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
On-package GPU and Graphics Turbo
Arrandale and Clarkdale are two-die packages. There's the 32nm CPU die and next to it is a 45nm DirectX 10 GPU die (no DX11 support until possibly Larrabee).
This isn't Larrabee (yet), it's a direct descendent of the graphics in G45. While G45 was built on a 65nm process, the 'dale graphics is built on a 45nm process.
The smaller transistors enable much higher performance. While G45 had 10 shader cores, the 'dale GPU increases that to 12. A number of performance limiting issues have now been resolved, so we should see much more competitive performance from Intel's graphics.
The memory controller has been moved off of the CPU die and is on the GPU die instead. It's still on-package so you get decently low latencies, but it shouldn't technically be as low as on Lynnfield. This is a temporary problem that fixes itself once the CPU/GPU are on the same die with Sandy Bridge.
Sandy Bridge brings on-die graphics
I've already explained turbo mode quite a bit so I won't rehash it here. The technology basically allows you to run your CPU at the fastest possible frequency regardless of how many cores are active. Westmere has this.
Arrandale will support graphics turbo modes, while Clarkdale won't. Clarkdale graphics is already running as fast as possible regardless of TDP.
If the GPU demand is higher than the CPU demand, the CPU will allocate more of its TDP to the GPU and vice versa.
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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.