Intel, AMD Square Off With Nehalem And Shanghai

Intel officially lifted the curtains on the Core i7 this past Monday at three different global locations, kicking off with a "Midnight Madness"-style block party in Tokyo. Events in San Francisco and New York rounded out the slate.

System builders, software developers and other guests were floored by the new processors' raw power at the San Francisco launch party, held in the city's new hipster mecca, Dogpatch Studios.

"It's a lot faster than I'm used to," said one 3D animator, referring to a custom-built Core i7-965 Extreme Edition desktop built by Puget Systems, Kent, Wash. The first Nehalem lineup also includes the Core i7-940 (2.93GHz, 8MB L3 Cache, $562) and the Core i7-920 (2.66GHz, 8MB L3 Cache, $284).

CRN's Test Center, reviewing the Core i-965 Extreme Edition on Intel's DX58SO Extreme Series "SmackOver" motherboard, described "nearly historic levels of improvement over previous generations of processors." Intel's move to DDR3 memory on upcoming Nehalem server chips is a big leap forward, said Source Code's Corn. But as of late October he was still concerned about the availability of memory to meet the new processors' demands.

"They're integrating the memory controller and with the QuickPath interface they'll compete right up against [AMD's] HyperTransport. It's triple channel DDR3 memory, so you start running three DIMMs at a time and we should see some spectacular memory performance," Corn said. "But I haven't been able to get any memory manufacturers to get me 1600MHz on hand yet, so I haven't had chance to test yet."

Others in the channel voiced concerns about the immediate availability of memory, graphics and other components to build around Nehalem, but Intel's Steve Dallman said about a week ahead of the Core i7 launch that those issues had been addressed successfully.

"I'm really glad you didn't ask me six months ago," said Dallman, Intel's worldwide reseller channel chief, when queried directly in early November about components availability in the first weeks after the Core i7 launch. "But today I'm feeling really good. Six months ago we were really worried about chassis availability and who would get certification on the X58 chipset.

"But now we're in excellent shape with the mainstream chassis guys. The board is incredibly solid from our perspective and has been shipping into the channel for a week or two. After the chassis, the boards and the CPUs, it's the regular mix and match on hard disks, etc.

"And look, memory is out there and available," he added. "Luckily, we put DDR3 memory on our earlier Extreme products. Right now we don't have any major gaps in components."

With regards to the new Core i7 desktop chips, system builders say that sounds about right because DDR3 on the client side is not new. But questions still remain about the new memory requirements on the server side, where Intel is also moving to DDR3. AMD is sticking with DDR2 for its newest server chips and has chosen to wait until 2010 to transition to DDR3, according to the smaller chip maker.

It may also take some time for software developers to fully embrace Intel's new triple-channel memory architecture, said Philip Pokorny, chief architect at Penguin Computing, San Francisco, Calif.

"Developers are going to have trouble with DDR3, because Intel is introducing a new prime number to write to, and the 'power of three' is harder than the 'power of two' that programmers are used to. Writing for three memory channels is tough for a software engineer," Pokorny said. "My guess is we'll see customers and applications vendors needing to take time to optimize for a new platform and a memory allocation system on three channels."

Next: Destination Shanghai