CPU Reviews

Because it’s not always about CPU prices and anticompetition lawsuits. [...]

That’s not the same as eating celery, right? [...]

According to reports, AMD’s six-core Istanbul server processor is set to be unveiled this upcoming Tuesday.

The chip is slated for its official unveiling at the Computex conference on June 2nd. It is meant to rival Intel’s Dunnington processor, and will sport 6MB of L3 cache to share amongst the cores. Each core will also have 512 KB of L2 cache per, and will presumably feature DDR3 support (depending on the socket).

According to the chip’s lead architect, Hans de Vries, AMD will be pitting two of these against one of Intel’s offering, thanks to the size of the chip. The Istanbul chip is reported to only take up 300 square millimeters, while the Dunnington is expected to take up 700 square millimeters.

Edit: Turns out that 700 million square millimeters is about 4.3x the size of a volleyball court. Mistake corrected.

Image Credit: AMD

[...]

Taking DIY to a whole new level, Steve Chamberlin, a Belmont, California, videogame developer, rolled his own 8-bit CPU for an aptly named project he calls "Big Mess of Wires," or BMOW. The project took him 18 months, $1,000, and 1,253 wires to complete.

"Computers can seem like complete black boxes," Chamberlin said. "We understand what they do, but not how they do it, really. When I was finally able to mentally connect the dots all the way from the physics of a transistor up to a functioning computer, it was an incredible thrill."

The project began with a 12×7-inch Augat wire-wrap board with 2,832 gold wire-wrap posts purchased on Ebay for $50. Over time, BMOW came to encompass 1,253 pieces of wire painstakingly wrapped at a rate of 25 wires per hour to create 2.506 individually wrapped connections. More than just a prototype, Chamberlin has added a keyboard, LCD output, USB connection, three-voice audio, and VGA video to demonstrate a working computer.

For those of you in the San Mateo area, Chamberlin’s BMOW will be on display at the fourth annual Makert Faire this weekend, May 30-31, as one of 600 DIY exhibits.

Image Credit: Wired

Image Credit: Wired

[...]

Intel’s Core i7 is one of the most innovative CPU releases to date. It’s fast, efficient, and cutting edge. The thing about cutting edge though, is that you’ll often pay a premium to gain access. [...]

This is big daddy Nehalem. [...]

Intel this week said its Nehalem-EX processor, an 8-core beast of a chip, will go into production sometime later this year and start shipping in server systems by early 2010. Even better, each chip supports 16 threads, says Boy Davis, Intel’s GM of the Server Platforms Marketing Group.

Already on-board is IBM, who is already developing a server based around Nehalem-EX. The server will hold eight processors, making use of 64 Nehalem-EX cores capable of handling 128 threads.

"We’re very excited today to be the first to demonstrate Nehalem-EX," said Alex Yost, VP IBM BladeCenter.

In addition to more cores and threads, Nehalem-EX also ups the memory ante, doubling the capacity with up to 16 memory slots per processor socket.

Image Credit: Intel

[...]