Intel ''Gulftown'' Sample Overclocked

Intel's upcoming hexa core looks promising for workstations and future proof high-end desktops.

It has been public knowledge that Intel will be releasing their first six core processor in the coming months but new details have only been released sparsely and no exact release date has been unveiled so far.
What we do know is that the CPU will be called Core i9 and that it will be based on the reworked "Nehalem" core codenamed "Westmere", which is also a shrink to 32nm. Back when this information became available, I published some peak performance numbers of the new processor:

A 3GHz Core i9 will deliver 144GFLOPS/s in 32bit operations versus 96GFLOPS/s in a 3GHz Xeon 5500 and considerably higher than the current 2.6GHz AMD Opteron six-core, which delivers 124.8 GFLOPS/s.

Comparared to the upcoming Phenom X6 "Thuban", the Core i9 will be more balanced as it will also increase the amount of L3 cache in the same proportion as the number of cores. AMD has only increased the core count but AMD's processors do feature a larger 512KiB L2 cache per core, compared with 256KiB in Intel's processors. That approach has payed off in the server and HPC market where AMD manages to grab the performance crown in some workloads but it will hardly be enough on the consumer market. Intel will have a big performance advantage from both the higher performance per clock and the higher clock. The "Gulftown" CPUs will also take fewer die space due to the smaller 32nm process.

This "Gulftown" engeneering sample was placed in a high-end EVGA X58 4-Way SLI motherboard:


The 3DMark numbers are interesting - with four 5870's, mind you - but just look at the air-cooled overclocking results:


4.6GHz on air cooling is a very good result this early in the game. While it certainly doesn't look like a quiet fan on that CPU, it is a good result nonetheless.



What about LN2? Have a look:


6.1GHz and capable of running 32M digits on Super Pi. A good result, shy of the 7 GHz AMD has been achieving with 45nm processors but the 32nm process still needs to mature and it's running on two cores less.

The Core i9 is looking promising but it won't be missed by someone looking for better performance in today's games. The gaming industry has been slow to pick up the increasing core density and dual cores still tackle most games fine. Quad cores are bringing some benefits to the table but still not enough to justify increasing core count further.

Source: Xtemesystems

MSI ''Big Bang'' Trinergy Errata

Yesterday's article, which detailed that MSI would introducing the Lucid Hydra chip in computer motherboards soon, was a mistake on my part.
Official confirmation indicates that the Trinergy motherboard is instead based on the NF200 bridge chip from Nvidia and that the Lucid Hydra chip will come later on a motherboard named "Fuzion" that fits in the same "Big Bang" series of motherboards, hence the confusion.

It may be the case that Lucid's drivers are still not up to reasonable stability or features and the motherboard has been delayed.
More info on the exciting Hydra will be posted as soon as it is available.

Source: MSI

MSI ''Big Bang'' Trinergy Pictured

Triple SLI High End P55 motherboard.

ERRATA: This motherboard is only based on NF200 and P55, Lucid's Hydra chip will be put on another motherboard, to be announced soon.

The MSI "Big Bang" motherboard was previewed a while back as the first consumer motherboard to feature the new Lucid Hydra chip. MSI seems to have expanded the "Big Bang" series to more enthusiast class models featuring high-end features.

MSI has partnered with Nvidia to bring Triple SLI support to a high-end P55 based motherboard, which can only support SLI in x8/x8 PCI-e slots when the NF200 chip is not in use. The use of the NF200 chip enables widths of x16/x8/x8 or x16/x16 for the cards but keep in mind that the upstream PCI-e bandwidth to the CPU will still only be the same as one x16 PCIe slot. The NF200 chips only increases bandwidth between the three cards when passing data through the NF200 chip. If you require more bandwidth from GPUs to the CPU, you will need to go for X58 solutions which offers 32 PCI-Express lanes to the chipset and from there to the CPU through the high-bandwidth QPI link.

The motherboard features only high quality components like expensive tantalum capacitors instead of electrolytic or solid ones, delivering a remarkable lifespan and high overclocking abilities. Not just on the CPU PWM mind you, it features these capacitors all around.
The NF200 chip itself sits below the CPU, with the P55 PCH next to the PCI slots.

Due to all these features the price is expected to be high, even for an enthusiast class motherboard.

Source: Donanimhaber (site apparently pulled the article, NDA violation?)

Silicon Madness Turns Two Today

It was two years ago that Silicon Madness came to existence, back then as simply siliconmadness.blogspot.com, now moved to siliconmadness.com
Silicon Madness is a personal effort of mine to bring a new point of view on the hardware industry, one where critical opinions can be expressed without the need to please a hardware sponsor or other dogmas of the industry.
SM's aim is to provide independent product value assertion, in a way that you - the customer - has the best choice for your dollar or euro.

Big changes coming soon to celebrate this two year lifespan and website growth. Silicon Madness will be moving to a dedicated server, and new software, by the end of the year(hopefully). Plans to integrate SiliconMadness with a new bulletin board software were users can also express their views are already well underway and the above picture is an early look at the overall revamp that coming soon.
We will also be looking for contributors by that time, and hope to be able to collaborate with readers to make SiliconMadness a website of computer hardware and technology excellence.

It has been thrilling to provide insights to SM readers during this time and articles like the ones below have been great fun to write and read, as confirmed by the SM audience. In no particular order, popular posts from SM:

• AMD Phenom II X2 550 Unlocking & Overclocking
• AMD Phenom BIOS Myth Debunked
• First Shots Of 32nm Intel "Clarkdale" Running
• Nvidia And The Missing LGA 1156 Chipsets, published one month before any insights from Nvidia PRs.
• ECS Showcases 880G, later renamed 785G
• Phenom II X4 925 First AM3 Benchmarks
• The First AMD "Propus" Die Shot
• Another Take At Xbox "Jasper" Power Consumption
• Intel's Self-Tuning Processor

It has been a great pleasure to contribute to the PC hardware and technology community for these two years as a hobby and I hope you have enjoyed the journey so far.

Kindest regards,
Tiago Marques

AMD 12-Core ''Magny Cours'' Samples Up And Running

Overclocked, runs 12 cores at an impressive 3GHz.


Impressive, to say the least: current "Istanbul" Opterons run at 2.8GHz in the high end with 1.3v and these new cores are manufactured at the same 45nm process. The new engeneering samples are holding at 3 GHz with just 1.16v, which is also necessary to keep power consumption low.

Also, a screenshot running lower clocks but showing that the system is a dual-socket motherboard, running 24 cores:


The upcoming 12 core beast will fit AMD's upcoming G34 socket and is built of two improved "Istanbul" cores on the same package - akin to Intel's Core 2 Quad - linked together by dedicated HyperTransport links.

The "Magny-Cours" processor itself has 12 MiB of L3 cache(6 per core) but 1 MiB per core is reserved for the new "Probe Filter", which is an aid to reduce cache snooping and enhance cache coherency. Each dual die processor will feature four registered DDR3 memory channels(two per CPU), more than doubling memory bandwidth compared to current "Istanbul" Opteron processors, and even surpassing the current Xeon 5500 series. The processor is expected in Q1 2010 and Intel is set to release the octo-core "Beckton" Xeon sooner than that. "Beckon" is rumored to also have four channels per socket, although of the higher latency FB-DIMM variant.
AMD will again be battling Intel with 50% more cores but may not be able to grab the performance crown in all applications since Intel's architecture has proved to be considerably better clock for clock.


Source: XtremeSystems

Windows 7 Released, Scrutinized

Gizmodo has had a laid back look at the new OS:

The Verdict
Windows XP was a great OS in its day. Windows Vista, once it found its feet several months in, was a good OS. With Windows 7, the OS is great again. It's what people said they wanted out of Windows: Solid, more nimble and the easiest, prettiest Windows yet.

OK... Let me see if I got that one right? XP was great back in it's day... Huh?!? People do have short memory.
If I recall correctly, I tried it when it got out, dual booting with Windows 98, found too many problems and got back to Win98SE for a whole year before XP got anywhere close to a "replacement". No change in hardware in between mind you. Was I the only one? I doubt it.
Even after that, I went looking for a WinXP replacement - it was still bug ridden. I settled with the more mature Windows 2000 SP4 for a couple of years, until Linux finally took a hold of my life. WinXP is now a good OS but I wouldn't say it was good when it launched and not even after XP 2 in 2004. I'd say somewhere around 2005, it was probably where most bugs were ironed out.

But Linux has a greater appeal, it lets me switch hardware with little hassle(Windows is improving) and is very low on memory usage:


That's my home server, running KDE+Apache+MySQL+Samba+SSH server. On 70MiB of RAM. The SWAP usage is reminiscent of a previous usage of BitTorrent and compilers, as this is a system where uptime is measured in months - it is mostly buffered data, like in the 4xx MiB usage, the actual unallocatable memory is the shown one.
You can easily get away with a more common desktop for under 200MiB, although mainstream Linux distros are getting kind of fat lately, they're still quite lean.
There are the issues with hardware (mostly vendor's fault) which are being constantly improved, but it's a free system, virus and malware free.

Microsoft surely seems to have improved the OS and I will try it sooner or later, although I will sit out any pre-SP usage in favor of Windows 2008, that I currently visit once in a while, or the XP in VirtualBox. I really don't like the bleeding edge, it's not a very sensible place to be very often.

If you can't upgrade from XP effortlessly, why not try another OS? Ubuntu is becoming more usable everyday but do stick to LTS releases if your hardware doesn't require the cutting edge 9.10 Beta. Just remember, be it Linux or Mac OS X, you won't learn another system in two weeks, just as you didn't when you first used Windows. I'm with Apple on this one: