The Nehalem Preview: Intel Does It Again
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 5, 2008 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Nehalem's Media Encoding Performance
We had time to run two of our media encoding tests: the DivX 6.8 and x264 workloads.
DivX 6.8 with Xmpeg
Our DivX test is the same one we've run in our regular CPU reviews, we're simply encoding a 1080p MPEG-2 file in DivX. We are using an unconstrained profile, encoding preset of 5 and enhanced multithreading is enabled.
The DivX test is an important one as it doesn't scale well at all beyond four threads, any performance advantage Nehalem has here is entirely due to microarchitectural improvements and not influenced by its ability to work on twice as many threads at once.
Clock for clock, Nehalem is nearly 28% faster than Penryn in our DivX test. Even better is when you put this performance in perspective: at 2.66GHz Nehalem is faster than the fastest Penryn available today the Core 2 Extreme QX9770 running at 3.2GHz. At 3.2GHz, Nehalem will be fast. The improvements in performance here are entirely due to the faster L2 cache and micro-architectural gains; being able to have more micro-ops in flight and improved unaligned cache accesses give us a significant improvement in video encoding performance.
The last time we saw these sorts of performance gains was when Conroe first launched.
x264 Encoding with AutoMKV
Using AutoMKV we compress the same source file we used in our WME test down to 100MB, but with the x264 codec. We used the 2_Pass_Insane_Quality profile:
Encoding performance here went through the roof with Nehalem: a clock for clock boost of 44%. Once more, Nehalem at today's artificially limited, modest clock speed is already faster than any Penryn out today. What Intel did to AMD in 2006, it is doing to itself in 2008. Amazing.
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SiliconDoc - Monday, July 28, 2008 - link
Oh yeah, and we're getting the knocked down lesser pins version probably, though not set in stone they won't be able to resist bending us all over and making all the massive die and tool and cuting restructurings required to pump out the lesser pinned models... while they tell us "it's cost effective" ( means they can charge 18 different rates and swirl the markets in confusion and gigantic price differences for mere few percentage performance differences).They sure have a lot of time to diggle around with it all, don't they- and a lot of capacity, a lot of marketers, a lot of board makers/changers...
Oh gawd it's a multi-tentacled monster... just realize they had their group megaspam session and have figured the most confusing, confounding, and master profiteering into it all. It's got nothing to do with practicality or delivering us the performance we desire. NOTHING.
gochichi - Friday, June 6, 2008 - link
Someone mentioned the breaking laws in the past (intel did).Just look at the distress that AMD is under. While they had the superior products, they couldn't make deals with Dell and so on. As soon as they were finally able to make deals fairly, Intel obliterated them on performance.
So while they should have been piling up an R&D fund during their "crown years" they hardly grew. To the extent that even thought their CPUs are not competitive they are still growing in overall market share.
I gotta balance my desire for performance now, and my ongoing desire for performance. I can't imagine how having AMD wiped out would be good for the long term. Performance is moving up surely enough but why can't we have the full rate of improvement? I mean, lets stop poluting the world with obsolete brand new equipment. I think the legal battle between Intel and AMD prevents Intel from eliminating AMD. The more they beat up on AMD, the higher the damages of their breaking the law and the higher the penalty for Intel.
I think AMD can make a strong comeback though. They had a sloppy start with the AMD-ATI merger but ATI is actually not far at all from NVIDIA in terms of design and performance. These pendulums do swing, and perhaps AMDs chips will be better next time. I think the price-point wars are the most important. If you can deliver a nice quad-core or 3x core for about $100.00 you're gonna be in business or at least have market share.
BSMonitor - Friday, June 6, 2008 - link
Giving a company incentives to exclusively sell your products is not a violation of any law. Aka, is E.A. Sports in violation of the law by signing an exclusive contract with the NFLPA ? No. How many GM dealers sell more than GM lines of cars? Not many... There are many other reasons to be excluse besides a "monopoly deal".Were Dell customers complaining about not having the choice of AMD processors? Not enough of them, clearly. You think for a second Dell would lose market share for Intel? Sorry, the answer is Hell No.
When AMD did have a strong processor lineup, they also hit manufacturing capacity walls.... Quite simply, AMD does not have the capacity to fill Intel's market share. Its not like there were AMD processors on the shelves because Dell was exclusively Intel...
Intel has more Fabs. Fabs don't get built overnight to meet demand... Now, AMD has inferior products and a couple more Fabs... Too little too late as they say...
hs635 - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 - link
Get aids and die painfully cuntJustin Case - Sunday, June 8, 2008 - link
[quote]Giving a company incentives to exclusively sell your products is not a violation of any law.[/quote]Actually, it is, if you control more than a certain share (typically 50%) of the market.
You can give volume discounts but you cannot make the cost depend on what other products your client sells.
If you're under that "critical" market share, you can do pretty much anything you want. Above it, the rules change (and there are very good reasons for that, as anyone who's studied macroeconomy knows).
There's really no need to come up with "examples" or ill-fitting "analogies". That's just the way the law is, and everyone who studied trade law knows that (including Intel's legal department). They've already been fined in Korea, they're on their way to being fined in the EU and Japan, and they'll probably be fined in the US too.
Unless they bribe the right people like Microsoft did, of course.
SiliconDoc - Monday, July 28, 2008 - link
I caught a couple articles on how Nvidia was hammering vendors for price structures - and how they were going to do it, a bit ahead of time of when it hit. Yeah, it hit, I saw it, eggs (hint) were broken all over the place.It's a kind of tyranny... lol
Uhh, thank computers I guess, since they've made everything like that so easy to track and enforce ("private" enforcement not law enforcement)...
Expect a lot more of it, too. Everything moves so fast in business, and courts move so slowly.
The Zerg - Friday, June 6, 2008 - link
Guys... here's an example of bad luck, bad tech or both:I work in a corporation. A very large one, the largest in a specific industry.
We use Intel-based CPUs. Worldwide.
My Centrino (in its Dell Latitude incarnation) died two days ago (causes unknown - and this caused a lot of trouble). Be sure that I had some nice words for Intel in that moment.
I use AMD at home (it was the best bang for the buck at that time). One week ago (and Hell YES, this is the bare truth) my ASUS motherboard died, together with an Athlon 3500+.
See? Nobody's perfect. Maybe 2 strong CPU players (makers) are better than just one. Maybe I will not use an ASUS motherboard next time, because I have another 3-4 serious options...
For the AMD/Intel fans: I am a Canon fan, but I really respect Nikon, Leica and Sony for their outstanding products. And: I can buy a 1Ds Mark III, but I currently own a 40D - "because I can 95% of the games with it"
And there is never too little too late for a World Press Photo award :)
Barack Obama - Friday, June 6, 2008 - link
Nehalem is looking to be beastly good. Let's see if it can combo well with Windows 7 and its multi-touch capabilities.Egglick - Thursday, June 5, 2008 - link
Here is my biggest question: Will these chips work with DDR2? In my opinion, DDR3 still isn't worth the price premium by a long shot.coldpower27 - Friday, June 6, 2008 - link
This shouldn't be much of an issue by the time this thing ships for mainstream platforms ala LGA1160, sometime in Early-Mid 2009.DDR3 is still cost prohibitive now, your looking at about 2x as much for the same amount of memory. However in 6-9 months prices can change alot.