Intel unveils eight-core Nehalem EX

**Bamboo** · 05-26-2009, 11:14 PM

Try and keep from drooling once you see the numbers because this baby is made for high end servers, not your high end gaming rig.

Intel unveils native eight-core Nehalem-EX

Once this trickles down to desktops, and programs can handle it, WOW

8 cores and 16 threads is nothing to sneeze at

Quote:

In comparison with the current four-core and six-core “Dunnington” Xeon 7400 processors, Intel says the new Nehalem EX will deliver up to nine times the memory bandwidth, 2.5 times the database performance, 1.7 times the integer throughput, and 2.2 times the floating-point throughput.

ScratchMonkey · 05-27-2009, 12:35 PM

The number of cores isn't the item of note. It's the memory bandwidth, which is the bottleneck above a few cores. You can slap lots more cores on a chip, but getting data to them all to keep them fed is hard.

Tonk · 05-28-2009, 03:19 AM

ya but 9x memory bandwidth should fix that problem

ScratchMonkey · 05-28-2009, 02:33 PM

It fixes the problem for 9 cores, which is very significant. But I believe Intel has proposed 16, and that number would be severely starved at that bandwidth.

The cool thing with this much bandwidth is that you can run a lot more clients on the same server, using less power and space. Data centers get more efficient.

**1er** · 05-29-2009, 01:08 PM

That's if you assume they mean 9x single core's bandwidth?

What if they mean 9x the quad alternative...

ScratchMonkey · 05-30-2009, 08:09 PM

No, the quote says 9x the 4 or 6 core CPU's bandwidth, not 9x of each core.

Alas, I don't see a real bandwidth number in the article.

For comparison, my first computer (actually, my brother's) had about 8 Mbps of memory bandwidth. That's an Apple IIe with byte-wide memory running at 1 MHz.