Intel's Core i7 920, 940 & 965 processors

So to confirm: All this socket 1366 business, will the new i7's coming in late 2009 still use the same motherboard socket 1366? I may get a 920 or the one above it in a few months, and then late 2009/early 2010 just upgrade the processor if the new high end ones are compatible woth 1366 still and get cheap enough.

I'm still running an AMD Athlon 2500+, overclocked to a 3200+. LOL. Good old nforce2 NF7-S. Fed up now 'cause it's so slow, my buddys athlon fx 5600 or whatever is even a lot faster

I just want this upgrade to be lasting as my 2500+ was for me, if all I need to upgrade is the CPU later that year then great.

Edit:whoops. Any way to delete this accident post?

I do a lot of 3d rendering and x.264 encoding. But I'm not too impressed in the improvement over my Q6600 running at 3.4ghz.
As it stands I don't think It's worth the upgrade. When things get cheaper it may look more worthwhile.

But then again, maybe a heavily overclocked one might be enough to put me other the edge.

Originally Posted by bubsterboo
I do a lot of 3d rendering and x.264 encoding. But I'm not too impressed in the improvement over my Q6600 running at 3.4ghz.
As it stands I don't think It's worth the upgrade. When things get cheaper it may look more worthwhile.

But then again, maybe a heavily overclocked one might be enough to put me other the edge.

Encoding Numbers for a Q6700 @ 3.33GHz: x264 - 562 seconds (versus 448 i7 965), DivX 6.8 - 1038 versus 882, WMV9 - 338 versus 253

Originally Posted by Blassster
So to confirm: All this socket 1366 business, will the new i7's coming in late 2009 still use the same motherboard socket 1366? I may get a 920 or the one above it in a few months, and then late 2009/early 2010 just upgrade the processor if the new high end ones are compatible woth 1366 still and get cheap enough.

I'm still running an AMD Athlon 2500+, overclocked to a 3200+. LOL. Good old nforce2 NF7-S. Fed up now 'cause it's so slow, my buddys athlon fx 5600 or whatever is even a lot faster

I just want this upgrade to be lasting as my 2500+ was for me, if all I need to upgrade is the CPU later that year then great.

Um, the socket will remain the same but whether Intel changes its VRM specification and makes the current batch of X58s invalid I don't know - this happened all the way through socket 775 days: 925-955X - no 925X couldn't run dual cores CPUs, 955-975X - 1066FSB CPUs only on 975X - Core 2 launch, only some 975X boards worked with the new CPUs.

Very in-depth review **thumbs up**, I'm patiently waiting to see what AMD's response is come end of this or next month... Hopefully if AMD bring out some good solid 45nm quads they may contend with the QX series and drive the prices down of Intels last and maybe latest offering :)

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
Encoding Numbers for a Q6700 @ 3.33GHz: x264 - 562 seconds (versus 448 i7 965), DivX 6.8 - 1038 versus 882, WMV9 - 338 versus 253

That's what I mean. Is 562s -> 448s worth the price of a new motherboard, ddr3 memory, and the CPU? So if something took 12h to encode, it might take 9 and half hours on that cpu. I like the kind of improvements that give you double for investing that much money in an upgrade. For example when i went from a X2 4800+ to my Q6600.

Wonder if the Source engie score will change when vavle actually implement multi-core properly.

i am very VERY greatful for all of the x264 benchmarks. glad to see Hyperthreading has the potential to not suck in many situations this go-around!

Nice review Bindi!

I found the power consumption numbers quite interesting especially the load ones. The tests over at lost circuits are done by measuring the power consumption directly (well before the vrms at least) so as to avoid the numbers being skewed by the motherboards. Their results here perhaps suggest that your load results are due to factors other than the cpu itself?

Perhaps the x58 consumes a lot of power which brings me to my next question. The guys at the tech report say here that the x58 is built on a 130nm process. That can't be right can it?

I'm particularly looking forward to the havendale cpus with integrated graphics late 2009/early 2010.

Originally Posted by Renoir
Nice review Bindi!

I found the power consumption numbers quite interesting especially the load ones. The tests over at lost circuits are done by measuring the power consumption directly (well before the vrms at least) so as to avoid the numbers being skewed by the motherboards. Their results here perhaps suggest that your load results are due to factors other than the cpu itself?

Thanks :)

Technically, that's better for just looking at the single component, however it's not what you pay for at the wall.

Perhaps the x58 consumes a lot of power which brings me to my next question. The guys at the tech report say here that the x58 is built on a 130nm process. That can't be right can it?

No, that's certainly a mis-quote by TR. It's 45nm High-k MG. 1) why go backwards? 2) Intel doesn't have any 130nm fabbing equipment left 3) AMD can't make a quad core work on 65nm and the 65nm quads Intel have here very power hungry even without a northbridge.

Every single slide and white paper I have from Intel pimps its High-k MG process - you can see from the Tick Tock scale too - last year 45nm Penryn, this year 45nm Nehalem, next year 32nm Westmere, year after 32nm Sandy Bridge.

Technically, that's better for just looking at the single component, however it's not what you pay for at the wall.

True but it gives us an interesting insight into what role the chipset/motherboard plays in the overall power consumption which is not something that to my mind has been adequately investigated or highlighted in the past on most tech websites. I look at the numbers at lost circuits and then the system based numbers at a variety of sites and can't help but think that either the early motherboards are not very well tuned in terms of power consumption or that the x58 is very power hungry which leads me to:

No, that's certainly a mis-quote by TR. It's 45nm High-k MG. 1) why go backwards? 2) Intel doesn't have any 130nm fabbing equipment left 3) AMD can't make a quad core work on 65nm and the 65nm quads Intel have here very power hungry even without a northbridge.

Every single slide and white paper I have from Intel pimps its High-k MG process - you can see from the Tick Tock scale too - last year 45nm Penryn, this year 45nm Nehalem, next year 32nm Westmere, year after 32nm Sandy Bridge.

eerrrrrr I think you have the cpu mixed up with the chipset there? I was referring to the x58. I'd be surprised if that were 45nm as if it were then I would have thought that intel would have made a fairly big deal out of it?

Thought I'd share the links here and here which show the idle power consumption to be even better than those on lost circuits. How their numbers can be so different when they all measure directly at the vrm stage is beyond me but that sort of discrepancy seems to be par for the course with tech review sites but oh well. Either results are impressive nonetheless! The potential of this architecture in laptops is immense which being primarily a laptop user is very exciting.

Could you just confirm whether you were talking about the cpu or the chipset as per my previous post? It seems pretty clear to me that the x58 is a real power hog despite not having the memory controller built in which seems to suggest either that it's built on an older process or that QPI is actually surprisingly power hungry. Any comments or insight?

Originally Posted by Renoir

eerrrrrr I think you have the cpu mixed up with the chipset there? I was referring to the x58. I'd be surprised if that were 45nm as if it were then I would have thought that intel would have made a fairly big deal out of it?

Sorry.

X58 is 65nm like P45/G45. X38/48 was 90nm.

:)

It's running 3.2GHz QPI links - I doubt 130nm could sustain that efficiently. The fast QPI and 38 PCI-Express x2 links cause it to be "power hungry" according to the Taiwanese.

AFAIK it's got no specific power saving features too, unless mobos include them (MSI for example with its GreenPower), it's just a "dumb" switching chip that's designed to be fast and efficient.

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
Sorry.

X58 is 65nm like P45/G45. X38/48 was 90nm.

:)

It's running 3.2GHz QPI links - I doubt 130nm could sustain that efficiently. The fast QPI and 38 PCI-Express x2 links cause it to be "power hungry" according to the Taiwanese.

AFAIK it's got no specific power saving features too, unless mobos include them (MSI for example with its GreenPower), it's just a "dumb" switching chip that's designed to be fast and efficient.

I figured 65nm would be the most likely process but nice to have it confirmed. I look forward to seeing what the power consumption of the havendale supporting version of the P55 chipset will be as that will not house QPI but rather just have a DMI link to the cpu as the gpu and the pci-express controller will both be on the cpu package. That should make for some awesome platform power consumption improvements. Just a shame it's so long to wait!

AFAIK it's got no specific power saving features too, unless mobos include them (MSI for example with its GreenPower), it's just a "dumb" switching chip that's designed to be fast and efficient.

Interesting. Perhaps a bit further down the line there be some more efficient implementations of the X58

The last 130nm chipset done waaaas P965/975X afaik. P965 might have been 90.., but I think the 1333MHz FSBs were supported when 90 was introduced so the NB could clock higher.

Nvidia's current 570MCP (that's like 2 years old) is 130nm still (and super hot at that, but it only houses a HT-1 8-bit width link, not "2" 20-bit 3.2GHz QPIs.)

I doubt you'll get power efficient X58s - it's a workstation chipset not a notebook one, performance is more important.

The P55s will essentially be an "ICH" tbh

The last 130nm chipset done waaaas P965/975X afaik. P965 might have been 90.., but I think the 1333MHz FSBs were supported when 90 was introduced so the NB could clock higher.

It irritates me when tech sites get details like this wrong, I mean surely he must have thought 130nm sounded odd but he chose to write it anyway. It's like when the 780G was introduced extremetech claimed that the SB700 was 130nm when in fact it's built on 55nm. How does this simple stuff get through the editing process unnoticed?

The P55s will essentially be an "ICH" tbh

Yep and that should allow for a nice upgrade to centrino especially taking into account nehalem's ability to power gate the cores at idle. Very impressive technology IMO.

Nice review, Q9450 running 7-zip got 9932 MIPS, but on me it gets 12465 MIPS almost 25.6% better with a very shy overclock. ;-)

How shy? ;)

For the love of god! QPI isn't a GHZ, its a GT/s, fix your charts!

# Core i7 965 (4x3.2GHz, 6.4GHz QPI, SMT enabled)
# Core i7 965 (4x3.2GHz, 4.8GHz QPI, SMT enabled)
# Core i7 965 (4x3.2GHz, 6.4GHz QPI, SMT disabled)
# Core i7 965 (4x3.2GHz, Turbo disabled, SMT enabled)
# Core i7 940 (4x2.93GHz, 6.4GHz QPI, SMT enabled)