Details on Intel Clarksfield processors

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Ridiculous pricing scheme. AMD, where art thou?

I'm fine with Montevina for the long haul.

 

Clarksfield is basically Core i7 for notebooks, right?

 

... Those Clevo 900F suddenly looked awesome

 

Not really, since mobile Nehalem does not have things in desktop i7/i5 like Quickpath Connect. And since you can already get i7 in some notebooks...

 

Well those are underwhelming clock speeds... I know it's not all about clockspeed, but still.

 

Is this some kind of ploy to sell Montevina CPUs? At those clock speeds, the processors don't make any sense: higher end mobile Core2Duos will annihilate them in anything that doesn't use more than 2 cores (let's face it, laptops are rarely used for stuff that does) and if you really wanted to pay $1000+ for a processor, the QX9300 will wipe the floor with any of these (even if they're truly equal to desktop Nehalems, they'd struggle to make up the huge difference in clock speed).

 

1K for the 2.0gHz extreme... wow

Still if its unlocked it will be readily overclockable. I had hoped for more though.

Guess i'm still waiting for the 32nm builds

 

Let's see... hmm...

http://www.intc.com/priceList.cfm

Mobile Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9300: 2.53GHz: $1038
Mobile Core 2 Quad Q9100: $851
Mobile Core 2 Quad Q9000: $348

Two things to note:

1. The link is wrong. It's Core i7/i5 not Core 2 Quad, they have a typo
2. This is the original source: http://www.hkepc.com/2765

The source says basically those quad core Mobile Nehalem will have 35W TDP. Compared to today's Core 2 Quad mobiles at 45W(which is really 55W because it doesn't include northbridge) that doesn't include the entire northbridge on die, I'd say its quite good.

Pretty sure they'll have higher clocked 45W or 55W versions later.

 

If that's true and well implemented, it could greatly make up for the slower clock speeds...we'll have to wait and see.

 

Yea, plus its only 35W. I don't know why they want to make it that low, but I guess they have to get there eventually. We already know Turbo Boost works pretty well because of the implementation on the Core i7.

Sandy Bridge will have significantly more advanced version of Turbo Boost.

 

Something seems wrong here, those clock speeds are way lower than current offerings at higher prices.

Even if it is the mobile version of the i7 I dont think it will be fast enough clock for clock at those lower speeds to end up much if any faster than what we have now.

Something seems amiss.

 

Actually Vicious have to say if you note one of the public benchmarks of the desktop i5 it puts a 2.13Ghz i5 against a 2.66 Ghz i7 and a Overclocked Q6600 at like 3.40 Ghz.

Not sure how the mobile version will stack up.

 

"The Core 2 Extreme XE (2GHz), Core 2 Quad P2 (1.73GHz) and Core 2 Quad P1 (1.6GHz), will be priced at US$1,054, US$546 and US$364 in thousand-unit tray quantities, the sources revealed."


If we exclude the XE version which is not for common users, we have 2 clock speeds:

- Core 2 Quad P2 (1.73GHz)
- Core 2 Quad P1 (1.6GHz)

Unless they are 2x more efficient, they will be blown up by the current T9800 and T9900 series. If you are using a Montevina machine, it will be wise to upgrade your CPU to a T9900 and use it for the next 2 years... (that's what I will do.)

--

 

I'll have to research it confirm but I figured a 3ghz i7 is similar to a 3.4ghz Core2Quad. 2.66 = 3.4 sounds a bit too far fetched to me.

wprime times or encoding times would be a good bench to confirm.

 

Compare them to the similar power level "P" series Core 2 and the three Core i7 mobiles will be much more comparable. I can assure you they won't be the direct replacement to QX9300.

 

all i need to hear

 

Link

 

wow, those better be pretty efficent otherwise they are going to get destroyed by the old stuff.

 

Turbo mode? A là Dynamic Acceleration? The thing that boots clockspeed on Montevina but almost never kicks in? I managed to get it to consistantly a couple months ago - by disabling one of my cores. I'll believe that works when I see it - at least MSI's Turbo Mode is reputed to actually work most of the time.

And since when is 8 MB of L3 "massive"? You can get 6 MB of L 2 on a lot of CPUs now - and that's dual core. 3 MB per core of L2 stacks up a lot better than 2 MB per core of L3 in my book.

Sure, it wins a few points for the faster FSB and memory. But I'm pretty skeptical of these CPU's right now. Sure doesn't sound like something I'd want to be the first to invest in.

Not like AMD's been coming out with anything halfway competitive in the mobile space for the past two years, though .

 

Even the desktop i7s aren't that impressive except in certain areas such as encoding. Most users can just stick with their current Core 2s, especially for gaming.

 

^^^^best advise i think so far

to think a Game is bottlenecked by a CPU @2.5-3.5 ghz on a dual core and 2.5-3.2 ghz on a quad core

 

I hope that the new Intel Clarksfield processors show what they are really made of.

Although, yeah, those Clock Speeds are not too impressive by themselves.

 

Nah, Turbo Mode sounds very similar to Dynamic Acceleration technology, but they work much differently. Nehalem CPUs have a seperate microprocessor called a PCU to manage power consumption of the entire CPU. Turbo Mode will also be managed with PCU so the OS won't interfere by bouncing threads around.

This is the Turbo Mode on Nehalem: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/intel-core-i7_9.html#sect0

On the i7 965 XE it only gives 133MHz increase with 4 cores and 266MHz with 1 core active. The performance increase corresponds to it.

On mobile and power constrained platforms, Turbo Mode will be a very potent weapon.

 

It really seem so. I was thinking to get a new i7, but after the specs and what i read around, better go for a QX9300. I dont think there will be a true replacement of this Quad for pretty some time. Not for a mobile workstation at least.

 

At least in terms of cache size, 8MB can be considered huge here since the Nehalems, just like the Turions, have on board memory controller. So they don't need big cache size to perform well.

What Intel is trying to do, at least what it seems to me, is to force more multi-threaded programs. Which is probably not a bad thing. Considering the clock speed to power ratio has hit a wall. Or so it seems.

 

the i7 is a true replacement, as it's never worse than the old. but it is not "just everywhere just better". it has enhancements, and you gain quite some performance if you hit those enhancements. games mostly don't => don't profit from the new one. that doesn't mean it isn't better on the whole, though. and it is better on the whole.

 

With the 4 core mobile Core i7, you'll get multi core performance with 4 cores and Hyperthreading, with high clock speeds at dual and single core operations due to Turbo Mode. It won't be stuck at 2.53GHz like QX9300 running 2 threaded games like WoW for example, and will probably clock at 2.93GHz for the i7 920XM. Calpella as a platform itself will probably save 15-20% power too.

 

You guys and clock speeds...

 

I know I would get one over the QX9300 if I could. PC Gamess benchmark shows the software does utilize hyperthreading well, so I get a pseudo 8 cpus system with Clarksfield.

 

What games do you play? Similarly to their desktop counterparts, the i7s don't really give any performance boost in most games since majority of games are not CPU limited (except physics calculation based ones). So even if your CPU was 1000x faster, the FPS wouldn't be higher...

 

I'm not talking about games, I'm talking about GAMESS. Specifically, PC GAMESS. They're quantum chemistry apps.