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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fpaat - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link
Cheap as*es who keep buying these lower spec broken underclocked BS parts contribute to the decline of PC gaming.There is exactly zero reasons to release so many different chips, except for crap manufacturing.
Buy an i7, be done. i5 = celeron = piss off Intel. ATI and NVIDIA can piss off as well for release 10 different versions of video cards per generation.
fpaat - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 - link
I LoL at people who still buy the "celeron" equivalent of computer parts.It's fine if your a teenager on a budget, but if you're an adult still buying gimp'd parts because you can't afford proper components, well, fail.
grimpr - Thursday, July 16, 2009 - link
Smart users would simply buy a fast SSD disk and a Windows 7 Home premium 64bit pack. Anand may glorify to heavens Lynnfield i5 but there is not a single excuse for dumping perfectly good hardware from 2006 upward for Intels new mainstream platform. Best upgrade would be in 2011 with a brand new platform from AMD, new CPU's from both companys that carry the AVX instruction sets, cheap low latency and fast DDR3-1600 ram as a standard, mature,cheap and fast DX11 cards, PCI-EX 3.0 and many more things.Hrel - Saturday, June 6, 2009 - link
I HATE their stupid price fixing screw the consumer crap. CPU's over 200 dollars are useless, that's simply too much for a CPU. They won't give us dual cores based on nahaylem cause they'd have to charge 190 and less; OH NO! Greedy bastards. I REALLY want AMD to get back on top so prices get driven down again.It's INFINETELY infuriating that the ONLY way that intel charges fair prices is if someone else MAKES them.
Hrel - Saturday, June 6, 2009 - link
Seriously??? E8400 anyone? I REALLY don't care about having 8 threads, like even you said in this article, doesn't really help consumers. I'm far more interested in highly clocked dual cores, and wish Intel would release dual core CPU's based on the new architexture, throw HT onto a solid dual core and I can't see any games in the near future even fully utilize it.I'd MUCH rather see a 4GHz dual core cpu with HT than some more stupid quad cores at sub 3GHZ clock speeds. This is 2009, we need to leave the sub-3GHz range in the history books.HexiumVII - Tuesday, June 2, 2009 - link
Lynnfield looks mighty good. Unfortunetly USB3 and SATA3 are looming. Since they won't be integrated into mobos for a while, high bandwidth on the PCIe slots for add-in cards will be crucial for the transition. I don't know about you buys, but USB3.0 will be the most exciting upgrade we had in a while.MasterShogo - Monday, June 1, 2009 - link
I'm not really sure if this has been talked about at all, but it seems to me that the option for an Nvidia-supplied chipset providing integrated graphics, and it still be good, isn't completely lost.I think you have to ask, why does a person want Nvidia integrated graphics in the first place? I see two reasons. For one, to provide a "business-like" or super-simple PC that has adequate graphics performance for normal stuff and simple games, but with a powerful processor. For this use, Nvidia could just make a chip that uses 8 of the PCIe lanes coming out of the CPU socket and leave the other 8 for the user/vendor to optionally provide a faster video card. Sure, that slot wouldn't have the awesomeness of a 16x PCIe slot, but it would be perfectly fine for this machine. Plus, the added video card could still use hybrid SLI or something similar for power-saving purposes...
Which leads me to the other reason people (like me) might want it. Power savings via hybrid-SLI. I would personally want all 16 lanes coming out of the CPU socket for my SLI setup or just one monster card. But in this case, I think it would be perfectly fine to have a 3rd party P55-like chip provide hybrid-SLI video for power savings. I wouldn't care about the starved DMI link, because I would never expect that video chip to do anything difficult, that's what I have the other video cards for! This is assuming the drivers work well enough to switch over very seamlessly when it needs to happen.
In other words, I think there is still enough input/output throughput for Nvidia to sell chips that use integrated graphics, but it is just going to be more spread over the board now, making their electrical design more difficult. Possibly requiring two different chips to provide for the two different scenarios. I don't see why they couldn't do it, though.
Or even better, make a 3rd party chip that can accept, as an interface, both the DMI and the PCI links coming out of the socket, but only using what is available in the particular board you are manufacturing at the moment. Maybe that would be too expensive, though. Any thoughts on how feasible that may be?
In any case, I don't need the three memory channels. It's not that I don't WANT them, it's that they don't help me at all. It's not like I'm running a major database server in my bedroom or anything. But having a direct PCI connection to the CPU would be cool, and I think this processor is just super-duper for a variety of reasons.
Kreed - Monday, June 1, 2009 - link
In terms of Photoshop CS4 performance, would a 2.8GHz i5 outperform 2.66GHz i7 920?Beno - Sunday, May 31, 2009 - link
if you test the i7 920 with HT off, lynfield will lose number 1 in those gaming benchmarkswhy didnt you bench it without HT?
genkk - Sunday, May 31, 2009 - link
is there any new mobos like the dragon platform to bench, anad is even using an old catalyst driver......... your 65% chipzilla and 35% chimpzilla