upcoming reviews.