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
Bitstreaming TrueHD/DTS-HD MA: Yep, Here too
The Radeon HD 5870 was the first graphics card to properly support bitstreaming of high definition Blu-ray audio codecs. Clarkdale/Arrandale is the second.
These CPUs come with an on-package GPU and that GPU supports the appropriate protected audio path to enable bitstreaming of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA. Of course 8-channel LPCM output is also still an option.
If you remember the G45 launch, Intel had serious issues enabling 8-channel LPCM output, HDCP and H.264 decode acceleration in general. I grilled Intel on what was going to make this round different and they are much more confident in their abilities.
They've increased the number of receivers they test with (originally it was at a whopping two, now they're up to…7). They've also expanded their test scenarios as well. The combination of the two, Intel believes, will result in a fully functional set of HTPC features at launch.
The first time I went by Intel's Clarkdale demo, Intel couldn't get bitstreaming working. A day later I got an email telling me to drop by again - they fixed it.
I got to see TrueHD bitstreaming from a Clarkdale system to a Sony receiver. I also confirmed that full two stream decode acceleration was working:
Intel had it working with Arcsoft's player, but is working with all of the major software vendors to hopefully enable full support on everything. Intel does seem to be taking this much more seriously than with G45.
The Clarkdale launch is still a couple of months away so there is definitely time for Intel to work out the kinks.
This is a serious feature. The fact is that in a couple of years every single PC shipped will have the ability to bitstream these audio codecs without any additional hardware. We're finally getting there folks.
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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.