The Lynnfield Preview: Rumblings of Revenge
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 29, 2009 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Power Consumption
I had to overvolt the sample to reach 2.66GHz and I didn't want to compare power of an overclocked CPU to other standard CPUs, so the table below uses the Lynnfield 2.13GHz chip with HT enabled. I also noticed some odd power readings which may be due to the early nature of the platform I was testing so I posted a range of power consumption values for the load.
| Processor | Idle Power | Load Power (x264 1st pass) |
| Intel Lynnfield 2.13GHz | 94.0W | 160W - 173W |
| Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 (2.66GHz) | 126.3W | 170.9W |
In my limited amount of time with the test setups I didn't have any other lower clocked quad-core chips to compare to but these early results look promising. The idle power in particular is most impressive.
Thanks to Nehalem's ability to completely power down idle cores the Lynnfield sample delivers the lowest idle power of any quad-core CPU I've ever tested. I didn't have time to investigate it here but I suspect that in scenarios where only two cores are busy, Lynnfield will offer significant power savings compared to all older (non-Nehalem) quad-core CPUs.
Final Words
It really took me until I reached the very end of writing this article to understand Lynnfield and where it fits into Intel's lineup, but I think I finally get it.
The $284 Lynnfield 2.80GHz chip should be very powerful. If I'm guessing right, it'll be faster than any dual core Core 2 Duo in applications that spawn one or two CPU intensive threads, while being faster than a Core i7-920 in even heavily threaded applications.
The $196 Lynnfield 2.66GHz processor stops from being absolutely perfect by not having Hyper Threading enabled. While it performs very i7-920-like in many cases, highly threaded workloads favor the rest of the LGA-1156/1366 lineup. That being said, not having HT isn't the end of the world; in many cases it's just as fast as it would be with HT enabled.
What Intel has done with the entry level Lynnfield is piece together a Nehalem that's just good enough to compete with the high end Phenom IIs and give you more bang for your buck than the existing Core 2 Quads, while not being too good as to ruin the point of the midrange Lynnfield.
There's also a lot of flexibility in Intel's strategy. Intel could deliver lower clocked Lynnfields and enable HT to be competitive at lower price points. I suspect that the real strength of Lynnfield is in its turbo modes; they will give it the advantage of delivering maximum performance regardless of how threaded your workload is.
Why would anyone want a LGA-1366 system then? I believe there are three major advantages to the LGA-1366 platform for single-socket desktops:
1) Support for Gulftown. You can only get 6-cores from the LGA-1366 platform in 1H 2010, Intel currently doesn't have any 6-core LGA-1156 parts planned.
2) More overclockable CPUs. The best yielding Nehalems (and highest clocked Nehalems) will be LGA-1366 processors. I wouldn't expect any 1GHz+ overclocks from LGA-1156 CPUs.
3) More bandwidth to PCIe slots. I don't see this as a huge advantage today, but there may come a time when having as much bandwidth to your GPUs as possible is important. I'm thinking general purpose GPU computing, DX11, OpenCL sort of stuff. But we're not there yet.
Ultimately I'm going to stick with what I first said on the whole LGA-1156 vs. LGA-1366 topic last November:
"The breakdown seems pretty simple: if you’re the type of person who bought the Q6600/Q9300, then Lynnfield may be the Nehalem for you. If you spent a bit more on your CPU or are more of an enthusiast overclocker, the current Core i7 seems like the path Intel wants you to take."
Lynnfield, today, looks very good. Enable all of its turbo modes and I believe Intel has another winner on its hands. When Nehalem first launched I complained that the move to a smaller L2 cache kept it from significantly outperforming Penryn in some applications and games. With Lynnfield's turbo modes I believe my complaints will be addressed; need better performance in games? Turbo mode solves that. In many ways, Lynnfield could end up being even more significant than Core i7 ever was.
Penryn was always good, Bloomfield was nice to talk about but Lynnfield may end up being the one you marry.
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Jabbernyx - Monday, June 1, 2009 - link
You're forgetting the $10 off promo code and 5% Live cashback ;)Randomblame - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Anyone else irritated that when this launches intel will have 5 sockets going?Shall we count em?
lga 775 core 2
lga 1366 i7
lga 1160 lynfield
lga 771 xeon penryn
lga 611 itanium
Did I miss any?
Anonymous Freak - Sunday, May 31, 2009 - link
If you're going to include Itanium; you might as well include the mobile sockets as well.Last October, Intel had one desktop, three server, and two mobile sockets:
LGA775 on the desktop was it.
LGA771 for dual Xeon, PGA-604 for quad-plus Xeon. (And LGA775 for single-socket servers, where the processors were just Core 2 series processors slapped with a "Xeon" name on them, so I'm keeping that with 'desktop'.) PAC-611 is Itanium.
Socket M is the slightly older mobile socket, Socket P is the newer. One could say that Socket M was already dead in October.
Early next year, we will have three desktop, two server, and two mobile sockets.
LGA 775 will be the low-end Core 2 socket, LGA 1366 for i7, and LGA 1156 for Lynnfield. Lynnfield should overtake Core 2 very quickly, especially after the integrated-graphics chips come out, and drop to two desktop sockets, though.
LGA 1366 doubles as the single and dual server socket; and the new "Nehalem EX" will in all likelihood have a new socket shared with the new Itanium (from reasonable guesses, anyway.)
Mobile will have just Socket P until the mobile Nehalems launch, when a new mobile Nehalem socket will be out.
Sorry, but LGA 771 is already dead. Its processors are completely obsolete at this point, by Nehalem-EP. And PGA-604 (which you missed,) as well as PAC-611, will be obsoleted by the Nehalem-EX socket. (Again, just guessing. The entire point of QPI was to make Xeon and Itanium share resources, so I would imagine they would use the same socket. Especially with Xeons now at higher power draw than even the highest draw Itanium; there is no reason for Itanium's goofy socket-with-power-pod arrangement any more.
Drazick - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Though the system looks good.I really liked the one chip Idea (Chipset).
I hope Intel eventually let nVidia develop chipsets for this platform.
Why don't you think the regular PCIE X16 lane in this system is enough for GPGPU? It might not be the best but for Encoding some movies and Accelerating Matlab it should be enough, no?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, May 30, 2009 - link
I didn't mean to imply that 16 PCIe 2.0 lanes aren't enough for GPGPU. But if you're doing a *lot* of compute over the PCIe bus, perhaps over multiple very high end GPUs, then you'll probably want QPI. This is more of a HPC or head-in-the-clouds-desktop scenario though.It should be more than enough for GPU based video encode or math.
Take care,
Anand
ssj4Gogeta - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Even if Intel allows Nvidia, they can't make integrated graphics for i5 because the chip is connected to the chipset via 2 GB/s DMI, which will bottleneck it.Doormat - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Until the price of 4GB DDR3 sticks come down (and I could put 16GB of RAM on the board), I think the i7 is where its at. At least with i7, I can go with 12GB now and then upgrade to 24GB later (12GB I need, 24GB I don't know...).A5 - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
If you NEED 12GB, then Lynnfield isn't going to be for you. Intel would much rather you use Xeons for that kind of workload anyway :Pltcommanderdata - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
So with mainstream Nehalems not having any QPI links and high-end Nehalems with QPI not needing them, are third-party IGPs dead? It seems that even if nVidia can win their legal issues with Intel, the technical challenges of being limited to DMI seem to make the Intel chipset business unprofitable. Higher priced chipsets with IGPs would be bandwidth limited over DMI and just making southbridges doesn't seem very glamourous or profitable.Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, May 30, 2009 - link
NVIDIA claims to have DMI based IGPs in development for LGA-1156 platforms. We'll see how good they are and if they do end up coming to market despite the legal issues.In the long run I don't expect the 3rd party chipset business to survive on either platform (AMD or Intel). Unless either company is horribly deficient at some basic platform need I'd expect desktop and mobile AMD CPUs to use AMD chipsets and for desktop and mobile Intel CPUs to use Intel chipsets. It may take a couple of years to get there but I think the end result is inevitable.
I believe that's why we're seeing such a strong push from NVIDIA lately with things like Ion. Attempting to stay put when we know what the tide is about to do is a difficult task.
Take care,
Anand