Intel Core i7 970 Gulftown On Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Core i7 970 Gulftown On Linux

Intel will be introducing their first Sandy Bridge CPUs in the coming months, which we already know has Linux graphics support well underway, but for now the top-end Intel desktop processors are the Gulftown CPUs that were introduced earlier this year. The Gulftown CPUs boast six physical processing cores with Hyper Threading to put the total thread count per CPU at 12. Besides putting 12 processing threads at your disposal, these CPUs are built upon the 32nm die shrink of Nehalem and boast 12MB of L3 cache. The first Gulftown desktop product to launch was the Intel Core i7 980X, which was quickly followed by the Core i7 970, and we now finally have the chance to test out this incredibly fast but expensive processor under Linux.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=15392

[clavko]

Let's rice it up a bit... there.



Somewhere over the rainbow...

[TheCycoONE]

With the TTSIOD 3D phong renderer, which is actually all CPU-based, the Core i7 870 was moderately faster than the Core i7 970.

But your graph clearly shows the 970 in the lead by 22fps?

[Michael]

But your graph clearly shows the 970 in the lead by 22fps?

Whoops, swapped around 870 and 970 in that text. Fixed, thanks.

[Michael]

Let's rice it up a bit... there.



Somewhere over the rainbow...

As I've said a few times before, with Iveland + OpenBenchmarking.org there will be improvements in this area via their embeddable tables, etc.

[droidhacker]

Don't you just love processors that are designed with the singular purpose of tricking the benchmarks?

[smitty3268]

As I've said a few times before, with Iveland + OpenBenchmarking.org there will be improvements in this area via their embeddable tables, etc.

And as I've replied before, this would take 10 seconds to do by hand in your articles. Which is why it's reasonable to hope this gets done immediately, and not waiting for months while a complete website/graphing system is setup.

[TrevorPH]

As I've said a few times before, with Iveland + OpenBenchmarking.org there will be improvements in this area via their embeddable tables, etc.

Any chance you could benchmark the 970 without HT to see the differences and work out if it's something worth using (or not)?

[lem79]

The new graphs look nice Michael. However one issue I see .. are you using "sub-pixel antialiasing" on the fonts? Personally I use greyscale, since sub-pixel looks terrible (reminiscent of HAM mode on Amigas, with its "colour fringing" side effect); look in Ubuntu's fonts preferences to see the difference.

Using Compiz to zoom in on the graphs, it would appear you are using some form of sub-pixel antialiasing, whereas you're using the equivalent of greyscale on the pts logo in the top right.

Greyscale antialiasing = much nicer.

[Michael]

The new graphs look nice Michael. However one issue I see .. are you using "sub-pixel antialiasing" on the fonts? Personally I use greyscale, since sub-pixel looks terrible (reminiscent of HAM mode on Amigas, with its "colour fringing" side effect); look in Ubuntu's fonts preferences to see the difference.

Using Compiz to zoom in on the graphs, it would appear you are using some form of sub-pixel antialiasing, whereas you're using the equivalent of greyscale on the pts logo in the top right.

Greyscale antialiasing = much nicer.

These graphs are screenshots of the SVG files rendered by Gecko.