New Socket On The Block

So all this CPU goodness and performance will drop right into that $450 LGA775 board you just bought, right? Of course not. Ung’s Law dictates that the minute you buy expensive hardware, something better will arrive that makes what you just bought obsolete.

Intel isn’t doing this just to piss people off (although a history of such behavior has had that result). Since Core i7 moves the memory controller directly into the CPU, Intel added a load of pins that go directly to the memory modules. The new standard bearer for performance boxes is the LGA1366 socket. It looks functionally similar to the LGA775, with the obvious addition of more pins. More pins also means a bigger socket, which means your fancy heatsink is also likely headed to the recycle bin. LGA1366 boards space the heatsink mounts just a tad bit wider, just enough to make your current heatsink incompatible. There’s a chance that some third-party heatsink makers will offer updated mounts to make your current heatsink work, but that’s not known yet.

What will be interesting to heatsink aficionados is Intel’s encouragement that vendors rate the heatsinks using a unified thermal rating that will be tied to the Turbo mode settings. For more information, see the Turbo mode sidebar below.

The Second Coming

Intel is adopting more than just AMD’s integrated memory controller with its new Core i7 chips; it’s also adopting AMD’s abandoned Socket 940/754 two-socket philosophy. For the high end, the LGA1366 socket will offer tri-channel RAM and a high-performance QPI interface. For mainstream users, Intel will offer a dual-channel DDR3 design built around a new LGA1066 socket late next year. LGA1066 isn’t just about shedding one channel of DDR3 though; LGA1066-based CPUs will also bring direct-attach PCI Express to the table.

 Instead of PCI Express running through the chipset, as it does with existing Core 2 and the new performance Core i7, PCI-E will reside on the die of LGA1066 CPUs. With the PCI-E in the CPU itself, Intel will reuse its fairly slow DMI interface to connect the CPU to a single-chip south bridge. The two chips Intel will introduce are the quad-core Lynnfield and the dual-core Havendale. Havendale CPUs will actually feature a newly designed graphics core inside the heat spreader that will talk to the CPU core via a high-speed QPI interface. Both chips will feature Hyper-Threading on all cores.

Many AMD users got a royal screwing when the company abandoned both Socket 940 and Socket 754 for a unified Socket 939; could Intel do something similar? We asked Intel point blank whether LGA1366 would eventually be abandoned for LGA1066; the company told us it fully intends to support both platforms. 

Intel’s Turbo Mode Technology

Turbo mode might sound like a feature left over from the TV series Knight Rider, but it’s more neat than cheesy. You already know that Core i7 CPUs closely monitor the power and thermals of the chip and use any leftover headroom to overclock the individual cores as needed. But just how does it work?

From what we’ve surmised by examining an early BIOS, you will be able to set each type of core scenario based on how far you want to overclock, given the load. For example, with applications that push one thread, you could set the BIOS to overclock, or rather, turbo that single core by perhaps three multipliers over stock. You would do the same for two-, three-, and four-core scenarios.

The BIOS will also take into account the thermal rating, or TDP, of the cooling system you’re using. If you’re using, say, a heatsink rated for 150 TDP, the BIOS will overclock to higher levels than it would with a 130 TDP unit. You would manually set the heatsink’s rating in the BIOS, as there’s no way for the heatsink to communicate with the motherboard directly.

AMD: The Road Ahead

Company Says 45nm Process Is Ahead Of Schedule

It’s been a long two years for AMD. After a ton of trash-talking, its Phenom CPUs failed to impress anyone. The integrated memory controller, the chip-to-chip interconnects, and the native quad-core design all added up to a high-end CPU that was maybe on par with Intel’s slowest quad-core chip. It didn’t help that an esoteric bug plagued Phenom’s launch and left lingering doubts about the CPU.

Next year will be different, the company pledges.

AMD has long acknowledged that one of its mistakes was trying to make a native quad-core design using a 65nm process. The chips proved to be too big and the yields too low. The yields were initially poor enough that the company began taking defective quad-core dies and selling them as tri cores.

With that in mind, AMD has been feverishly working to get its 45nm process online. The good news is that it’s ahead of schedule. AMD says it expects to have 45nm-based CPUs by the end of this year, not well into next year as expected. All indications are that AMD will release 45nm-based Phenoms by late this year with clock speeds finally ramping up to the 3GHz range—a speed Intel pierced more than a year ago.

The bad news is that even a 3GHz die-shrunk Phenom may not be enough to go head-to-head with Intel’s Core i7 in performance. For that, it’ll likely take the company’s Shanghai core, which is on tap for 2009. AMD is playing it much closer to the vest, but the quad-core Shanghai will be followed by a six-core Istanbul CPU at the end of next year. By 2010, AMD expects to have its Magny-Cours chip out with 12 cores in the CPU. Right now, AMD is mainly concentrating on the one bright spot on its roadmap: multi-CPU systems, where its chip-to-chip design makes these configs competitive with Intel’s CPUs.

One thing is clear, with rumors continuing to swirl that AMD is short on cash and may sell off its fabs, the company—which has already seen its fair share of adversity—is facing one of its most trying times.

Graphics

Larrabee will loom but not make an impact in ’09

It’s been a long time since a new vendor entered the 3D graphics market, but that’s exactly what Intel plans to do late in

2009 with Larrabee. Unlike previous videocards from Intel, which used traditional 3D pipelines, fairly standard x86 cores will power Larrabee.

Larrabee will include many x86 cores, but the cores in Larrabee processors will be greatly simplified compared to a modern Core 2 proc. Larrabee CPUs will be based on the Pentium P54C design, updated to include modern features, such as 64-bit support and the inclusion of traditional GPU hardware in the form of texture filtering units. Additionally, Larrabee will feature cache coherency between the many x86 cores, which means that all of the cores will have access to the same high-speed cache, and thus, memory. This is a common feature in monolithic CPU cores, like the AMD Phenom and upcoming Intel Core i7, but it isn’t typically a GPU feature. Cache coherency should give Larrabee a significant advantage over more traditional architectures when it comes to running general-purpose computing applications on the GPU.

So should you start saving your pennies for a Larrabee-powered GPU in 2009? Not yet. We expect that Larrabee will launch in late ’09 with parts targeted at the server community for render farms and scientific applications, followed by mainstream parts designed to upgrade low-end machines that would typically sport integrated graphics. For 2009, at least, Nvidia’s GT 200 and ATI’s RV770 cores (which power the existing GeForce GTX 280 and Radeon 4870 HD, respectively) will remain the top dogs in graphics.

So what exactly is upcoming from ATI and Nvidia? ATI will roll out a slew of parts across all prices based on modified versions of the RV770. The current rumor is that Nvidia will launch a modified version of the GT 200 sometime next year, tweaked to reduce power consumption and die size, that’s more suitable for lower-end parts, as well as dual-GPU cards similar to ATI’s Radeon 4870 X2 boards.

GPUs For General-Purpose Computing

We’ve heard a lot of buzz from Nvidia and ATI about GPUs being used for general-purpose computing, but to date, only a small number of applications actually harness this power: a couple of Folding@Home clients, a video encoder or two, and a whole host of scientific and video-rendering apps that don’t really apply to normal users. Right now, GPU-based computing is essentially a promising science fair project—at least as far as Maximum PC readers are concerned.

In 2009, we expect that to start to change. A host of mainstream apps, including Photoshop CS4, are slated to launch that will impact the scene in a big way. By treating the photos you’re editing as 3D textures, Photoshop is able to take advantage of the astounding performance packed into a modern GPU. What’s the end-user benefit? Lightning-fast zooms, resizes, and scrolling, and that’s just the beginning. And although the first round of video encoders failed to deliver acceptable visual quality at better-than-CPU speeds, we expect to see rapid improvement in visual quality as the GPU-powered encoders mature.

However, we don’t expect to see any massive increase in these GPU-accelerated apps until there’s a common API that lets software vendors write GPU-accelerated programs for Nvidia, ATI, and Intel GPUs. (Right now, apps must be specifically coded for either ATI or Nvidia GPUs.) Both Microsoft and Apple have APIs in the works that will compete to become the final unified standard, but today there’s no way of knowing which will win.

Next up: Motherboard Chipsets, Hard Drives, USB 3.0, and the next PCI-E