anandtech: The Sandy Bridge Preview

[James]

really?

im still on my "ancient" core2duo and i still dont find it slow for anything. i play all the latest games at the highest settings with no slowdown. all my work programs run with no lag (i do professional production work with adobe software), id say my SSD gave the biggest performance boost if anything. the only time i want a faster cpu is when im encoding video which about 3-5% of the time.

i think that since the core 1 duos's that we hit a software plateau where we dont need faster hardware anymore... all my previous cpu's (celeron 333, tbird 1ghz, tbred 1.4, venice 3000, x2 4200, etc)... ive steadily felt a need to upgrade but not this time around

Fair enough. From my PPro200, to my PIII550, to a T-Bird 1.4GHz, to an Athlon X2 to my current Core2Quad, I've felt distinct and obvious needs for upgrading.

All that being said, I still feel I should update about every 2nd generation of CPU's these days. (that would be every 2nd "tock" I guess .) That's 4 years between upgrades, which isn't bad. Especially because I do much more video encoding than I once did before. I'm interested in the new chips dedicated hardware accelerated video transcoding. I'm looking forward to a re-write of several software applications to take advantage of that.

And again, all of that being said, my next upgrade is to a larger SSD for several systems, which means I won't have money for a platform upgrade until this time next year or so. Which means I'll probably catch it during a Tick cycle, instead of a Tock.

[Nater]

Anyone who does video encoding needs as many cores as possible, at least for the present and near future. The software also, obviously, needs to support it. Considering how well such processes can be parallelized, that shouldn't be a problem for now.

I think I'll do a 2600K, 16GB DDR3, and 300GB intel SSD upgrade at the first of the year. I'll also throw in a GTX 480 unless nVidia has anything faster around. I'd like to use AMD for the graphics, but their Linux drivers are trash.

[nukefault]

1. Get quad-SLI'd GTX480s.
2. Set up a custom watercooling system for them and the CPU and RAM.
3. Connect it to your hot water tank.
4. Sell your hot water heater on Craigslist. You won't be needing it.

[Nater]

That's not expensive enough. I need:

(2) Sandy Bridge-EPs (8-cores/16-threads).

(8) 8GB DDR3-1600 Registered ECC memory.

(1) nVidia Quadro 6000

(2) nVidia Tesla C2070s

(1) intel 600GB X25-M G3 (operating system)

(1) Fusion-io ioDrive Duo 320GB

Supermicro motherboard with 10GbE (for iSCSI) or 10GbE CNA (FCoE) and GbE for data networking. 3U SAN device with mix of 15,000 rpm and 7,200 rpm drives for storage and SAS expanders.

[ewitte]

Just tried a htpc with an i3 and its not the speed that pissed me off it was the glitches like it losing sync to the tv constantly. Putting a GTS 450 in there. Also replacing a MB I had less than a week because I wouldn't be able to fit it in with two PCIe tv tuners. I was only able to find one mATX that even worked.

[ewitte]

That's not expensive enough. I need:

.

Just wait and I'll accumulate way more than that Except I'm a bit more budget oriented I'd rather have 128GB off of 4GB chips instead of 8. And using infiniband because 10Gbe is priced crazy.

[Nater]

For one thing, using fewer, larger DIMMs is a lot better idea from a power perspective assuming they're using higher density ICs instead of just more ranks. If you don't think memory power consumption matters, you've not run enough memory. It's also a lot better from an expansion standpoint. 8GB modules have dropped to a price where they don't command a much higher price per GB than 4GB DIMMs. This is assuming registered, ECC memory. I don't think they make 8GB unbuffered DIMMs.

Infiniband is an HPC interconnect, it's not really feasible for much else. iSCSI can be run over IB, but it requires ISER (iSCSI extensions for RDMA) and as far as I know is only working on Linux. I know even less about fibre channel over Infiniband, it's probably also a Linux only show. I'd guess the only real use for it is to allow compute clusters to access remote storage on the same interconnect they use for intercommunication.

DDR Infiniband is about half as expensive per port as 10GbE using XFPs, but it's far less useful for all but a few, specialized users.

[ewitte]

I swear two weeks ago it was $115 for 4GB and $350 for 8GB. I now see a kingston value 8GB for $248. I can swing the $248 but the budget is already overstretched for $350 when I need 100+GB. I actually have 8 2GB sticks in my test machine. Started out wanting to do the project in $3k now I've expanded it to $15k and still having issues getting everything I want.

IB is working great for me and I don't even have anything but plain IPOIB and regular iSCSI working until I get a switch (no cool stuff like iser or srp working yet). Hardest part is actually finding the drivers and figuring things out because there is so little information out there. Took me a while to get it working on vmware. I can now do CentOS fairly quickly. The first install took me a few days to figure out. Then I formatted and did it in again in 15 minutes. Most Virtual Machine platforms are linux based so its not really an issue. Especially for the SAN.

[Geforce255]

1. Get quad-SLI'd GTX480s.
2. Set up a custom watercooling system for them and the CPU and RAM.
3. Connect it to your hot water tank.
4. Sell your hot water heater on Craigslist. You won't be needing it.

Sell the house to pay the electric bill....