Brag: 8Core Penryn, Yorkfield FTW

Yep, I just got back to posting my regular bragging blog. But hey, it's not like I'm not absent for like a month so sorry for that. Anyway, this CPU-Z has been taken quite a long time and I haven't posted it so just to celebrate my "comeback", I posted it for all to see.

If anyone is wondering, this is the server version of the processor I posted just below this post (yes, tha's like more than a month old). Check it out and join me with my drooling.

And yes, I'm back again in posting, but I can't be sure if I can post as regularly as possible. Things have gotten more interesting in my life and well, it takes a lot of my time. But that's good!! Till next bragging...

Brag: My Penryn and X38 Chipset

Heya all, I'm still alive and very much in business. A lot of people I talk to in real life has been asking if I'm still on hardware thing, and I said, "most definitely". In fact, that is the sole reason why I can't update my Blog as much as I want to.

Anyway, if one has any doubts, just check out this new toy. I am not sure if many review sites have gotten their hand s on these babies already, I never really have time to check the hardware sites. Check out the image, it goes to the official CPUZ Validation site. Sorry, no benchmark...

Tech Link (Roadmap): Intel Pulls Yorkfield Extreme Edition Into 2007

Looks like better days are coming for the true and faithful FanBoys. The newer products are going to launch earlier than originally sceheduled. It bodes well for those planning an upgrade, or just want to get their hands wet with the latest and greatest. Ready your wallet boys and girls (image from VR-Zone).

Intel has brought forward the launch of Yorkfield Extreme Edition from Q1 2008 to Q4 2007 bringing pressure to AMD Phenom FX slated for launch later this year. Intel has not determined the final clock speed of Yorkfield Extreme Edition but it will be at least 3.33GHz/1333FSB with 2 x 6MB shared L2 cache. Yorkfield and Wolfdale schedule remains unchanged at Q1 2008 and there are 2 SKUs for Yorkfield and 4 SKUs for Wolfdale.

Source:Intel Pulls Yorkfield Extreme Edition Into 2007

Tech Link (Processor): New Crysis Video: Game kicks a$$ on Intel's Penryn Quad Core

Yeehaw, watch and see how smooth the game play is with the new Penryn-based quad core system. It's like you're watching a movie rather than playing a game, no stall, hiccups, or stutter whatsoever. This platform rocks. The specs is as follows:

System configuration:

Intel Penryn 45nm "Yorkfield"
quad core CPU @ 3.2GHz
Intel 975BX2 Motherboard
NVIDIA 8800GTX
2GB RAM, 250GB HDD
Windows XP



Source:New Crysis Video: Game kicks a$$ on Intel's Penryn Quad Core

Tech Link (Processor): First Penryn (wolfdale) Numbers

metro.cl of xs managed to find a link containing numbers to early Penryn benchmarks. If you are wondering how the chip performs, then check it out. From those images in that forum link, I say it's looking good.

Ok got this link by MSN,

Here you can see a lot of screenshots, the ones without a CPU-Z by the side, specially Super Pi 1M, take it with a huge grain of salt.

Source:First Penryn (wolfdale) Numbers

Tech Link (Industry): Interview with Lead Architech for Penryn and Nehalem

HexusTV has an interview posted about the upcoming processors (Penryn) and next major microarchitecture introduction (Nehalem). In the interview, they mentioned the performance improvement derived from process and uA changes. Check it out, see and hear what's next in store for you directly from the horse's mouth!

Get the low-down on Intel's forthcoming Penryn and Nehalem straight from the guys who designed them - Stephen Fischer and Mark Buxton. We gave them a grilling at Intel Developer Forum in China.

Source:Interview with Lead Architech for Penryn and Nehalem

Tech Link (Processor): Intel says new chips about 40 pct faster

Wow, reuters* posted a scoop about the performance of the upcoming processor from Chipzilla. According to the article, as much as 40% performance increase can be expected from Penryn. If you are a hardcore FanBoy, you'll know how powerful they can be. It'll be interesting to finally wait for them invade the desktop arena. Expand to read the full article....

Tue Apr 17, 2007 2:51AM EDT
BEIJING/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp. said a new line of computer processors due out later this year will be about 40 percent faster than current chips when running computer games, videos and other heavy workloads.

The world's biggest microchip maker, which powers about 75 percent of computers, said the new Penryn processors will have the same basic design as current ones, but the circuitry will be 30 percent thinner -- just 45 millionths of a millimeter wide.

"In high-performance computing and bandwidth intensive applications ... there will be up to a whopping 45 percent performance increase," said Patrick Gelsinger, the general manager for Intel's digital enterprise group.

The Penryn would be the world's first 45 nanometer processor, Gelsinger said at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing on Tuesday. The new processors will hit the market later this year, but Gelsinger did not provide a timeline.

In a prototype Penryn chip with four processing cores, that translated into 40 percent faster performance in computer games and video processing, while more mundane tasks such as image processing ran about 15 percent faster, Gelsinger said.

Intel held the forum in China just a month after saying it would build a $2.5 billion microchip plant in the mainland, underscoring the growing importance of the country in the global electronics manufacturing food chain.

The successor to Penryn, a family of chips known as Nehalem, will make their debut in 2008 with an overhauled design and featuring up to eight processing cores, double that of current top-of-the-line chips, he said.

Intel also reiterated plans to build graphics capabilities into Nehalem processors, a sign that it is mounting a challenge to AMD chips scheduled to come out in early 2009.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s plans to integrate graphics into its processors -- a project known as "Fusion" -- is one result of its $5.4 billion purchase of Canadian graphics chip maker ATI last year.

Intel currently offers graphics integrated into its chipsets, the cluster of secondary chips and interfaces that surround a central processor and make it work with various parts of a computer.

The bulk of personal computers -- especially laptops -- are sold with such integrated graphics, and analysts have said the move to include such functions in processors themselves could put pressure on the market for separate graphics cards made by Nvidia Corp. as well as AMD's ATI division.

Nvidia has said it is not worried about integrated graphics, saying that the high-end graphics capabilities needed in areas such as games and medical imaging will sustain demand for its more powerful dedicated graphics chips.

Source:Intel says new chips about 40 pct faster

Omigosh, Penryn Spotted On The Wild, Brace Yourselves!

Are you ready for some Penryn-loving CPU-Z? If not, then click here, if yes, click on the image below to go to the validation link. Enjoy the Penryn in all its glory! Click "Read More" to get all the details...




You've been fooled :). Happy April Fool's day! I spent a lot of time editing that CPU-Z, teehee :).

Press Release: Intel Details Upcoming New Processor Generations

Chipzilla finally unleashes the official statement about its upcoming processor (Penryn) and upcoming microarchitecture (Nehalem). I'll post more on this later on, right now, check out the official Press Release (I'll format it later on)...

Intel Details Upcoming New Processor Generations

Marking the next step in Intel's "tick-tock" product strategy and cadence to deliver a new process technology with an enhanced microarchitecture or entirely new microarchitecture every year, Intel Corporation will begin producing its next-generation Penryn family of processors in the second half of this year. These new processors benefit from enhancements to the Intel® Core™ microarchitecture and also Intel's industry-leading 45nm Hi-k process technology with its hafnium-based high-K + metal gate transistor design, which results in higher performance and more energy-efficient processors.

Intel has more than 15 45nm Hi-k product designs in various stages of development, and will have two 45nm manufacturing fabs in production by the end of the year, with a total of four in production by the second half of 2008 that will deliver tens of millions of these processors. Below are many of the details of the Penryn processor family and a glimpse into some of the key features of Intel's future generation of processors, codenamed Nehalem.

PENRYN FAMILY MICROARCHITECTURE INNOVATIONS

• A Range of Products -- Six Penryn family processors, including dual and quad-core desktop processors and a dual core mobile processor are all under the Intel Core processor brand name as well as new dual and quad-core server processors under the Intel® Xeon® processor brand name. A processor for higher-end server multiprocessing systems is also under development. As previously noted, Intel already has a total of 15 45nm products scheduled.


• Technical Marvel -- 45nm next-generation Intel® Core™2 quad-core processors will have 820 million transistors. Thanks to our high-k metal transistor invention, think of 820 million more power efficient light bulbs going on and off at light-speeds. The dual-core version has a die size of 107mm2, which is 25 percent smaller than Intel's current 65nm products - and quarter of the size of the average U.S. postage stamp - and operate at the same or lower power than Intel's current dual core processors.


• Deep Power Down for Energy Savings, Improved Battery Life -- The mobile Penryn processor has a new advanced power management state called Deep Power Down Technology that significantly reduces the power of the processor during idle periods such that internal transistor power leakage is no longer a factor. This helps extend battery life in laptops. This is a major advancement over previous generation industry leading Intel mobile processors.


• Intel Dynamic Acceleration Technology Enhanced Performance for Single Threaded Apps -- For the mobile Penryn processor, Intel has enhanced the Intel® Dynamic Acceleration Technology available in current Intel Core 2 processors. This feature uses the power headroom freed up when a core is made inactive to boost the performance of another still active core. Imagine a shower with two powerful water shower heads, when one shower head is turned off, the other has increased water pressure (performance).


• Speeding Up Video, Photo Imaging, and High Performance Software -- Penryn includes Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 4 (SSE4) instructions, the largest unique instruction set addition since the original SSE Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). This extends the Intel® 64 instruction set architecture to expand the performance and capabilities of the Intel® Architecture.


• Other Technical Features to Improve Performance
  
  
  
  • Microarchitecture Optimizations -- Increases the overall performance and energy efficiency of the already leading Intel Core microarchitecture to deliver more instruction executions per clock cycle, which results in more performance and quicker PC responsiveness.
  
  
  • Enhanced Intel® Virtualization Technology -- Penryn speeds up virtual machine transition (entry/exit) times by an average of 25 to 75 percent. This is all done through microarchitecture improvements and requires no virtual machine software changes. Virtualization partitions or compartmentalizes a single computer so that it can run separate operating systems and software, which can better leverage multicore processing power, increase efficiency and cut costs by letting a single machine act as many virtual "mini" computers.
  
  
  • Higher Frequencies -- Penryn family of products will deliver higher overall clock frequencies within existing power and thermal envelopes to further increase performance. Desktop and server products will introduce speeds at greater than 3GHz.
  
  
  • Fast Division of Numbers – Penryn-based processors provide fast divider performance, roughly doubling the divider speed over previous generations for computations used in nearly all applications through the inclusion of a new, faster divide technique called Radix 16. The ability to divide instructions and commands faster increases a computer's performance.
  
  
  • Larger Caches -- Penryn processors include up to a 50 percent larger L2 cache with a higher degree of associativity to further improve the hit rate and maximize its utilization. Dual-core Penryn processors will feature up to a 6MB L2 cache and quad-core processors up to a 12MB L2 cache. Cache is a memory reservoir where frequently accessed data can be stored for more rapid access. Larger and faster cache sizes speed a computer's performance and response time.
  
  
  • Unique Super Shuffle Engine -- By implementing a full-width, single-pass shuffle unit that is 128-bits wide, Penryn processors can perform full-width shuffles in a single cycle. This significantly improves performance for SSE2, SSE3 and SSE4 instructions that have shuffle-like operations such as pack, unpack and wider packed shifts. This feature will increase performance for content creation, imaging, video and high-performance computing.
  
  
  
  

NEHALEM MICROARCHITECTURE

After Penryn and the 45nm Hi-k silicon technology introduction comes Intel's next-generation microarchitecture (Nehalem) slated for initial production in 2008. By continuing to innovate at this rapid cadence, Intel will deliver enormous performance and energy efficiency gains in years to come, adding more performance features and capabilities for new and improved applications. Here are some new initial disclosures around our Nehalem microarchitecture:

• Dynamically scalable for leadership performance on demand with energy efficiency
  
  
  
  • Dynamically managed cores, threads, cache, interfaces and power
  
  
  • Leverages leading 4 instruction issue Intel® Core microarchitecture technology
  
  
  • Simultaneous multi-threading (similar to Intel® Hyper-threading technology) returns to enhance performance and energy efficiency
  
  
  • Innovative new Intel® SSE4 and ATA instruction set architecture additions
  
  
  • Superior multi-level shared cache leverages Intel® Smart Cache technology
  
  
  • Leadership system and memory bandwidth
  
  
  • Performance enhanced dynamic power management
  
  
  
  


• Design scalable for optimal price/performance/energy efficiency in each market segment
  
  
  
  • New system architecture for next-generation Intel processors and platforms
  
  
  • Scalable performance: 1 to 16+ threads, 1 to 8+ cores, scalable cache sizes
  
  
  • Scalable and configurable system interconnects and integrated memory controllers
  
  
  • High performance integrated graphics engine for client
  
  
  
  

Click here to download this fact sheet as in PDF format. [PDF, 48KB]

Click here to listen to an audio interview with Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and co-general manager of Intel Corporation's Digital Enterprise Group.

Intel, the world leader in silicon innovation, develops technologies, products and initiatives to continually advance how people work and live. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom.

Source:Intel Details Upcoming New Processor Generations

Tech Link (Technology): Intel's Penryn Core

If you want to know more about Penryn and the existing articles posted on well-known sites doesn't satisfy your hunger, then LostCircuits has an article posted for your viewing pleasure. Expand this article to read up MS' summary.

Summary

On January 26, 2007, Intel went public with the demonstration of their first processor core - codename Penryn - manufactured on a 45 nm dry lithography and running several operating systems at roughly over 2 GHz core speed. The manufacturing process - P1266 - has been working since January 2006 for the manufacture of the highest density SRAM cell array in the industry and is based on bringing back metal gates into the transistors while replacing the (SiO2) insulator with a precision-manufactured hafnium alloy High-k substrate using ALD technology.

The 45nm process-technology promises to put an end to leakage current runaway and allows the placing of roughly twice as many transistors per area compared to the hitherto used 65 nm (1264) process. Yield analysis is good at this point and the A0 silicon running is no small accomplishment. What else has Intel in stock for the next few months?

And what are IBM / AMD saying to all of this?

Source:Intel's Penryn Core

Press Release: Intel's Transistor Technology Breakthrough Represents Biggest Change to Computer Chips In 40 Years

I posted yesterday the on-slaught of Penryn-related articles and links, and now that I have official word from Intel, I am posting the full press release and other relevant information.

You'll see that Intel actually made more and more announcements publicly and officially since last year of November (though they have been mentioning it way earlier than that). And just this month, prior to this current announcement, they've made one earlier announcement making the computing world really excited of what Intel can do and what Intel can offer now and in the future. So enough of my blabbering, expand for more.

Intel's Transistor Technology Breakthrough Represents Biggest Change to Computer Chips In 40 Years
Intel Producing First Processor Prototypes With New, Tiny 45 Nanometer Transistors, Accelerating Era of Multi-Core Computing
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 27, 2007 – In one of the biggest advancements in fundamental transistor design, Intel Corporation today revealed that it is using two dramatically new materials to build the insulating walls and switching gates of its 45 nanometer (nm) transistors. Hundreds of millions of these microscopic transistors – or switches – will be inside the next generation Intel® Core™ 2 Duo, Intel Core 2 Quad and Xeon® families of multi-core processors. The company also said it has five early-version products up and running -- the first of fifteen 45nm processor products planned from Intel.

The transistor feat allows the company to continue delivering record-breaking PC, laptop and server processor speeds, while reducing the amount of electrical leakage from transistors that can hamper chip and PC design, size, power consumption, noise and costs. It also ensures Moore's Law, a high-tech industry axiom that transistor counts double about every two years, thrives well into the next decade.

Intel believes it has extended its lead of more than a year over the rest of the semiconductor industry with the first working 45nm processors of its next-generation 45nm family of products – codenamed "Penryn." The early versions, which will be targeted at five different computer market segments, are running Windows* Vista*, Mac OS X*, Windows* XP and Linux operating systems, as well as various applications. The company remains on track for 45nm production in the second half of this year.

Intel's Transistors Get a "High-k and Metal Gate" Make-Over at 45nm
Intel is the first to implement an innovative combination of new materials that drastically reduces transistor leakage and increases performance in its 45nm process technology. The company will use a new material with a property called high-k, for the transistor gate dielectric, and a new combination of metal materials for the transistor gate electrode.

"The implementation of high-k and metal materials marks the biggest change in transistor technology since the introduction of polysilicon gate MOS transistors in the late 1960s," said Intel Co-Founder Gordon Moore.

Transistors are tiny switches that process the ones and zeroes of the digital world. The gate turns the transistor on and off and the gate dielectric is an insulator underneath it that separates it from the channel where current flows. The combination of the metal gates and the high-k gate dielectric leads to transistors with very low current leakage and record high performance.

"As more and more transistors are packed onto a single piece of silicon, the industry continues to research current leakage reduction solutions," said Mark Bohr, Intel senior fellow. "Meanwhile our engineers and designers have achieved a remarkable accomplishment that ensures the leadership of Intel products and innovation. Our implementation of novel high-k and metal gate transistors for our 45nm process technology will help Intel deliver even faster, more energy efficient multi-core products that build upon our successful Intel Core 2 and Xeon family of processors, and extend Moore's Law well into the next decade."

For comparison, approximately 400 of Intel's 45nm transistors could fit on the surface of a single human red blood cell. Just a decade ago, the state-of-the-art process technology was 250nm, meaning transistor dimensions were approximately 5.5 times the size and 30 times the area of the technology announced today by Intel.

As the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years in accordance with Moore's Law, Intel is able to innovate and integrate, adding more features and computing processing cores, increasing performance, and decreasing manufacturing costs and cost per transistor. To maintain this pace of innovation, transistors must continue to shrink to ever-smaller sizes. However, using current materials, the ability to shrink transistors is reaching fundamental limits because of increased power and heat issues that develop as feature sizes reach atomic levels. As a result, implementing new materials is imperative to the future of Moore's Law and the economics of the information age.

Intel's High-k, Metal Gate Recipe for 45nm Process Technology
Silicon dioxide has been used to make the transistor gate dielectric for more than 40 years because of its manufacturability and ability to deliver continued transistor performance improvements as it has been made ever thinner. Intel has successfully shrunk the silicon dioxide gate dielectric to as little as 1.2nm thick – equal to five atomic layers – on our previous 65nm process technology, but the continued shrinking has led to increased current leakage through the gate dielectric, resulting in wasted electric current and unnecessary heat.

Transistor gate leakage associated with the ever-thinning silicon dioxide gate dielectric is recognized by the industry as one of the most formidable technical challenges facing Moore's Law. To solve this critical issue, Intel replaced the silicon dioxide with a thicker hafnium-based high-k material in the gate dielectric, reducing leakage by more than 10 times compared to the silicon dioxide used for more than four decades.

Because the high-k gate dielectric is not compatible with today's silicon gate electrode, the second part of Intel's 45nm transistor material recipe is the development of new metal gate materials. While the specific metals that Intel uses remains secret, the company will use a combination of different metal materials for the transistor gate electrodes.

The combination of the high-k gate dielectric with the metal gate for Intel's 45nm process technology provides more than a 20 percent increase in drive current, or higher transistor performance. Conversely it reduces source-drain leakage by more than five times, thus improving the energy efficiency of the transistor.

Intel's 45nm process technology also improves transistor density by approximately two times that of the previous generation, allowing the company to either increase the overall transistor count or to make processors smaller. Because the 45nm transistors are smaller than the previous generation, they take less energy to switch on and off, reducing active switching power by approximately 30 percent. Intel will use copper wires with a low-k dielectric for its 45nm interconnects for increased performance and lower power consumption. It will also use innovative design rules and advanced mask techniques to extend the use of 193nm dry lithography to manufacture its 45nm processors because of the cost advantages and high manufacturability it affords.

Penryn Family Will Bring More Energy Efficient Performance
The Penryn family of processors is a derivative of the Intel Core microarchitecture and marks the next step in Intel's rapid cadence of delivering a new process technology and new microarchitecture every other year. The combination of Intel's leading 45nm process technology, high-volume manufacturing capabilities, and leading microarchitecture design enabled the company to already develop its first working 45nm Penryn processors.

The company has more than 15 products based on 45nm in development across desktop, mobile, workstation and enterprise segments. With more than 400 million transistors for dual-core processors and more than 800 million for quad-core, the Penryn family of 45nm processors includes new microarchitecture features for greater performance and power management capabilities, as well as higher core speeds and up to 12 megabytes of cache. The Penryn family designs also bring approximately 50 new Intel SSE4 instructions that expand capabilities and performance for media and high-performance computing applications.

Click here to go to Intel's 45nm Transistor Technology Virtual Press Kit

Source:Intel's Transistor Technology Breakthrough Represents Biggest Change to Computer Chips In 40 Years

Tech Link (Industry): Penryn, technology, rumors, and preview

I have a bunch of links, all of them came from a fellow forumer, ame, about this new technology process for the upcoming processor. Aside from the process shrink, new technology used for such process such as high-k, the more mundane but very attractive to the enthusiasts is the rebirth of HT (hyper threading).

While I'll list all the other links, I'd really like you to go visit bit-tech for their nice article, which I'll quote here. Expand to read more and check out other resources.

On top of the new instructions, there are also new power management features, higher clock speeds and larger cache sizes. The dual-core Penryn processors will have up to 6MB of L2 cache, while the quad-core Penryn processors will come with up to 12MB of L2 cache – that’s a 50% increase over the Conroe and Kentsfield cores that come with 4MB and 8MB of L2 cache respectively.

Source:Intel 45nm technology overview

::Other Resources::
AMDTech: Intel Demonstrates new 45nm Transistors and Conroe's Successor
PCPer: Intel Demos 45nm Up an Running

Tech Link (Technology): Intel Samples 45nm “Penryn” Microprocessors.

I'm still down with muscle pain and slight head-ache, darn, I hate this weather (hot, cold, hot, cold) and it all does to me is make me sick.

Anyway, enough of the ranting. Chipzilla looks to be very agressive in pushing the marketing process and ensuring technology leadership. I am excited to see how these will turn out, and waiting with both hands open to receive the new samples.

Intel Corp. on Monday said that the first prototypes of microprocessors using 45nm process technology have been produced. The announcement once again illustrates Intel’s very aggressive process technology transition roadmap and proves that Intel Corp. has delivered on its promise to tape out its first 45nm chip this quarter.

“We are processing the first samples of the Penryn design. These samples will go back to the design team to determine if design is working as expected,” Mark Bohr, director of process architecture and integration at Intel, is reported to have said in an interview with Reuters news-agency.

Intel’s sampling of the code-named Penryn processor at 45nm fabrication process occurs amid the company’s arch-rival Advanced Micro Devices still have not announced a single processor made using 65nm fabrication process, which is used to manufacture the majority of Intel’s central processing units (CPUs) these days. According to the director of Intel, the company is on-track to produce Penryn in volumes and ship them to customers in the second half of 2007.

No official details concerning the Penryn chip design were announced this time, however, according to previously published news-stories, the chip code-named Penryn is a 45nm incarnation of the dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo processor for mobile computers (code-named Merom) with SSE4 technology that, Intel promises, is set to benefit a variety of applications, including those involving graphics, video encoding and processing, 3D imaging, gaming, web servers and application servers. It is unclear what kind of advantages besides the SSE4 the new chips will have over the current Intel Core 2 Duo product family. Typically, thinner manufacturing process may allow Intel to crank up clock-speed of the chips, enlarge its cache sizes, reduce power consumption and make them cheaper to make.

Intel announced in mid-October that that it has fifteen microprocessor designs set to be manufactured using 45nm process technology, including such products like Bloomfield, Yorkfied and Wolfdale.

AMD is expected to ship its first processors made using 65nm fabrication process shortly and be on the market with 45nm process technology by mid-2008, still, several quarters behind Intel, but not a year, as in the case of 65nm production technology.

Source:Intel Samples 45nm “Penryn” Microprocessors.