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Intel Set to Deliver 3GHz Mobile Penryn CPUs

Paul Lilly — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 10:27:25 -0500

Netbooks have become so wildly popular that we could hardly blame Intel if it decided to focus solely on its Atom processors. Rest assured that's not the case. According to UK news and rumor site Channel Register, Intel will soon release mobile Penryn-based processors clocked at 3GHz and higher.

The faster processors will be part of Intel's Montevina Plus platform, which will focus more heavily on HD capabilities. Quoting Intel''s mobile marketing director Karen Regis, Channel Register reports the rollout also means Intel will expand its ultra low voltage (ULV) technology into mainstream markets. These include systems just above the netbook sector typically running between $600 and $1,000, Regis said.

Look for Montevina Plus to show up in the second quarter of this year.

Intel Officially Launches Six-Core Xeon Processors, Boasts 50% Performance Boost

Norman Chan — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:54:20 -0500

Intel today announced the official release of their Dunnington-based Xeon 7400 server CPU. The six-core chip is monolithic, meaning that all six cores are on one die, and is the first Xeon CPU to sport that design. The previous 7300 series CPU, dubbed Tigerton, was a quad-core processor with two dual-core chips on a single module (like existing quad-core consumer chips). As expected, Dunnington is still of the Penryn architecture (45nm High-K manufacturing process), and will be compatible with current Tigerton Socket 604 motherboards.

Speed-wise, Intel claims a 50% performance increase in the 7400 over the 7300 series CPU based on TPC-E database benchmark testing (TPC-E simulates the online transaction workload of a large brokerage firm). More impressive is Intel’s claim that even with the improved performance, Dunnington’s energy efficiency actually means it uses 10% lower power than the previous generation. The gains are largely attributed to the presence of a new 16MB level-3 cache, in addition to the extra compute power of two more cores. Xeon 7400 CPUs will launch at 2.66Ghz with either four or six core, and will be priced from $856 to $2729.

What does this mean for consumers? Unfortunately, not much. Intel has no current plans to release a six-core CPU to the mainstream market, and few applications would be able to scale well enough to take full advantage of the additional two cores. Intel seems to be pushing Nehalem for the consumer market, which will launch as a quad-core. Dunnington customers – large Web 2.0 companies like Myspace – will be the ones who benefit most from the extra performance and power efficiency, which may enable them to develop compute-intensive features like high-definition video sharing.

Intel Release’s New Midrange Chips On Monday

Justin Kerr — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 22:20:15 -0500

In an attempt to tighten the screws on AMD, Intel is continuing to roll out new midrange processors early next week. Despite the fact that they aren’t officially released yet, online e-tailers are already taking orders. The CPU’s will be based on Intel’s 45-nanometer process and both Alienware & Falcon Northwest are preparing to announce systems featuring the new parts in tandem with its release. The 95 watt Q9650 currently retails for $559 on Newegg, and features a core clock speed of 3 GHz. This paired with a 12MB L2-cache, and a 1333MHz front side bus make it a solid performer for the price. In fact, this puts midrange consumers within striking distance of the Dream Machine's 150 watt QX9775 which retails for a much heftier $1550. The QX9775 runs only 200MHz faster with the same 12MB’s of L2-cache. The main difference between the two is the 1600 MHz FSB, Skulltrail support, and the subsequent overclocking potential that comes with the extreme series. Looking for something more modest? The Q9400 is rated for 2.66 GHz and will feature 6 MB of L2-cache on a 1333MHz FSB. For those who prefer the dual core design, the Core 2 Duo’s lineup will be receiving an update as well. The new E8600 clocks in at 3.33GHz,with 6 MB of L2-cache and a FSB of 1,333MHz, while the lower end E7300 will sport a 2.66GHz clock with 3 MB of L2-cache, and a 1066MHz FSB. The 65 Watt E8600 is e-tailing for $279 and the E7300 will go for $144.

Ready to upgrade? What are you going to use?

XFX nForce 780i SLI

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 14:35:25 -0600

We knew something was up when Nvidia officials were light on details concerning its 780i chipset during a recent press briefing. Normally quite happy to toot its hardware horn, Nvidia practically skipped the PowerPoint slide on the chipset.
Why? Like Intel’s x48, the 780i isn’t really that new. In fact, those familiar with the 680i are well acquainted with the 780i, which is pretty much a 680i with an extra chip (interestingly named the Nforce 200) thrown in to add PCI-E 2.0 support and a full x16 tri-SLI mode.

Despite this, the XFX Nforce780i SLI is still worth taking a gander at. In the hardware department, it has some nice enthusiast touches, such as a POST LED and surface-mounted reset and power switches, but it’s pretty bare-bones next to the Asus board. While we can see not including 802.11n or the wacky pre-boot stuff in the XFX 780i, where are the eSATA ports?

In the I/O arena, the XFX 780i board features three physical x16 slots. Two slots operate at full x16 PCI-E 2.0 data rates while the third runs at x16 PCI-E 1.0 rates. When running tri-SLI mode, the two PCI-E 2.0 slots are actually slaved to the nForce 200 chip, which plumbs directly into the north bridge, while the third x16 PCI-E is routed through the south bridge. There’s been some criticism of this design, which is a bit like going from your kitchen to the living room by crawling though the bathroom window and cutting across the yard. Can you truly synchronize three GPUs if one has to take such a circuitous route? Nvidia says it’s not an issue because the cards actually do most of their talking across the big SLI bridge that’s clipped to the top of the cards. The board includes bridges for tri- and dual-SLI configurations.

Also supported out of the box in the 780i is Nvidia’s Enthusiast System Architecture, which lets a PC talk to new ESA-enabled smart components such as power supplies, water coolers, and case enclosures. We’ve seen early ESA implementations, and we like it so far.

What is truly a differentiator between the 680i and the 780i is support for Intel’s 45nm Penryn CPUs. Although Nvidia officials initially indicated that they expected quad-core Penryns to work on 680i boards, to the chagrin of enthusiasts everywhere, they were wrong. Due to limitations with existing board designs, the current 680i inventories won’t work with Penryn quad cores, such as the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 or the upcoming budget quad Penryns. For those, you need a board like the XFX 780i.

You’re not completely CPU-safe though. While the 780i supports 1,333MHz Penryn CPUs, it isn’t clear if it will work with the upcoming 1,600MHz FSB Core 2 Extreme QX9770 CPU. Nvidia has been cagey concerning this issue, saying that it can’t comment on compatibility until Intel releases a shipping part. In our tests, however, it’s a no go. Using a 3.2GHz/1,600FSB Core 2 QX9770, the XFX 780i board wouldn’t work even with the CPU and FSB downclocked to a 1,333MHz FSB. Nvidia has a point that it’s still waiting for final silicon to finish validating it, but come on. Aren’t Nvidia and Intel even communicating here? We must note that the QX9770 worked fine with the Asus X48 board.

This is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the XFX 780i board, and the entire chipset lineup. Add that to talk of a soon-to-be-released 790i chipset with DDR3 support and you have a chipset and board that have fairly limited appeal. Although performance was quite good and it erases the performance gap we saw in our January showdown between the x38 and 680i, we’re pretty damned worried that it’ll be obsolete faster than you can say 45 nanometer.

Hypersonic Sonic Boom OCX

Nathan Edwards — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:44:12 -0600

January 2004. DirectX 9 had just shipped. SCO had begun its ultimately futile crusade against IBM. And Hypersonic’s brightly colored Sonic Boom, featuring Intel’s newest processor, was smacking our benchmarks around.

Sure, back in 2004 the new hotness was Intel’s Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and the Sonic Boom’s paint job was bright yellow, but the cherry-red Hypersonic Sonic Boom OXC—the first rig we’ve tested using Intel’s fabled Penryn CPU—still gives us an undeniable sense of déjà vu.

The Enthusiast System Architecture enables the power supply, cooling system, and motherboard to talk to each other.

This Sonic Boom’s got a sweet 3GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9650 CPU overclocked to 3.88GHz on a 1.7GHz FSB. Throw in a pair of XFX GeForce 8800 Ultras and 4GB of OCZ Reaper DDR2 at 1,208MHz, all sitting pretty on Nvidia’s new 780i SLI motherboard, and you’ve got a system as hot—in theory—as the Sonic Boom we awarded a 9 Kick Ass verdict to four years ago. Unfortunately, we don’t traffic in theory. Despite hot parts, a fab paint job, and wicked technology, the Sonic Boom went bust during our stability testing.

It’s a shame because one of the neatest things about this Hypersonic system is its use of Nvidia’s new open Enthusiast System Architecture (ESA), which enables unprecedented monitoring of system temperatures, voltages, and stats via the Nvidia Monitor app. The 1,200-watt PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool power supply is ESA-compliant, as is the custom CoolIt CPU/GPU cooler. You can read more about the ESA in our In The Lab segment, but let’s just say we like it.

Before we get to the nitty-gritty of benchmarking, let’s marvel for a minute at Hypersonic’s fully kitted flight simulator rig. The Lian-Li PC-A10 chassis is beautifully decked out with a cherry-red Colorware paint job, and looks sleek but still classy, especially compared to the over-the-top cases we’ve seen recently from HP, Dell, and AVADirect.

Hypersonic doesn’t mess around when it comes to crafting a flight-sim deck. Instead of one measly monitor, we got three 19-inch LG L1933 Flatron displays hooked up to a Matrox TripleHead2Go Digital Edition, which runs the three digital monitors from one DVI port for a combined 3840x1024 resolution. You’ll find our impressions of the flight-sim aspects of this setup, which also include a Saitek Pro Flight yoke, rudder pedals, and throttle, in this month’s In the Lab (page 60).

But what if flight simulation’s not your thing? What if you’re only interested in the rig itself and not the optional flight-sim package and all its accoutrements? It is for you, Earth-bound reader, that we ended our dreamy sky tours and commenced our standard Vista benchmark suite.

This is the second rig we’ve tested using our new benchmarks and for the most part it performed admirably. The rig’s best scores came in Photoshop CS3, which at 102 seconds was nearly 50 percent faster than our zero-point, and Quake 4, where we saw our fastest frame rates ever: 239 fps, which not only devastated the zero-point (135 fps) but also bested the Falcon Northwest rig (226 fps) that has held the record since June. Vista gaming is finally catching up to XP!

We found decent gains in our ProShow Producer, Premiere Pro CS3, and Fear 1.07 benchmarks as well. In fact, the only benchmark in which the Sonic Boom OCX had any trouble at all was our MainConcept encoder test, where it had plenty. It locked up in two out of three runs. When it finally completed a test, its score was a disappointing 1,451 seconds—slower than our zero-point system.

The system didn’t fare well in our Prime95 stress testing, either. One core usually failed less than an hour into the tests, and it wasn’t until we set all clock speeds back to stock that we saw any real long-term stability. Granted, a stress test is the ultimate machine punisher, especially on a machine as overclocked as this one, but like many other vendors recently, Hypersonic went a few megahertz too far.

Hypersonic sent us a system that looked great and performed pretty damn well on our benchmarks. We appreciated the massive overclocks, forward-thinking Penryn, ESA architecture, and flight-simulator setup, as well as the overall build quality. But stability issues hurt this machine, as does its volume—the fans are simply too loud. We understand that Hypersonic, freshly acquired by OCZ, may still be adjusting to its new environment; hopefully, this is simply an aberration, and the next rig we see from the company will be firmly back in 9 Kick Ass territory. But nearly $8,000 for a loud machine that crashes occasionally just doesn’t meet our expectations.

December 2007 - 100 Greatest Tech Innovations of All Time!

The Maximum PC Staff — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:38:21 -0600

In the PDF archive of the December 2007 issue, you can find:

100 Greatest PC Innovations
Best of the Best 2007
Penryn Preview
Best 30" Monitor Ever!
And 17 More Awesome Product Reviews!
Ask the Doctor
Rig of the Month
The Watchdog
And a whole lot more!

Click the big giant cover image to the right to download the PDF archive today!

Daily News Brief: EVGA Responds to Gripes Over 680i's Broke Penryn Support

Paul Lilly — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:20:27 -0600

EVGA Offers 680i Upgrade Promotion

Enthusiasts who built their system around the 680i chipset were hit with a curveball after learning their boards would not play nice with Intel's 45nm Penryn quad-core processors (Yorkfield), but EVGA is stepping up to offer their customers an inexpensive consolation. As part of their 680i Motherboard Upgrade Promotion, for the next 59 days, those who registered their 122-CK-NF68-XX motherboards can opt to upgrade to the 780i 132-CK-NF78-XX for $89.99. The new iteration supports Yorkfield processors, PCI-E 2.0 and comes with a 3-way SLI bridge.

RIAA Says 'No' to Ripping CDs

After the Jammie Thomas verdict, the RIAA must feel as though they're on top of the world, and now it appears they're trying to make ripping CDs a punishable offense. In Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA claims that "once the Defendant converted Plaintiffs' recordings into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies." Does that mean ripping itself is unauthorized, or the act of putting the ripped files into a shared folder? Because of how the RIAA worded the supplemental brief, no one knows for sure. Stay tuned...

Apple Releases Slew of Patches

Apple has issued several security fixes to the Max OS X and Safari browser yesterday, with a staggering 31 updates going towards the OS. Both 10.4 and 10.5 (Tiger and Leopard) are affected, with fixes targeting a slew of exploits in everything from the Address Book component to iChat and more. The latest round of patches highlight the Mac's rise in popularity, marking the 35th and 36th security update of the year, compared to just 22 sets of patches in 2006.

DS Thrives, Nintendo Frowns on Bundles

In the wake of extremely high demand for the Wii console, Nintendo's DS handheld units have been selling like hotcakes, recording 1.5 million units moved in November. And according to Nintendo's president Reggie Fils-Aime, some retailers have even "voic[ed] concerns about DS inventory going into the holiday." Nintendo has some concerns of their own, namely the practice of retailers forcing expensive Wii bundles onto consumers hoping to pick up the friendly priced gaming console. Asked if Nintendo would threaten offending retailers with fewer shipments, Fils-Aime responded "we are simply making an observation and that reinforces our point quite nicely with retailers." Point taken.

Ruiz's Raise Raises Questions

It's no secret that AMD's found themselves in murky waters ever since Intel awoke from their long Netburst slumber, so it came as a surprise to learn that Hector Ruiz, AMD's CEO, would be receiving a raise. Or is he? According to AMD, it turns out a senior public relations staff member erred when confirming the story, and the reported raise was in reference to Ruiz's bump in salary during 2006 (from $950K to $1,124,000). So while Hector can't claim a big bump in salary, he can still claim to be the highest-paid CEO in semiconductors.

IE Update Blocks Internet

Microsoft's cumulative security update MS07-069, marked as critical, has caused some critical problems for some. Users around the web are complaining that the update breaks IE to the point of not being able to connect to the internet, which would be like installing airbags in your automobile only to find out the ignition no longer works. Affected browsers include both IE6 and IE7.

No BS Podcast #38: The Hard Drive Edition

Maximum PC Staff — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:00:13 -0500

This week, Will, Gordon, Dave, and Jeremy discuss. This week, the gang talks about

Solid state hard drives and Alienware
Patent problems with hard drive tech
Intel's new high-end X38 chipset
EA's purchase of Pandemic and Bioware

We also celebrate the return of Will, give updates on some new contests, and go into the Lab to discuss The Orange Box and MAME cabinets.

Do you have a tech question? A comment? Email us at maximumpcpodcast@gmail.com or call our No BS Podcast hotline at 877.404.1337 x1337. Also, get your game on with the editors of Maximum PC by joining our Steam group!

Modders, be sure to check out Mod Shop: submit and vote on the coolest mods around—and win prizes!

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