HardwareWhat Nehalem is really about

As IDF has started, the first benchmarks of Nehalem will probably pop up. It is without a doubt an impressive architecture that gets a much better platform to run on, but this CPU is not about giving you better frames per second in your favorite game than the Penryn family. Let me make that more clear: even when the GPU is not the bottleneck, it is likely that most...

As IDF has started, the first benchmarks of Nehalem will probably pop up. It is without a doubt an impressive architecture that gets a much better platform to run on, but this CPU is not about giving you better frames per second in your favorite game than the Penryn family. Let me make that more clear: even when the GPU is not the bottleneck, it is likely that most games will not significantly faster than on Penryn. We, the people behind it.anandtech.com will probably have the most fun with it, more than your favorite review crew at Anandtech.com :-). And no, I have not seen any tests before I type this. Nehalem is about improving HPC, Database and virtualization performance, much less about gaming performance. Maybe this will change once games get some heavy physics threads, but not right away.   Why? Most Games are about fast caches and super integer performance. After all, most of the Floating point action is already happening on the GPU. All Core 2 CPUs were a huge step forward in integer performance (not in the least because of memory disambiguation) compared to the CPUs of that time (P4 and K8). Nehalem is only a small step forward in integer performance. And the gains due to slightly increased integer performance are mostly negated by the new cache system. In a previous post I told you that most games really like the huge L2 of the Core family. With Nehalem they are getting a 32 KB L1 with a 4 cycle latency, next a very small (compared to the older Intel CPUs)... [ Read more on www.anandtech.com ]

HardwareToshiba propels DVD quality to near high definition

Toshiba announced its XDE technology yesterday, which makes DVD picture quality close to high definition.

HardwareIntel Developer Forum 2008 - Live! Nehalem, Gelsinger Keynote Coverage

Pat Gelsinger and Dadi Perlmutter are on stage and are going to be talking about everything from Nehalem to Larrabee and Atom....