Socket 1366 obsolete, SMT a 'gimmick'

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/16729/40/

Controversial...

I was wondering when somebody would comment on that... saw it this morning.
Seems like it goes totally against the prevailing opinions on most forums... if it's true though, I'll rethink getting an i5.

> the real question is what currently exists to take advantage of the tri-channel memory.


Maybe ramdisks e.g. for high-speed database access?

P55 supports up to 16GB, but X58 supports up to 24GB.

Subtract the RAM needed for the OS, and the rest is
available for application programs and ramdisk(s).


MRFS

The claim that SMT decreases performance in x264 and games goes against both my own testing and every reliable review that I've seen (and no, this doesn't count as a reliable review).

That's odd.

I could have sworn that an i7-975 was faster than an i5...




Now, I think you can make a decent case that the i5-750/p55 is the best value on the market right now (though there are some excellent values from AMD as well, especially at lower price points), but to call it the best setup on the market is ridiculous.

Sure it is. It's way more expensive too...

For a gamer (and I'm talking the highest in-game settings here) an I5 based rig is all they need. A good P55 mobo -which BTW is cheaper than X58- will provide tons of fun with overclocking and the money saved on RAM can be put into graphics card or SSD. I really feel for ppl who got themselves an I7 based platform.

Tri-channel is not a gimmick. It just is what it is.

Same thing for dual channel. http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 5-11.html.


http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 8-28.html.


If you where actually expecting tri-channel to make a difference on the desktop then you have been living in a hole/cave or something.


There was always this simple test as well. Run your DDR2 in single channel mode vs dual and see if you notice difference. Nope. There are benchies on this as well but I dont feel like looking them up.

While I am normally against Intel, this article is stupid in its conclusion. Tests with a 1st gen i7 with the 2nd gen ... duh. Conclusion should be thie 17 - 900 series is obsolete. Lets see you put the i9 in your socket 1166.

And before you say x8/x8 isn't that much of a difference, lets see it put to the test with 2 5970s or 2 295s. Until you saturate the channels, it doesn't make much difference. No one who plans on buying 2 ultra high end cards would dare to cripple them.

Who buys 2 5970s?!? Noobs...

People with less then 2x5970 ( I dare to say, 99.9% of us) will never even notice the difference between x8/x8 and x16/x16.

There could be a use for tri channel down the road, as we see fusion typeproducts coming out, and BW becomes a bottleneck with a gpu type on chip.
Just some thoughts....

i wouldn't say early adopters got bent over because an article on Fud claims it so but if there isn't some serious hardware around an i7, it is a waste. Quad SLI/Quadfire with all the trimmings would necessitate the 1366 platform. any cards that can saturate the 8x lanes at peak will suffer on the i5 platform and you will find that goes beyond the 5790 and the 295 when people are volt modding and liquid cooling.
it was a waste for me but i came out of it unscathed lol

1366 obsolete...puh-leez...that's like saying AM2+ is obsolete because of AM3.

Intel made it known that the i7 was for the "enthusiast" and that i5/i3 was for the mainstream.

I think what this article really illustrates is that the mainstream computing platform and hardware (i5 and Phenom w/dual channel) has finally reached a level of performance that can run any and all applications even the most sophisticated of power users would need. Or to phrase it another way, software development has fallen so far behind hardware development that it doesn't take as much hardware to get the most out of all applications.

Also what this article illustrates is that not every gamer no longer needs uber high end hardware to play the latest titles.

This is quite different from the state of desktop computers of even three years ago when the fastest cpu's and dual gpu's were necessary to run the latest gaming title with all the eye candy...yes, I'm referring to Crysis...and in some instances, the "best" hardware at the time was still not enough to max out the eye candy and get playable frame rates. Heck, my old single core Dell laptop with single channel DDR would get bogged down solely from working in large Excel spreadsheets and large Access databases. Today, my Dell 630 with a Core2Duo and 2GB dual channel barely blinks at those spreadsheets and databases.

For anyone just getting into DYI computers within the past 2 years, this article may seem topical. But for anyone with a sense of history or anyone who has been building computers for more than 5 years, this article could be considered pedantic.

Lastly, this is a Fudzilla article we're talking about...

Well that's another thing isn't it. Sure Gulftown looks 'amazing' but how much of it is benchmarketing?

I won't be upgrading to Thuban even though I have one of the lowest x4 Phenom II's, and that's with Thuban costing a lot less than Gulftown I'd bet. Is anybody who bought an i7 920 or so actually going to buy an i9?

Just a quick question, did anyone think that tri-channel memory would really make a difference? Since when did you read a RAM comparison that didn't show that any halfway decent RAM does just fine in most cases. The problem is that dual-channel RAM is plenty for even a fast RAID 0 hard drive arrays. Maybe with some nice SSDs the extra memory speed might be relevant.

The cheapest X58 is a crappy $160 motherboard and the i7 920 is still $290 online. That is already a $110-$130 difference depending on whether you need hyperthreading or not. I would say that is pretty significant, especially since the LGA 1156 is supposed to still be getting 32nm quads, just not 6-cores. Not only that but when those come out it will be time to upgrade motherboards regardless of whether you have an LGA 1156 or LGA 1366 motherboard.

It does seem to be a very "against the grain" article. I'd be interested to see how a more scalable benchmark though.

Why does the Cinebench R10 benchmark say quad threaded? Did they run with SMT disabled? This doesn't prove SMT to be a gimmick at all. I get higher Cinebench scores at 2.66GHz than they do at 2.93GHz (assuming the 975 is at stock). They mentioned proving it a gimmick at the end, but they must be talking about another article. This one has nothing to do with SMT.

You'd think they would link to the previous article, since it would increase hits.

EDIT: This might be what they meant: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15504/40/1/7/

I wish Fuddo would work on their graphs and legends, they require some deciphering and that's not a good thing.

I only just realised that "CS en" and "CS dis" meant "C-states enabled/disabled"

SMT is not a gimmick or AMD wouldn't be looking into its own version. They just suck at reviews. A lot of people here who own Core i7s, even a guy at work says that they are just super fast. My friend at work said it took 10 minutes to install Windows 7 with his Core i7 and 12GB of DDR3. Maybe not fully but probably the install time for copying files.

As for tri channel, its only a gimmick until programs start to use more than two channels. Just like the first quad core (the Q6600 was the first) was a gimmick until Windows Vista/7 utilized it better and games started to. Back in 2007 people always said "get a dual, OC it quad is useless". Now they say get a quad. Once the third channel starts to get used it will make a huge difference. But for now its mainly server apps and highly memory bandwidth sensative apps.

As for 1366, its not dead or obsolete. Only to those who are Enthusiasts of our kins, well most of us who budget lower. But a lot of people will pick it up for its nice mobos with all the features. Always has. Hell its even set for 6 core so obsolete, no. For mainstream? Never has been meant for it.

"SMT is not a gimmick or AMD wouldn't be looking into its own version"

AMD is doing something similar with the Bulldozer line

LOL... there is no "chipset" dictating PCIx lanes on the 1156. it is integrated into the CPU so your stuck. i think the i5 buyers got took worse than the i7 buyers to be honest. anyone buying an i7 for gaming and bought a single card didn't do their homework so no pity from me there. They didn't "hide" i5 from anyone nor claim that i7 was the well rounded mainstream product. They actually stated the opposite and even tagged it with a very small piece of the market from the onset. JDJ showered this place with prelim specs on the i5 and what it was meant to be so even if a person didn't venture outside of the TH forums for their tech fix, it was spoon fed to you.

Problem: Not even dual channel gets utilized for desktop apps.

Skt 1366 and 1156 are the successors to Skt 771 and Skt 775. Intel did not force anything on nor did they screw the consumer. They did the same thing that they (and AMD) have done before with introducing new tech. If you remember, Skt 775 still used a northbridge/southbridge configuration whereas Skt 1366/1156 moved the memory controller on die. Fact is a new socket and chipset were required to achieve the performance gains that an IMC offers. And, by their very design, i5 and the P55 is a lesser performing processor and chipset that i7 and X58; with some examples being DMI instead of QPI, dual channel instead of triple channel memory, disabled hyperthreading for certain i5 models, and 8x limits on PCIe gpu lanes. So, really, the argument of i7 buyers getting screwed is more your opinion and perception than it is fact.

5890s and Fermi are coming tho, so it may make even more of a difference.

Anytime first time adopters buy early, they get stung, and then if the under perf chips come later, the higher ones have had time to come down overall in price, thus making the under chips to be reasonably priced from the get go, with just small early price elevations

It's a little bit different in this case though. Did anyone who actually bought an i7 desktop actually think they were buying something that was in reality no better than a top end C2Q or even the Phenom II 940?

I think the consensus was that they were getting something that was a lot better. I mean sure you can pick and choose benchmarks that prove how wonderful i7 is but in a desktop environment it isn't valid.

So now you have a setup where the early adopters paid a lot more and are now in some ways being overtaken by the mid-range less than a year later. A lot less actually what is it? 8-9 months or so?

If you had read this review - flawed as it is - in January...would you have paid what you paid for an i7? It's worth thinking about.

And lets not forget about the D0 stepping 920 which was supposedly a huge increase in overclockability yet couldn't get the i5's improved turbo a couple of months later?