I guess I dont know how to say it correctly, but i thought it was pretty common knowledge. id suggest build a few machines and try it for yourself. Leave the turbo feature on and check your fps and your performance tab on the task manager. Then turn it off in bios and set core affinities and watch performance and fps. Try it for a few games. Try it on a few machines so you can rule out flukes. Play around with putting applications on different cores. Intel or amd it doesnt really matter. I guess the most recent example I saw improvement in was Star Craft 2. Probably about 15 fps improvement on my i7950 with turbo stuff disabled and setting things my way. Now with star craft I only tried it on i7. I didnt try it on amd.
To be clear I am not talking about OS processes. Im talking about applications. I do not recommend shutting off a bunch of windows services. Its not uncommon for the os to be using like 40-50 processes, depending on what all your doing. I think most gamers these days have 2 monitors. One for one game and one for another. Like crafting in darkfall while grinding in whatever. Also while looking at facebook or checking the forums. You could set cores to one game and cores to another and cores to internet browsing or watching a movie.
Also turn off superfetch if you are using vista. Its a service you can stop and it doesnt really help performance like its supposed to.
What you're claiming is something that theoretically should not be able to happen, unless perhaps you've got something cooled improperly and overheating. Maybe you're taking about C-states, and Vista not knowing what to do with a multi-core processor. But Windows 7 doesn't suffer from the latter problem, and C-states are a different issue entirely.
So the p55 doesn't do sata 3. Thanks alot for that info.
I am very curious now about this Sandy Bridge. It is supposed to have graphics built into the CPU. Will that take up CPU resources auch as one of the cores or part of the bus or anything? I have heard the graphics comming from Sandy Bridge aren't really made for gaming but more for entertainment. Just curious if Sandy Bridge will be on par with the i5 760 or the beginning line up of the i7 series. I really like the idea of Sata 3 and it is the future of speeds for SSD so I kind of want to get into a motherboard that supports that kind of technology. I guess I will have to just wait for the CES and the first roll outs and bench test reviews to figure out what to do.
AMD's 800 series chipsets are all SATA 3, so long as you get the SB850 southbridge. Some such motherboards use an older southbridge with an 800 series northbridge, in which case, you lose SATA 3. Some of Intel's Sandy Bridge chipsets are supposed to have two SATA 3 ports, but mostly be SATA 2. That's fine so long as you don't plug things into the wrong port. Some older motherboards do have a separate SATA 3 chip, but it has to connect to the southbridge via PCI Express lanes. Some motherboards do this by taking half of the PCI Express x16 connection that is built into the Lynnfield processors, which is bad, because it means that your video card only gets a PCI Express x8 connecdtion. Others do it by taking the PCI Express 1.0 x4 connection through the southbridge, which isn't as bad.
Crucial's RealSSD C300 is currently the only SSD on the market able to take advantage of SATA 3 speeds, and it doesn't take that much advantage of it. For write speeds, it can't even saturate a SATA 2 connection, so SATA 3 doesn't help at all. For read speeds, a SATA 2 connection theoretically can go up to about 300 MB/s. Under favorable conditions, real world performance tops out at around 270 MB/s. SandForce drives can offer that in sequential performance in both directions. Crucial claims that their RealSSD C300 can go up to 355 MB/s in sequential writes. That is faster than you can get from SATA 2, but not a lot faster.
Indilinx and SandForce claim that their next generation SSDs should be able to go up to 500 MB/s. Indilinx's Jet Stream has been repeatedly delayed, and should show up eventually, but it's unclear when. There aren't credible rumors of when SandForce's next generation SF-2000 controller will launch, either. For both of those, I'd say wait until OCZ announces that they have just launched a new product, and then add about three months for products to actually appear at retail. OCZ likes to jump the gun like that. And then add a couple more months after products show up at retail before any claims that the firmware works can be considered credible.
Intel's third generation X25-M is due out soon, supposedly this year, but is still a SATA 2 drive. If it's as fast as Intel says it is, it will roughly match a SandForce drive in performance. Naturally, Intel will probably charge more for it, just because they're Intel and they figure people will pay it because they've heard of Intel and not SandForce, or OCZ, G.Skill, Mushkin, or whoever.
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Yes, Sandy Bridge is going to have integrated graphics built into the CPU die. Intel is trying to get everyone to use Intel graphics. Apparenly paying motherboard manufacturers to take Intel graphics chips off their hands wasn't successful enough, so now they're trying building it into the processors.
It's going to be typical Intel graphics: awful drivers, not enough hardware to perform well even if it did have good drivers, but good enough for a lot people who neither know nor care about graphics performance. It might actually be among the fastest integrated graphics on the market, if only because AMD and Nvidia haven't meaningfully updated their integrated graphics lineup in years. AMD's Llano is going to destroy the Sandy Bridge graphics, and likely offer around quadruple the performance. Plus, AMD video drivers actually work right.
Having Intel graphics sitting there is wasted silicon for an awful lot of people, of course. But there's lots of wasted silicon to most people in various chips that you get. Are you really going to use 14 USB ports at once? So long as you don't plug in a monitor to actually use the graphics, it's harmless. Well, I guess the monitor ports on the back panel will waste space, but presumably there will be motherboards that don't go overboard with this.
Sandy Bridge is a full node die shrink from Bloomfield and Lynnfield, though. Double the transistors means you can waste a quarter of them on integrated graphics and still end up with something a lot nicer than at the 45 nm node. Wasting that many transistors adds to the die size, and hence the cost of production, but that's Intel's problem, not yours. The competition, AMD's Zambezi (due out in Q2 2011), is likely to itself be a rather expensive chip to produce, with eight cores and 16 MB of cache on an SOI HKMG process node.
Comments
I guess I dont know how to say it correctly, but i thought it was pretty common knowledge. id suggest build a few machines and try it for yourself. Leave the turbo feature on and check your fps and your performance tab on the task manager. Then turn it off in bios and set core affinities and watch performance and fps. Try it for a few games. Try it on a few machines so you can rule out flukes. Play around with putting applications on different cores. Intel or amd it doesnt really matter. I guess the most recent example I saw improvement in was Star Craft 2. Probably about 15 fps improvement on my i7950 with turbo stuff disabled and setting things my way. Now with star craft I only tried it on i7. I didnt try it on amd.
To be clear I am not talking about OS processes. Im talking about applications. I do not recommend shutting off a bunch of windows services. Its not uncommon for the os to be using like 40-50 processes, depending on what all your doing. I think most gamers these days have 2 monitors. One for one game and one for another. Like crafting in darkfall while grinding in whatever. Also while looking at facebook or checking the forums. You could set cores to one game and cores to another and cores to internet browsing or watching a movie.
Also turn off superfetch if you are using vista. Its a service you can stop and it doesnt really help performance like its supposed to.
What you're claiming is something that theoretically should not be able to happen, unless perhaps you've got something cooled improperly and overheating. Maybe you're taking about C-states, and Vista not knowing what to do with a multi-core processor. But Windows 7 doesn't suffer from the latter problem, and C-states are a different issue entirely.
So the p55 doesn't do sata 3. Thanks alot for that info.
I am very curious now about this Sandy Bridge. It is supposed to have graphics built into the CPU. Will that take up CPU resources auch as one of the cores or part of the bus or anything? I have heard the graphics comming from Sandy Bridge aren't really made for gaming but more for entertainment. Just curious if Sandy Bridge will be on par with the i5 760 or the beginning line up of the i7 series. I really like the idea of Sata 3 and it is the future of speeds for SSD so I kind of want to get into a motherboard that supports that kind of technology. I guess I will have to just wait for the CES and the first roll outs and bench test reviews to figure out what to do.
AMD's 800 series chipsets are all SATA 3, so long as you get the SB850 southbridge. Some such motherboards use an older southbridge with an 800 series northbridge, in which case, you lose SATA 3. Some of Intel's Sandy Bridge chipsets are supposed to have two SATA 3 ports, but mostly be SATA 2. That's fine so long as you don't plug things into the wrong port. Some older motherboards do have a separate SATA 3 chip, but it has to connect to the southbridge via PCI Express lanes. Some motherboards do this by taking half of the PCI Express x16 connection that is built into the Lynnfield processors, which is bad, because it means that your video card only gets a PCI Express x8 connecdtion. Others do it by taking the PCI Express 1.0 x4 connection through the southbridge, which isn't as bad.
Crucial's RealSSD C300 is currently the only SSD on the market able to take advantage of SATA 3 speeds, and it doesn't take that much advantage of it. For write speeds, it can't even saturate a SATA 2 connection, so SATA 3 doesn't help at all. For read speeds, a SATA 2 connection theoretically can go up to about 300 MB/s. Under favorable conditions, real world performance tops out at around 270 MB/s. SandForce drives can offer that in sequential performance in both directions. Crucial claims that their RealSSD C300 can go up to 355 MB/s in sequential writes. That is faster than you can get from SATA 2, but not a lot faster.
Indilinx and SandForce claim that their next generation SSDs should be able to go up to 500 MB/s. Indilinx's Jet Stream has been repeatedly delayed, and should show up eventually, but it's unclear when. There aren't credible rumors of when SandForce's next generation SF-2000 controller will launch, either. For both of those, I'd say wait until OCZ announces that they have just launched a new product, and then add about three months for products to actually appear at retail. OCZ likes to jump the gun like that. And then add a couple more months after products show up at retail before any claims that the firmware works can be considered credible.
Intel's third generation X25-M is due out soon, supposedly this year, but is still a SATA 2 drive. If it's as fast as Intel says it is, it will roughly match a SandForce drive in performance. Naturally, Intel will probably charge more for it, just because they're Intel and they figure people will pay it because they've heard of Intel and not SandForce, or OCZ, G.Skill, Mushkin, or whoever.
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Yes, Sandy Bridge is going to have integrated graphics built into the CPU die. Intel is trying to get everyone to use Intel graphics. Apparenly paying motherboard manufacturers to take Intel graphics chips off their hands wasn't successful enough, so now they're trying building it into the processors.
It's going to be typical Intel graphics: awful drivers, not enough hardware to perform well even if it did have good drivers, but good enough for a lot people who neither know nor care about graphics performance. It might actually be among the fastest integrated graphics on the market, if only because AMD and Nvidia haven't meaningfully updated their integrated graphics lineup in years. AMD's Llano is going to destroy the Sandy Bridge graphics, and likely offer around quadruple the performance. Plus, AMD video drivers actually work right.
Having Intel graphics sitting there is wasted silicon for an awful lot of people, of course. But there's lots of wasted silicon to most people in various chips that you get. Are you really going to use 14 USB ports at once? So long as you don't plug in a monitor to actually use the graphics, it's harmless. Well, I guess the monitor ports on the back panel will waste space, but presumably there will be motherboards that don't go overboard with this.
Sandy Bridge is a full node die shrink from Bloomfield and Lynnfield, though. Double the transistors means you can waste a quarter of them on integrated graphics and still end up with something a lot nicer than at the 45 nm node. Wasting that many transistors adds to the die size, and hence the cost of production, but that's Intel's problem, not yours. The competition, AMD's Zambezi (due out in Q2 2011), is likely to itself be a rather expensive chip to produce, with eight cores and 16 MB of cache on an SOI HKMG process node.