Hold Off On Building that PC..........again!

[USAFANG67]

Intel samples 45 nanometre parts

Bigger caches, dividers and *Ts

By Charlie Demerjian: Tuesday 28 November 2006, 11:16
ACCORDING TO Reuters, Intel has taped out Penryn and is starting to sample it. These 45 nanometre chips are going to be a shrink of Merom/Conroe/ Woodcrest with some goodies sprinkled on top. We first told you about them a year and a half ago, and not much looks to have changed.

The basics are the same as the current core, it is just tweaked. The big thing is that cache will be upped to 6MB from 4, basically they will be catching up to AMD here (Note: I am going to get phone calls over that one...). The other biggie will be the clocks, no not the top end, the dividers. Look for it to be in the 3.46-3.73GHz range when all is said and done, but they will support half-clock dividers. This means instead of the rather absurd 333MHz steps they have now, they can do 166MHz.

If you are curious why the current CoreNumberForeignnumber parts go from 1.6 to 3.0GHz, that is because marketing demands 5 SKUs, and without the half step dividers you are looking at 5 * 333 or 5 * 266 for the spread. That will be a thing of the past.

The chips are also on the 45nm process, and from all reports, it is going swimingly. Intel is going to drive the mainstream wattage down a bit from 65 to 50W here but we still have a year to go, things may change in the meantime. Where ever it ends up, it will be less power than the 65nm parts.

Last up are some new *Ts, most notably Rockton finally pokes it's head above the surface for a look around. The chips will also be a little better, a little more efficient, and fix a few of the warts that CoreDuho had. HT was also back on some roadmaps, but it does not look like that will ever be turned on, but the circuitry seems to be there in one way or another.

There are a few things that you won't see this time around, real quad cores and higher FSBs. The Yorktown rumours that were flying around at IDF were and are wrong, there is no converged quad core parts until Nehalem. There are also no plans for a 1600FSB unless something bad happens to Nehalem/CSI, or AMD pressures Intel hard.

While the chip may be ready a little earlier, don't expect the process to be pulled in much. Think Q4/07 for a trickle of parts, and Q1/08 for the real volume. Intel pulled in a lot of dates during 2006, but pulling in a combination of process and parts may be a little much to hope for.

[tserold]

Could you dumb it down just a little.

[eisman]

Yeah, what does all that mean?

[Onikage954RR]

Means nothing. I have a 3 year old PC that runs even the most hard core games on high settings.

Anything you build today is going to be useful for a long time. Sure there will be a new uber 6 core CPU out in 6 more months but it's not necessary.

[05_NISMO_4X4]

I'm still working on a 1.2GHz PC with 512MB of RAM and a 60GB hard drive. An antique by today's standards, but it still works fine for me!

[konarider]

i have the AMD 64 w/ the 6800 card for about 2 years now..still happy w/ it!

thanks for the info though..

[HKYStormFront]

p4 2.7, 1 gb ram, 250 gb 7.2k rpm HDD, geForce 5200 AGP, SB 5.1 Live, DVD-RW , xBlade tower w/ 5 fans here...oh and trick blue LED's (i didn't build it, my friend gave it to me when he left for the military back in june)

[Mainerunr]

P4-2.8, 1gb ram, 250gb SATA hd, 80gb PATA hd, old ATi all-in-wonder 9600XT (so I use the system to record TV). most games are fine but I've really only been playing NFS:Most wanted and tiger woods '06 lately (although gaming on the computer has come to a standstill since I got the PS2 and 5 games sunday...)

need to upgrade soon though, video processing is killing me. 3 hours to process an hour of video is ridiculous but it oculd be the software too...still, makes it a major PITA when making DVD's off the video from the digicamcorder.

when I upgrade it will be to whatever I can buy for $1000. motherboard, cpu, ram, video for starters, unless I need a new burner or hard drive too but those are cheap. probably wont happen for a couple years so maybe the 45nm dual core chips will be out and relatively cheap by then. hopefully they wont change too much other crap between now and then(PCI-E came out right after my last upgrade).

going to build a system for a friend, he set my limit at $1500. should be able to put together a sweet system.

[igbar]

Yeah, buy a Mac.

[emcee_peepants]

Originally Posted by tserold

Could you dumb it down just a little.

Yeah, um, what?