Is Intel scared of Nehalem?

by Tarinder Sandhu on 21 August 2008, 14:38

Tags: i7, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

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Scared, what?

 Intel scared of Nehalem?

Intel has officially acknowledged the existence of Nehalem, its next-generation microarchitecture, during several keynotes during this week's Intel Developer Forum Fall 2008. It's even been productised to Core i7, so it's real, very real.

However, as much time as Intel has put into disclosing what makes this particular core such an engineering leap forward over the present generation, hard-and-fast performance numbers have been difficult to come by - kind of surprising for a chip that launches in the next few months, right?

One would expect a class-leading architecture which will become the backbone of Intel's server, desktop and mobile parts for at least the next two years, to be heralded with the usual glut of 'oh-my-lord-it's-fast' benchmarks, suitably skewed (ahem, normalised) to AMD's fastest, thereby showing the delta that, Intel believes, exists between the semiconductor rivals' best.

So why no angelic trumpets and red-carpet treatment for a design that, on paper, takes present Core 2 (Penryn) to the cleaners in a number of memory-bandwidth and heavily-threaded instances?

Is it because of AMD?

Could it be that AMD's announcement that it will pull its next processor update, Shanghai, forward to Q4 2008 has Intel execs quaking in their expensive suits? We don't think so, because Shanghai's performance improvements over current-generation Barcelona are generally known, and it'll struggle to add more than 20 per cent extra oomph when evaluated on a clock-for-clock basis against Phenom X4. Knowing this, Shanghai will probably perform somewhat akin to Intel's Penryn.

Could the lack of numbers have something to do with Nehalem's performance not being quite up to scratch? That seems highly unlikely, especially if our Nehalem performance preview is accurate, and we have no reason to doubt that our 2D numbers will stack up against retail samples.

It's a question of economics, we reckon

Ultimately, we reckon that Nehalem performance has been deliberately kept under wraps by the powers that be. Why? Because letting a full suite of numbers out for public consumption, which has been Intel's method of disseminating its engineering excellence since first-generation Core microarchitecture hit AMD Athlon in the nuts, inextricably dampens - nay, crushes - sales of present-generation parts.

As a consumer or business, why would you buy a Core 2-based system when something potentially better, lots better, is just around the corner? - a product that will require a new motherboard and, potentially, new memory - kerching! Knowing just how much of a whipping Nehalem can potentially hand to Penryn in heavily-threaded scenarios, Intel would be driving potential customers away from mid-to-high-end sales of a chip that's been yielding well for some time. Cutting off your nose to spite your face comes to mind.

Intel is scared of Nehalem, insofar as its prodigious performance makes Intel's current line-up look, well, a little tardy by comparison, and why tell people that when there are millions of Core 2-equippe d machines waiting to be sold at the likes of PC World and Best Buy? Why spend $400 on a chip, or $2,000 on a system, now when the same money will buy you so much more performance in just three months?

Of course, after so little sleep during IDF, this particular hack could well be off his rocker. We'll let you decide.



HEXUS Forums :: 13 Comments

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right now, intel are competing within themself atm and you maybe right, that initial benchmarks dont tell teh true story on how powerful nehalem realy is. i mean showing off full benchmark numbers on a produc thats coming out in a few months time could do more harm then good with your current stock. i expect proper numbers to appear with weeks of nehalem finaly coming out.

i cant wait for these baby's to come out
The 6th and 7th paragraphs don't quite match up.

Nehalem's performance not being quite up to scratch, but good enough to crush sales of present-generation parts?
This article:
http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=480

Has a different opinion, in that it looks like the architecture has been designed with the intention of rounding it out and desktop performance is not expected to leap miles ahead of Penryn until quads are better supported.
Tetras
This article:
http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=480

Has a different opinion, in that it looks like the architecture has been designed with the intention of rounding it out and desktop performance is not expected to leap miles ahead of Penryn until quads are better supported.

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying - the performance is leaps and bounds ahead of C2D/Q at a clock for clock level…

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=15015

we have shown performance on the product here….

Could the lack of numbers have something to do with Nehalem's performance not being quite up to scratch? That seems highly unlikely, especially if our Nehalem performance preview is accurate, and we have no reason to doubt that our 2D numbers will stack up against retail samples.

I think if you read the comments - http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=145760

You can see the general thoughts of the HEXUS reader, some will jump others won't

It will be interesting to see the performance at the lower clock speeds and see how they stand up…
I'm not sure I understand what you are saying - the performance is leaps and bounds ahead of C2D/Q at a clock for clock level…
I was a bit ambiguous, by desktop performance what I meant was games.

Anandtech
Nehalem is about improving HPC, Database, and virtualization performance, and much less about gaming performance. Maybe this will change once games get some heavy physics threads, but not right away.

Why? Most Games are about fast caches and super integer performance. After all, most of the Floating point action is already happening on the GPU. The Core 2 CPUs were a huge step forward in integer performance (not the least because of memory disambiguation) compared to the CPUs of that time (P4 and K8). Nehalem is only a small step forward in integer performance, and the gains due to slightly increased integer performance are mostly negated by the new cache system.

Anandtech
The percentage of L2 caches misses for most games running on a Penryn CPU is extremely low. Now that is going to change. The integrated memory controller of Nehalem will help some, but the fact remains that the L3 is slow and the L2 is small. However, that doesn't mean Intel made a bad choice. Intel made a superbly good choice by improving the performance where Core (Merom/Penryn) was mediocre to good. Penryn was already a magnificent gaming CPU, but it could not beat the AMD competition in HPC benchmarks, and AMD put up a good fight in database performance benchmarks. Now Intel is ready to fix these shortcomings.

I take that to mean clock for clock up against high clocked Penryns where quads aren't yet supported Nehalem doesn't perform well right now (against Penryn) and this also seems to be the case with your gaming benchmarks (with the exception of 3D Mark Vantage, which can deal with the cores).