Intel Penryn set to despoil pretty streets of AMD Barcelona

WHEN AMD gets its Mediterranean journo bash going on the hot beaches of Tunisia on 22 April, you'll see many R600 GPUs there.

Too bad I won't since, well, I'm an Asian journo and those supposedly aren't covered. A birdie from the company told me, though, that more than one system on that demo day will run those mighty GPUs on some shiny new CPUs, nicknamed not Tunis, but a place near it - Barcelona.

A good idea to get some extra "brand new CPU" coverage before its actual launch a month later or so? Yes, surely. Will Intel stand still? No way, surely. The brand new naughty chippery from Satan Clara has more than just the process shrink to spoil AMD's game and mess up Barcelona's pretty vista. Not the bloated Microsoft malware, but the actual city view.

Intel's update now specifies more clearly what the Penryn family brings across the whole spectrum (mobile, desktop, server). Yes, the 45 nm high-K process gives speeds well above 3 GHz on desktop and server parts, and close to 3 GHz on mobile. Also, the FSB1600 move is now official - together with better chipsets on both single-FSB and dual-FSB fronts. You know already about X38, the preferred high-end chipset for desktop Penryn - Intel has also confirmed today the launch of a brand new dual-FSB chipset for the Penryn flavour of Xeons this year, which they used to get the claimed 45% improvement in "bandwidth intensive" apps. Besides the FSB1600, it has much lower latency memory as well as 2 x 16 PCI-E capability for parallel graphics or massive I/O - helping it on both 3-D workstation and server platforms. This is sorely needed to handle Barcelona's memory advantage.

Beyond this, the "Dynamic Acceleration" stuff - in single-threaded apps when other cores are idle, allowing the active core to auto-overclock to use the spare power headroom - is now available across the complete family, including the mobile parts. A potentially deadly issue of massive hot spots on the die when one core overclocks while the others sleep has been supposedly resolved by Intel, according to Steve Smith - so, overclockers need not worry.

The CPU voltages are expected to be just slightly below those of current Core 2 parts, so Intel expects no major issues in support by many current mainboards via BIOS updates. They, in fact, used the existing 975X uni-FSB and Greencreek dual-FSB chipsets for initial Penryn runs (prior to benchmarks, where X38 and 'unnamed new dual-FSB platform' were the ones to depend on).

Frequency-wise, Intel didn't want to say the precise clocks for the first iteration (which, remember, comes soon after Barcelona), but was adamant about going above 3 GHz - including quad core parts.

With these additions, I believe Penryn will be able to match Barcelona clock-for-clock on FP tasks too, and have quite a bit of integer headroom - of course, for end-2007, its clocks will probably also be some 20% above Barcelona entries (3.33 GHz Penryn dual-die QC vs ~ 2.7 GHz Barcelona single-die QC). The faster FSB, with Xeon-graded parts probably able to do over 2 GHz FSB production use on good mobos (water-cooled Asus Striker Extreme?), will help alleviate the memory throughput competition too.

Interestingly, the TDP limits are the same as for current 65 nm products - 130 W for QC desktop "Extreme Edition", 120 W for QC server part, and up to 80W for single-die DC part. While the official 45 nm talk is of "before year end" I wouldn't be surprised at all if some of these parts arrive quite a bit earlier: Intel was definite about the shipments happening this year from the first two 45 nm fabs, so they must be having some buffer in place there - prior to X'mas season? In the meantime, the new Core 2 Extreme QX6800, right now in my hands awaiting torture, and its sibling, Xeon X3240 - will face the first Barcelona entries.

Oh by the way, I particularly liked these deeply philosophical explanations for the non-techie hacks from Intel's press release - "Thanks to our high-k metal transistor invention, think of 820 million more power efficient light bulbs going on and off at light-speeds.", and, "Imagine a shower with two powerful water shower heads, when one shower head is turned off, the other has increased water pressure" - uuuh, what kind of dimwits are mingling among IT journos these days, that need this kind of explaining?