According to The Inquirer, Stoakley/Seaburg/Harpertown are just about ready to be released.<br><br>The 3.2Ghz Harpertown is expected to have a ~20% improvement over X5365 Clovertown DP 3 GHz FSB1333, for just ~6% clock jump.<br><br>Here is the article from The Inquirer:<br><br>Intel Skulltrail to break dual-socket performance barrier<br><br>100+ real GFLOPs on a desktop, anyone?<br><br>By Nebojsa Novakovic: Thursday 23 August 2007, 08:38<br><br>"INTEL IS pretty much ready with the Harpertown 'cream of the crop' of initial Penryns, and the boards with the new Seaburg chipset, aka Stoakley platform, are about there by the likes of Tyan, Asus, Supermicro and of course Intel itself.<br><br>I've myself seen the dual-socket workstations and servers running 3.2 GHz X5482 FSB1600 Harpertown DP on the new chipset ever since Beijing April IDF - even then they were running stable on branded vendor boxes. The recent run at Intel labs handled even overnight non stop benchmark runs with 100.0% per-core on all cores CPU usage fine - not bad for pre-production units. The new boards, by the way, have full copper, fanned, heatsinks on the chipset north bridge, finally - these are hot babies running DUAL FSB1600 at the same time, so more decent heat dissipation is a must.<br><br>According to the industry sources in high performance computing, the larger 12 MB caches on these parts, compared to vastly increased net memory bandwidth obtainable on the Seaburg chipset and DDR2-800 CL5 FB-DIMMs, give far higher benchmark results in some cases than the current dual Xeon batch.<br><br>For instance, STREAM-type memory bandwidth benchmarks are expected to be between 40% and 60% faster, and you could get around 80 GFLOPs double precision net (Rmax) 40Kx40K Linpack performance out of 102 GFLOPs peak, with the current (not yet fully optimised) code.<br><br>This is a ~20% improvement over X5365 Clovertown DP 3 GHz FSB1333, for just ~6% clock jump - and before further tuning that may incorporate some opcodes from SSE, like dot product.<br><br>Based on the sources who saw dual-socket Barcelona running, with the most optimised new PGI compilers for the platforms, and after a good round of tuning, it should give up to 55 GFLOPs Rmax out of 64 GFLOPs peak, at 2 GHz. Now, it shows Barcelona is a bit more efficient per clock than the Harpertown, but it also has a 60% clock disadvantage that more than destroys its competitive position at the dual-socket system level. Even if AMD manages to ship a 2.2 GHz bin in October, when Intel is supposed to have X5482-based platforms on the way to the customers already, it still doesn't nearly make up.<br><br>Yeah, Linpack is of course a useless benchmark, but unfortunately many workstation or supercomputer tenders all over the world include it as a critical measure - the Top 500 ranking is still based on it.<br><br>This is just the beginning, though. Intel's "Skulltrail" high-end dual socket media & gaming platform will use this same Xeon, just in an unlocked Extreme version, and the same Seaburg chipset, but in an optimised lower latency, higher bandwidth configuration with selected FB-DIMMs running upward of DDR2-1000 speed and lower latency like CL4.<br><br>The board has FOUR PCI-E x16 GPU slots and, of course, strong power/VRM config with overclockable Dual FSB config on top of the unlocked multipliers. All the chipset and VRM heat sinks are easy to replace for optional water block/freeze block cooling.<br><br>Knowing the 4++ GHz air cooling overclock headroom on these 45 nm parts, and even higher liquid or cryo cooling potential, and coupled with fast FSB & memory - I thought "Fast FB-DIMM" was an oxymoron - we could be in for some record results when the monster E-ATX board shows up in the market in the next few months.<br><br>After all, an extra 20 - 30% speed boost on CPU, and additional 30+ memory throughput due to optimised FSB latency coupled with both higher bandwidth and lower latency by those upcoming FB-DIMMs, should give a very decent application performance increase, not to mention ability to feed, say, four Nvidia G92 GPUs simultaneously?<br><br>One of these records will surely be the above mentioned Linpack - Dual water-cooled 4+ GHz Extreme Harpertown Xeons on a Skulltrail board will be the first ever dual-socket PC / workstation / server to break the 100 GFLOPs net - Rmax - Linpack performance barrier.<br><br>Now, just think what wonders will that machine do for gaming physics or, as our Theo reported from Leipzig, real time ray tracing."<br><br>
i am not as versed on meanings of all of the numbers. i used know what clock speed meant, but that's no longer much of a comparative science. i guess at the end of the day, it's always been all about performance and the next generation towers are going to be an incredible boost over my current G5. <br><br>is the 3.2Ghz Hapertown expected to be the top of the line? if so, i am certainly going to be fine with the 3.0 model if there is one. the one concern i have is the increased heat with the Hapertown. i still remember the very loud dual Ghz machines we bought for some employees -- sounded like airplanes when the fans came on. i hope we don't get that as i keep my computer up on my desktop (big desk).<br><br>
I am not good at comparing cpus.<br>Clock speed is important, just not as important as it was a couple years ago.<br>AMD is coming out with a 45nm processor quad-core Barcelona processor.<br>On paper the Barcelona sounds a little more advanced than Intel's Harpertown.<br>But the first batch of Barcelona processors will only be clocked at 2.0GHz.<br>Harpertown at 3.2GHz will eat Barcelona for breakfast.<br>In this instance Harpertown's clock speed is very important.<br>Intel's Harpertown will give AMD's Barcelona a trashing because of it.<br><br>Yes, the 3.2GHz Harpertown will be the top of the line.<br>I don't think you can go wrong with the 3.0GHz Harpertown.<br>It appears to me that the 3.0GHz Harpertown should be quite a bit cooler than the 3.2GHz Harpertown. 80W TDP compared to 120W TDP of the 3.2GHz Harpertown.<br><br>Rumor has it that the Harpertown 3.2Ghz is 20 percent more powerful than Apple's 3.0Ghz quad-core Clovertown processor.<br>Harpertown has a 6 percent increase in clock speed over Clovertown.<br>I think it would be safe to assume the 3.0Ghz Harpertown will have a 10 percent increase in power over today's 3.0GHz Clovertown.<br><br>Heat issues? Again I don't know.<br>But it appears to me that the Harpertown processors are not any hotter than the Clovertowns and Woodcrest processors in today's Mac Pro.<br>To give you an idea:<br>The 3.2GHz Harpertown has a 120W TDP as compared to the 150W TDP of the 3.0Ghz Clovertown.<br>The 3.0GHz Harpertown has an 80W TDP as compared to the 80W TDP of the 3.0GHz dual-core Woodcrest.<br>The 2.83GHz Harpertown has an 80W TDP as compared to the 65W TDP of the 2.66GHz dual-core Woodcrest.<br>(Okay, the 2.66GHz Woodcrest is cooler but at what price?)<br><br>
Intel announced the Core 2 Extreme X7900 yesterday.<br>The 2.8GHz Merom processor offers a 4MB L2 cache with support for 800MHz Front Side Bus.<br><br>So, what's the big deal about that?<br><br>Mac users will recognize this chip as the chip that was announced in the iMac on August 7th as a high end configuration. <br>It appears that Apple is able to get preferential shipments on upcoming Intel processors. <br>Intel had previously provided Apple with a 3.0GHz Xeon (Clovertown) processor with an early limited production.<br><br>Apple is getting Intel processors before Intel's launch date.<br><br>In summary...Intel plans to launch it's Harpertown processors on Nov 11th.<br>Maybe Apple will bring out the new Mac Pros before November 11th<br><br><br><br>
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