Intel Corp (INTC)

[chipguy]

I was hoping to see Intel stay with the 130W TDP for Nehalem-EX, instead of moving to the newly 170W envelope that Tukwila has made fashionable. This is quite an achievement for EIGHT high speed cores, plus all of the memory controllers and QPI lanes. I can't wait to see the benchmarks.

There will be a price to be paid. Considering the extra
QPI links, the eight CPUs in 130W Beckton will have
less power to divide up among them than the four CPUs
in the 130W Core i7.

For the sake of argument let's say four Nehalem cores
in i7 burn 100W to run at 3.2 GHz and the eight cores
in Beckton have 90W to share. That's only 11W per
core stead of 25W per core. Assuming perfect cube
law power scaling with voltage and frequency:

f[Beckton] <= 3.2 * [11/25]^(1/3) <= ~2.4 GHz

This first order analysis suggests top bin Beckton will
clock no more than 2.4 GHz, maybe a bit less.

That being said, eight Nehalem cores running in the
low 2.x GHz range is an awful lot of server ooomph,
certainly far more than AMD will be able to put into
one socket in the foreseeable future. It is also a
bullet right between the eyes for Sun's Niagara.