Overclocking Nehalem "almost As Good As Having A Second Graphics Card" - Intel
San Francisco (CA) - Benchmarking and overclocking the upcoming Intel Nehalem processor is going to be tricky business, but Francois Piednoel says we will see "dramatic" speed increases. At the Intel Developer Forum today in San Francisco, Intel’s Francois Piednoel and Matt Dunford outlined the various issues in benchmarking people will face when testing the new chips. Perhaps the trickiest of them all will be the "Turbo Mode" which according to Piednoel will be "aware of its environment" and change clock speeds according to temperature and current.
Turbo mode will dynamically alter the speeds of the four cores once the processor gets out of a thermal envelope. Dunford and Piednoel told reporters that the BIOS menus will have a menu to select thermal dissipation (TDP) numbers. If you have a really good heatsink, you could crank this number to 190 watts. Conversely, an average heatsink would warrant a rating of 140 watts or below. Once the processor detects that it’s going out of this envelope, it will start clocking itself up/down. The processor will also try to move poorly threaded applications to few cores.
The Turbo Boost throttling could obviously vary benchmarking results and Piednoel said someone testing the chip in Singapore versus a cooler environment will probably see a difference in speeds. Thankfully, the throttling only takes place when the processor is out of the thermal envelope and Piednoel promised that Turbo Boost can even be turned off in BIOS.
Since many games are single threaded, the turbo mode will actually give perhaps a 10% increase in potential frames per second. Of course there’s a big difference between potential and actual frame rates and Piednoel said we can expect "single digit" gains for most games. Multithreaded games like Lost Planet and benchmarks like 3D Mark Vantage should see a dramatic difference from the 8 threaded Nehalem and Turbo Boost.
Turbo Boost could be considered a "self-overclocking" feature and in a properly cooled environment, Piednoel proclaimed that the results from Turbo Boost and traditional will be "almost as good as having a second graphics card." Boy I bet AMD and Nvidia will love that comment.
To show off the power of Nehalem, Dunnford and Piednoel had a monster computer with the processor and four solid-state drives giving an insane 1 GB sustained transfer rate. In a demo we saw at Computex, Intel loaded up Sony Vegas 8 with a 1 GB video file in less than five seconds. They also demoed a picture and video viewer that organizes photos/videos based on calendar date. You can zoom into the days of the calendar and the content you shot that day will appear in thumbnails. Videos appear as moving clips. No more clicking the OK button or guessing which video you shot first or last - everything is organized perfectly.
As a professional photographer and videographer this is a huge deal. After filming an event, I often have dozens of clips that I have to import and sort. Usually this involves transferring them into a folder and then dragging each clip into Sony Vegas or VLC. After watching the clips, I label them and move them into appropriate folders. This program shows all the video clips in time-stamp order. And all the clips are moving, at the same time.
"You’ll be able to manipulate videos the way you manipulate pictures today," Piednoel said.

DO we have to start working out TDP numbers to overclock? (i.e how much TDP will my water cooling take?)
some new OC guides might be in order.
omg - all this endless talk - so we get a bigger spin on the prespun turbothingy and now we are told they have a monster computer. Then we are given a quik review of software for home movies (o neato) and the author likes that supr8 app that was seen at comdorx. fascinating.
SHOW ME - shutup and push the start button - btw nice party you have here - no babe pix, nice touch. Where's the bar and the food.
People seem lost on the convention floor.
Benchmarks have been limited, and until the chips actually hit the market and are tested by consumers...they don't mean anything. It doesn't matter if intel already has the performance lead or not, they cheat...time, after time...after time. Overclocking the thing is like having another gpu? Right, i'm sure raising the clock by20 or even 30% is going to match the 800-1200 Gigaflop/sec gpu processing power of an nvidia or ati card.
Well actually, this being intel i suppose they could be using thier forthcoming larrabee as the referance.....i'd believe that. I mean, their 8 core larrabee, launching in the timely fashion of 6-9 short months will offer breath-taking computation performance of UP TO 250 Gigaflops/sec, sure that's about 1/5th the power of a $270 single core card that's already 3 months old...
on the otherhand, that puts it in the realm of possibly delivering performance UP TO par with that of the ati x850XT PE card...the best video card that 2004 had to offer. GPU computation power has increased by a factor of 5.5 - 6 times in 3.5 years. But hey, it will only be a year between when the 4870 launched and when larrabee hits the market, and statistically single core gpu performance only rises by 42% each year.
But whatever, if it's great for the $700-$1500 price bracket good for them. Personally i'm more interested in AMD's 45nm Shanghi. 4x512K L2 cache, 6mb L3 cache, DDR2 and DDR3 compatible through the cpu's IMC. The engineering samples that have gotten out are clocked from 2.3 - 3.2gjz. At 2.4 it already has a 30-40% clock-for-clock gain over 2.6ghz phenom's and even at 3.2ghz with 100% load on all cores the chip only has a power draw of 55-60 watts.When nothing can take productive advantage of any cpu's full potential as it is, would rather get the sub $300 chip that doesn't require immiediate upgrade to ddr3 that costs more than the cpu
AMD's overclock tool requires a good deal of experience so Intel new design could have a few growing pains.
Don't worry I don't think Intel wants AMD to go belly up, just be sufficiently crippled so they aren't a problem.
I blame AMD for the slow introduction of Nehalem. If they gave Intel any real competition we would already have it.
I've been sorting my pictures/videos by dates for ages, like many others have, I'm sure. While they are usually(default) sorted by file name...they are usually named in the order they are taken--which, coincidentally, is by date. Anyway, I'm a little surprised how impressed the writer is about this feature, which seems like it should be a given to me.
Regardless, a better organizational system implemented in the standard windows environment is convenient.
A Q6600 runs 210 watts easily,I don't know what reality you came from.The current wattage TDP's sucked ass and were bullshit to begin with.
Why? Then there's gonna be AMD being a monopoly.I don't see the logic behind it.
Then stop using everything that has intel influence for a day and see how you like living in he 1960's kid. Even your car has technology that in one way or another has been developed on transistors that they innovated.
I've got an unlimited supply of R404A - bring it on!
ioced, got anything to back up you said? I was planning to get a Nehalem this Christmas but it seems that it won't be available (at sub $300) until H2 2009 so I am looking to get an AM3. It would be great is AM3 chips can match Yorkfield clock for clock.