Kentsfield aka Core 2 Quadro isnt far away now! Engineering samples have been floating around for some time, and a new batch has recently been doing the rounds. It seems this chip is ready to go as the mid-october time frame has been mooted as a release date. Now this is really dragging the chip kicking and screaming into life.
It was originally slated for Q1 2007 and it was only a few weeks ago that this became Q4 2006 and now it would appear that its early Q4 2006 at that!
I do wonder if Intel's launch will coincide with amds ramp to 65nM ? do amd have there quad core waiting in the wings as a suprise counter measure or are intel just getting ready and putting more pressure on there rival.
As intel are being far from quiet about there
cpu releases these days.
The kentsfield chip isnt all that revolutionairy after all its two conroe's packaged together on one substrate. Intel of course have plenty of experience in doing this before with the presler 'double core'
cpu.
Early benchmarks suggest it is indeed quick but not without its faults. Mainly due to the fact its 4 cpus but two, 4 meg l2 caches. Where the conroe chips can share its cache with the other
cpu it seems in quad core windows can get confused and assign cores 1 and 3 to work together.
This is lower performance than if it was the cores 1 and 2 which are both part of the same silicon.
This is goes back to the old 840EE chip which had two real chips and two virtual hyperthreading chips.
Back then windows was easily confused and would assign tasks to sub optimal cpus.
Other details of the chip are that it should be a direct swap in for c2d chips on intel 965 and 975x chipset based boards and that the TDP is around 130w. Exactly double that of the E6700.
The engineering samples so far have been stock clocked to 2.66GHz the same as an E6700. Most have been able to overclock them to around 3.33GHz however, at which speed they smash all speed records going. Scoring some 5000 marks on the
cpu test of 3d mark 06
Edit - It was 3dmark 06.
Comparison table here,
http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/.../3dm06-cpu.png
The following link shows just what the 'core'
cpu can do in terms of sse instructions
http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/...ia_integer.png