The Real Conroe Successor: Clarkdale & All You Need to Know about Westmere
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 24, 2009 6:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Intel spent a lot of time talking about Nehalem a year ago, but not much time on Westmere. It's the tick to Nehalem's tock, or in other words, it's 32nm Nehalem.
Unlike previous die shrinks, we don't get larger caches with Westmere - Nehalem was already too big to begin with. Westmere keeps the same architecture, same cache sizes (or ratios) as Nehalem. It's all built using smaller 32nm transistors and on a smaller die. For the same core count, expect Westmere to be roughly half the size.
But the same core counts aren't what you're going to get. I included the table below in yesterday's Core i7 920XM preview:
| Codename | Market | Cores | Manufacturing Process |
| Bloomfield | Desktop | 4 | 45nm |
| Lynnfield | Desktop | 4 | 45nm |
| Clarkdale | Desktop | 2 | 32nm |
| Clarksfield | Mobile | 4 | 45nm |
| Arrandale | Mobile | 2 | 32nm |
The Westmere products are Gulftown, Clarkdale and Arrandale. That's six, two and two cores. Lynnfield is the last quad-core on the roadmap for the foreseeable future.
We'll talk about Gulftown later, but the focus today is Clarkdale with a little Arrandale.
Meet the 'dales
Arrandale and Clarkdale are the first two Westmere family members you'll meet. Both are technically due out later this year, although we won't see large volumes (by Intel standards) until Q1 2010. Both Arrandale and Clarkdale are dual-core Westmere parts with on-package graphics. The only difference is that Arrandale is mobile while Clarkdale is desktop.
Arrandale running - Hyper Threading helps improve performance even in normal workloads
The desktop socket is LGA-1156, the same socket as Lynnfield. The mobile socket is mPGA-989, the same socket as Clarksfield.
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shortark - Thursday, September 24, 2009 - link
"The problem is that when we go to buy a pc all we see is a processor name--i7 , i5, blah blah"No offense meant, but since I found Anandtech, I have never had to "go to buy a pc".
All the info you need in order to build your own pc, to whatever specifications is all right here. Anandtech has "roudups" for different budget levels to help clear things up.
It is sort of funny though, because I found the site originally after getting caught not knowing the difference between a "williamette", and a "northwood" when I tried to upgrade my own motherboard.
Since then I've overclocked the snot out of every chip I've bought.
mdbusa - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
Going to buy a pc for me means going to the it mall to a pc shop and choosing the mb cpu etc... and then the shop will put it together for me. and yes I agree that Anandtech has great advice on budget and other systems. the pc shops have pricelists of cpu's mb etc..--nowhere will those lists include terms like clarksdale or westmere or whatever--the wont even mention nm size.just choose your mb, cpu, video, ram etc...
shortark - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
With a little patience you could build your own, with more power, better warranties, and best of all lower price. And to help, sites like Newegg, or Tigerdirect use the codenames in most of their product listings, and newegg can seperate by socket type. You sould give it a try it's fairly simple since SATA, you don't have to worry about hdd jumpers anymore, so it's pretty much just matching up similar connections. The real value though is in overclocking. ie 2.4 P4 @3.2, or 2.4 E6600@ 3.3, or a 2.4 Q6600 @ 3.6, or my newest 3.0 E8400 @ 3.6 it's free performance, and that is whats got me so excited about each die shrink. Every time the die gets smaller, the easy overclocking potential goes up.I'm looking forward to redoing and shrinking my HTPC, since my rig now is a full blown 680i Q6600 system, Not exactly efficient or quiet. sorry for the rant.
taltamir - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
except, the article focuses on the laptop cpu... which, last I checked, you can't really build yourself.shortark - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
Evidentally you missed page 1. blah blah blah" Intel Clarkdale Desktop Processors"....."socket LGA 1156"...or maybe it was the title you missed."The Real Conroe Successor: Clarkdale & All You Need to Know about Westmere", or maybe it was in page 1 where a simple table states "Clarkdale | Desktop | 2 | 32nm"beside my response was agreeing that the code names are confusing.
Electrician Conroe - Monday, July 23, 2012 - link
That's amazing, but good news because it will give AMD a great opportunity to recover. They can sell a quad against any Intel dual as long as the base clocks have the same first digit. Nobody (statistically) is going figure that even a double-throwdown super-trick over-and-under hyperthreaded handshaking pair will beat four of a kind, across the board. It might be true, but it won't sell at Best Buy.