Don't forget Nov 14, SB-Extreme!
Although those who want price per watt will be disappointed by
the 125 TDP. Nope, 130 TDP. Anyway still 583 dollar 6 core
beastly machine. I still like the idea of finally getting a 2 socket
moboard and a sandy bridge xeon FOR SAME PRICE (each).
Mobo will be pretty penny though I'm sure.

skgiven

It's a good job they do

It causes progress in speed and efficiency and mantains sanity in pricing

...and the i7-2700K duly turned up 4days ago; an extra $15 for an extra 100MHz (3% performance hop). I guess they will wait a while and then release an i7-2800K or similar. Perhaps an i7-2900K as well in the distant future. Then they run out of numbers or would confuse everyone by using 3000 number range (different generation).

Arm 8 and Windows 8:
Windows will support Arm on small handheld devices, extending to notebooks, desktops and even cloud servers. The addition of x64 for Arm is nothing short of a frontal attack on AMD and Intel, right across the CPU range. x64 was required for the server end of the market (memory addressing), but should facilitate better acceptance by Windows 8, which I fully expect to be released in 2012 and a server version of the operating system to turn up around a year later (perhaps slightly sooner this time).

Arm's X-Gene will allow from 2 to 128 cores up to 3GHz each, and each core will use up to only 2W when in use (0.5W when not). This covers hand held devices through to cloud servers. X-Gene processors will turn up in 40nm to 28nm; sizes more akin to GPU's than CPU's. The speculation is that these will be 3times as efficient as the latest dual skt Intel server processors. We will have to wait until mid/late 2012 to have any real idea but they should be very competitive; 40nm is now well proven, especially for such small chips (good yields = good price). My guess is that we wont see 128core versions until W8 Server is available, or maybe later, but the processors should be 28nm by then.

I dare say it will be a few years before we can crunch on one, but I quite fancy a 384GHz system that uses <300W.

For those who REALLY like to play, this article entitled "Spaniards prototype ARM-GPU hybrid supercomputer" says that "The system board ... is now available as a development system" and suggests it may only be "around $500".

Let us know if anyone experiments with this baby.

I finally went Bulldozer and all I can say is that it has had a bad press

It's matching the Phenom II clock for clock and you get a whole load more of them

On paper the 125W TDP FX8150 does not look like one of the greenest CPU's available

It's still in the bedding in/tweaking phase and is living on one memory stick borrowed from the lean green crunching machine so it's a bit hemmed in at the mo.

The 6 cores of the 95W version of the Phenom II makes 15.83W/core

The 8 cores of the 125W FX8150 makes 15.63 W/core so just a slight edge

..throw in the fact that each core is crunching at 1.4 * the rate of the Phenom II cores...and bingo

There's the difference

65W Phenom II 905E =10Ghz 153.85Mhz/W (tdp)
95W Phenom II 1055T = 18Ghz (Cores OC'ed to 3Ghz) 189.47Mhz/W (tdp)
125W FX8150 = 33.8Ghz (Cores OC'ed to 4.2Ghz) 270.4Mhz/W (tdp)

That's over a 75% increase in number crunching power per watt since this thread kicked off less than 2 years ago


I'll get back to you I think my 134.5 Floating Point MIPS per Watt at the socket will be threatened


(On the GPU front I've followed the same principles - time will tell)