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Intel Slashes Prices on High End in Preparation for Intel Core (Nehalem)

Paul Lilly — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:41:48 -0500

Intel's Core processor lineup (the parts formerly known as Nehalem) are a stone's throw away from release, and in preparation of the launch, Intel is cutting prices on a pair of existing chips and adding a few more to its lineup.

The price cuts affect two of Intel's higher end offerings, with the Core 2 Quad Q9550 (2.83GHz) and Xeon X3360 both dropping a generous 40 percent from $530 to $316. The new price points represent 1,000 tray units, so expect to pay slightly more through your favorite online vendor.

New models will also find their way into the lineup, including the Core 2 Quad Q9650 (3.0GHz) and Core 2 Quad Q9400 (2.66GHz) priced at $530 and $266 respectively. A trifecta of new Xeons will also make their way into the lineup: Xeon X3370 (3.0GHz) priced at $530, X3333 (2.66GHz) priced at $266, and the E3120 (3.16GHz) priced at $188.

It might be awhile before other popular chips in Intel's lineup see another price drop, as the company has stated its initial Nehalem parts, the Core i7, will be geared towards high-end PCs.

Image Credit: Intel

Super Talent MX Series SSDs Get a Speed Boost and Rebate

Paul Lilly — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:50:35 -0500

Not everyone is sold on SSDs, but that isn't stopping almost everyone from trying to sell you one. Competition has started to heat up, and it looks as though OCZ and Super Talent are lining up for a race to see which company can offer the fastest SSDs at the lowest price point. Super Talent kicked things off with its MasterDrive MX line, offering 120MB/sec write and 40MB/sec read speeds in 30GB, 60GB, and 120GB sizes for as low as $299, but OCZ joined the race just a few months later with a low cost line of its own. OCZ's Core series drives upped the ante with a hat trick that includes slightly more storage space, better read and write speeds at up to 143MB/sec and 93MB/sec respectively, and lower price points. Game, set, match?

Not quite. Super Talent doesn't appear ready to concede the mainstream market, and to prove it, the company has revised its MX series SSDs to offer faster speeds. Both the 15GB and 30GB models now sport read speeds of 120MB/sec and write speeds of 60MB/sec, while the 60GB and 120GB boast the same read speed but increases the write speeds to 80MB/sec. "Our expert engineering team is constantly discovering new ways to improve our proudcts, and this is one improvement that will be well received by power laptop users," said Super Talent director or marketing, Joe James.

The tweaked SATA-II SSDs still trail behind OCZ's Core series, but to make them more competitive, Super Talent has begun offering a $40 rebate (PDF) when purchased through Newegg. Is it enough to make you consider a SSD?

Image Credit: Super Talent

Intel’s details Nehalem, Larrabee and hexa-core CPU plans

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:57:53 -0500

If there’s one message Intel wants the world to take away from its Monday morning sit down with the enthusiaist media, it’s that all pistons are firing full bore.

The company demonstrated working silicon from its upcoming Nehalem CPU, talked up details about its return to the world of discrete graphics, and even said it had a hexa-core CPU ready to go. That's six dies in one package, for everyone who flunked tenth-grade Greek.

The biggest news announcement wasn't Nehalem, but Intel's reentry into the discrete graphics market. Although light on concrete details, Intel said Larrabee, the first discrete part, would not be ass-bad integrated graphics. Instead, it would be full-on performance GPU. Larrabee would feature “many” cores and performance would scale to the teraflop range. The new graphic part will also include a new vector instruction set and leverage Intel’s strong tool set to ease the pain of developing massively-parallel, general-purpose apps on GPUs. Intel believes that its tools will set it apart from ATI’s GPGPU and Nvidia’s CUDA frameworks, which offer similar functionality. Both initiatives are slowly gaining traction in the scientific and animation industries, but the tools to utilize GPUs for general purpose computing are still rough. Of course, this doesn't apply to consumers, who simply want to play the latest games on their PC, but Larrabee will cater to PC developers as well. The part will ship with full support for DirectX and OpenGL.

Intel didn’t detail which flavor of DirectX would be supported, but it would be current. Intel expects the first Larrabee parts to see the light of day sometime in late 2009 or early 2010. The company also cleared up some misconception about Larrabee. Many thought Larrabee cores would be the basis of its integrated graphics platform but on Monday, Intel denied that saying that it would continue to develop an integrated graphics core for normal computing. Integrated designs, however, will likely move from the chipset into the CPU package itself.

Besides Larrabee, Intel also released more on its upcoming Nehalem chip. Based on a 45nm process, Nehalem will utilize a modular design that will let Intel build CPUs featuring different numbers of cores and different cache configs, as well as integrated graphics and memory controllers. The initial consumer enthusiast version is codenamed Tylersburg. It will be a native quad-core design, and each core will feature a Hyperthreading-like capability to execute two threads simultaneously. Tylersburg will feature L3 cache and an integrated tri-channel DDR3 controller. That should offer boatloads of bandwidth but it’ll also mean more complicated memory configurations.

The demonstration Tylersburg machine featured six DIMM slots. To operate in tri-mode, three DIMMs have to be populated. However, the demonstration machine ran fine with just two DIMM slots occupied.

The desktop version of Nehalem is already up and running.

As expected, Nehalem does away with the front-side bus. The chip will communicate with the chipset and other CPUs via a high-speed interconnect Intel has dubbed Quick Path Interconnect. Tylersburg is expected near the end of this year. Intel also demonstrated its hexa-core CPU. Codenamed Dunnington, the chip is essentially a six-core Penryn.

Should upgraders expect such a beast to fill their existing Socket 775 boards? No, Intel said. Dunnington will only find a home in Xeon boards. Intel said that while there’s been some discussion about Dunnington on desktop, the resources to make it work in a desktop configuration don’t make fiscal sense. And since Dunnington will hit just after Nehalem, the company expects most performance desktop users to adopt Nehalem. Dunnington’s best fit is for workstation and servers where it should work as a drop-in replacement for current quad-core Xeons.

On tap beyond Nehalem, Intel said to expect Westmere, a 32nm shrink of Nehalem with some microarchitecture enhancements to keep performance up. A more significant upgrade is expected with the Sandy Bridge CPU core in 2009 or 2010.

Two Cores in Every Apple

Tom Halfhill — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 15:23:33 -0600

Give Apple some credit: rushing out the first Intel-based Macs six months ahead of schedule was nearly miraculous. What’s especially impressive is that the first two models are the MacBook Pro and iMac. Inch-thin notebooks like the MacBook Pro require much more custom engineering than roomy desktop systems. And although the iMac is a desktop, its slim all-in-one case makes it nearly as difficult to design as a notebook.

As I predicted last year, the x86 Macs aren’t cheaper than PowerPC Macs. On average, Intel processors cost more than PowerPC processors. But the new Macs are much faster and a better value. Four other things about them should interest any computer enthusiast, even those who will never buy a Mac.

First, like all Macs, the new machines have the same curb appeal as the iPod. By comparison, the typical Windows PC looks as fashionable as a car battery. Beauty is only skin deep, but supermodels get paid a lot more for flashing their skin than the rest of us do. Other PC vendors should get off their butts and hire some case-modders.

Inside, the initial Intel-based Macs use the Core Duo (Yonah), the first dual-core descendant of the Pentium M. Despite Apple’s minuscule market share, Macs are getting the very latest Intel chips, not bottom-shelf silicon. That means the new Macs will compete strongly with the performance of Windows PCs.

In addition, the new Macs have a next-generation BIOS that supports Intel’s Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI). Eventually, all PCs will implement this standard, which was conceived to replace the ancient PC BIOS. It’s ironic that Macs will be the vehicles for popularizing this PC technology. But then, the first blue-bellied iMacs of 1998 were largely responsible for popularizing another industry standard, USB.

More important, the new Macs are the first ones theoretically capable of natively running a Microsoft OS. The potential to support three platforms (including Linux) in one box is compelling—especially if the x86 transition starves Mac users for native software. Unfortunately, Apple isn’t using Intel’s virtualization technology to make multiboot systems more robust, but that could come later.

Although I still think the switch to x86 is a big gamble, so far Apple is taking the right steps.