but good things come to those who wait - I want a Quad with SEE4
although the desktop Penryns will be early next year, much more later than I expected!
So I think I may have to get a stop gap E2140 and overclock it or something to tide me over, because the p4 3.2ghz cpu is seriously lagging...
even that would give me a nice 3x speed boost
AMD may be planning tri-cores but until those will be released, arch-rival Intel will have its new, 45nm processor line-up already in stores. With 45nm production set to begin soon the desktop parts, that will follow the new Xeons is closing in fast and will be ready to give AMD a big slap even before the end of the year.
The first wave of 45nm desktop CPUs is set to include no less than 8 (eight) releases, all depicted below. First to arrive will be the QX9650, an Extreme Edition part featuring four cores clocked at 3 Ghz, 12MB of L2 cache (6MB per die) and a 130W TDP. This one will be launched in November and will hit the stores soon after. With 2007 gone and 2008 young and naive, Intel will have seven more CPUs, four dual-cores and three quad-cores ready. The highest-end non-Extreme quad-core is the Q9550, with 12MB of L2 cache, a frequency of 2.83GHz and a TDP of 95W.
The cheapest 45nm quad, the Q9300 will be clocked at 2.5GHz and will have only 6MB of L2 cache (3MB per die). As for the dual-cores, Intel will release the E8500, E8400, E8300 and E8200, clocked from 3.16Ghz to 2.66GHz and all with a 65W TDP. All processors (including the QX9650) will have a 1333 MHz FSB. Intel is probably saving the 1600FSB for later.
http://www.tcmagazine.com/comments.php? ... 94&catid=2
Clock per clock, Penryns are faster, Intel said. It is unclear how much of this comes from the 50% larger L2 cache and how much comes from new architectures. Otellini, however, did indicate Penryns deliver 20% greater performance due to the 45nm hi-k/metal gate solution.
The big surprise of the day? Two live demonstrations of Nehalem in a physical machine. In the morning, we had a simple Nehalem system setup running Windows XP and a few applications. Otellini told us that Nehalems had been taped out for about a month, and what we saw was three week old "A0" silicon. He then held up a wafer showing wide, native quad-core Nehalems that were in use. Intel representatives made sure that they weren't using the AMD term “native quad-coreâ€