Still, the same Oregon-based team that created Nehalem also did Westmere, so the ins and outs of the processor were already familiar to them. Sandy Bridge will be a “tock” with more radical architectural remodeling. They’re a refinement of the quad-core Nehalem architecture introduced at 45 nanometers, with a relatively conservative set of enhancements outside of the obvious changes in core counts and cache sizes. Speaking of which, the chips in the Westmere family are a “tick” in Intel’s vaunted tick-tock cadence. Instead, the firm will press ahead with a quad-core version of Sandy Bridge, the upcoming architectural refresh slated for the 32-nm process. As far as we know, though, Intel has no plans to release a native quad-core derivative of Westmere. Almost looks to me like one could eliminate the apparent white space on both sides of the memory controller and the I/O, uncore, and memory controller would wrap pretty snugly around four cores their associated 元 cache. Presumably, Intel would want to minimize wasted space on a design like this one, so I’m intrigued. In a briefing, Dave Hill, Westmere’s lead architect, acknowledged this “white space” and noted only that he wasn’t going to talk about the reasons for it. Interestingly, Intel’s architects call the uncore area running up the center of the chip “the tube.” (Well, I thought it was interesting, anyway.) Your eye may also be drawn to the top left corner of the chip, where there’s a pretty big area with not much going on. Instead, it relies on a QuickPath Interconnect to link it to the X58 chipset. As a drop-in replacement for Bloomfield, Gulftown has no integrated PCI Express connectivity ( a la Lynnfield) and no integrated graphics ( a la Clarkdale). The image above shows Gulftown’s layout nicely. The main things you need to know about Gulftown are reproduced in the table below, which should act as something of a code-name decoder.Ī map of the Gulftown die. If your head hasn’t exploded yet from code-name overload, I congratulate you. Gulftown is intended to be a drop-in replacement for the existing members of the Core i7-900 series, all of which are based on the quad-core chip code-named Bloomfield.
L4d2 bazinga code#
This six-core processor is primarily known, in its server/workstation guise, as Westmere-EP Gulftown is the code name for the desktop variants of the chip. Like the dual-core Clarkdale Core i3/i5 processors introduced earlier this year, Gulftown is a part of the Westmere family of 32-nm chips. The Core i7-980X adds a new code name to that constellation: Gulftown. Consequently, we’ve started referring to Clarkdale, Lynnfield, and Bloomfield rather than attempting to enumerate all possible products based on those bits of silicon. Knowing them is helpful because the complexity of Intel’s product portfolio is surpassed only by that of its naming scheme. If you’ve been following Intel CPUs lately, you’re probably well-versed in code names. Keep reading, and you’ll see what I mean. Given this thing’s performance and other qualities, I’m having a difficult time finding reasons to complain. The Core i7-980X builds on the foundation established by the first Core i7 processors back in late 2008, but it raises the core count from four to six and adds a bundle of performance in the process. At times like that, this new processor Intel will be officially introducing soon is almost incomprehensible.
L4d2 bazinga series#
But some days, I’m still amazed that I don’t have to listen to a series of bleeps and bloops for 30 minutes before I get to play Borderlands. This is not normal in any other walk of life.
L4d2 bazinga full#
I’ve gone from listening to short programs load in from tape on an Atari 800 to 12-megapixel monitors arrays playing amazing-looking games in full motion. We have that sort of dynamic going on with computer chips, and it’s also quite entertaining, if you’re so inclined. Which is, for a car guy, a barrel of fun.
L4d2 bazinga driver#
Soon, pressing the accelerator would subject the driver to forces strong enough to be lethal in the right amounts. Another year after that, the standard would be down to four seconds. A year later, we’d be testing a car in the same price range with a six-second 0-60 time.
One year, we’d be reviewing a car that could accelerate from zero to 60 in eight seconds. If we were Car and Driver, it would look something like this. The problem comes down to the sheer rate of improvement among the products we review. I have to tell you, sometimes, being a critical reviewer in the realm of technology is not an easy task.
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