Review of Intel's newest XEON processors - code named "Prestonia"

[AGodspeed]

http://www.whiningdog.net/reviews/PC/OfficialPrestonia18XEON/PrestoniasPart1.htm

Holy Crapola! :Q

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

:Q

so hyperthreading makes the OS actually see 2x the quantity of cpu's?

woah

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

Hyperthreading is the future, plain and simple. It makes perfect sense, and has the price/performance ratio over dual or quad processing. It's good to see Intel take up the cause of the buyer with Microsoft as well. Being charged for another processor would anger me enough to try Linux again. Hopefully the Hammer implementation of SMT will be fully compatible and as widely coded for.

 

[Adul]

nice increase fpr the same speed, but I wonder how much is from more cache and what is from HT.

 

[Athlon4all]

This is great, and really, a place where Intella will have the upper hand for a while in the server market. It definately makes the Xeon much more competetive with the Athlon MP. I mean, the MP 1800+ barely edged out the 1.8 Prestonia, and a 2.0 would beat out the MP 1800+ and a 2.2 Prestonia would have a significant performance lead over the Athlon MP. The Hammer vs. Prestonia matchup should be quite interesting coming 2002's end.

 

[Cosmic_Horror]

would like to see Anandtech do a review

 

[imgod2u]

What I don't get is why Northwood doesn't have SMT enabled as well. The circuitry is there and it can easily be enabled. I would love to have the speed increase in a Northwood as well.

 

[Bovinicus]

I would like to see that SMT technology in action in some real world benchmarks. The Sandra benchmarks make it look VERY promising. Of course, you can never rely too heavily on synthetics.

 

[AGodspeed]

What I don't get is why Northwood doesn't have SMT enabled as well. The circuitry is there and it can easily be enabled. I would love to have the speed increase in a Northwood as well.

I think it's a OS issue with good old MS.

I would like to hear some reasoning behind the disabling of HyperThreading on current P4 processors (Willamette and NW). Why would Intel even bother wasting die space with HyperThreading if they aren't going to enable it (or is HyperThreading's die size fairly small and therefore insignificant in size? Or is it that Intel wants to get the "practice" of fabbing P4's with HyperThreading now so it's not an issue later on?).

 

[imgod2u]

I'm guessing at the time the P4's were designed, (have been for years now), HT was incorporated in the design. And instead of taking it out and spending a lot of re-engineering money, Intel just decided to disable it in the consumer version. But why? Why disable something that could easily bring performance increase in a chip that needs it so desperately? Why?!

 

[BlitzRommel]

It's a simple answer -- pricing; same reason they disabled SMP support in Celerons. So joe schmoes like us can't reap the benefits of SMP. Bah; can't blame them I guess, it's a marketing thing.

 

[Degenerate]

Mabey lack of software support...or mabey still buggy.

 

[imgod2u]

Well, they're not pricing the Xeons at that high. 1.8GHz runs for $345. One question, what OS would you need to run to take advantage of Dual Xeons? I know WinXP Pro has support for 2 processors, but with HT, and 2 processors, that would make it 4 threads wouldn't it? Would WinXP Pro be able to pull that off?

 

[Sunner]

Win2K Server supports 4 CPU's, as does Linux and FreeBSD.

Those are the most sensible choices I can think of for x86.

 

[Anand Lal Shimpi]

It's a bit more complicated than just wanting to differentiate different CPUs according to price. Hyper-Threading actually requires little more than a BIOS option to enable presently but there's a very good reason why it's disabled. I was planning on reviewing it next month when it's officially launched but I may do a quick article explaining what the current status is and why.

Take care,
Anand

 

[Elledan]

<< Win2K Server supports 4 CPU's, as does Linux and FreeBSD.

Those are the most sensible choices I can think of for x86. >>


Linux supports up to 8 CPU's at this moment.

 

[fkloster]

Damn did you guys see that platform they plugged that Xeon into? Wow...

 

[Sunner]

<< Linux supports up to 8 CPU's at this moment. >>


Oups, that didnt come out quite the way I meant it to.
I believe FreeBSD supports up to 6 CPU's, dont know though, never seen any official docs on it, just saw someone mention it on the FreeBSD mailinglist.
Anyways, Linux performs better in SMP configurations.