IT portal update: Nehalem, women and heavy benchmarking
by Johan De Gelas on September 15, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing general
Updated (22/09/2008): Our Dunnington review will be online tomorrow.
After seeing how much reactions Derek got with his now famous post about "female readership at Anandtech", I thought that this title would definitely draw your attention :-). Anyway, one of suggestions that Derek got was that Anandtech should hire female editors for the woman point of view. Those people really need to read it.anandtech.com more: we have Liz writing some heavy and well written articles here such as container based virtualization and software virtualization.
So, that took care of the "women" part of this blogpost. Another suggestion that was posted was that we should deliver what we have promised you. And indeed it.anandtech.com promised you an in depth comparison of the hypervisors out there such as Hyper-V, ESX and Xen. We delivered only a few virtualization benchmarks so far. What happened? Well, after we did so much testing, we worked with the performance teams of VMware and Microsoft and after some time we ironed out a few mistakes that we made. So that made us rerun a whole battery of benchmarks and tests, but that is the price you got to pay when you start testing something which is new to you. So expect a full hypervisor comparison late this month. Why this late? Because a very important launch of CPUs caused us to shift our focus: we want to deliver some benchmarks on those new CPUs first. If all goes well, you should see those spanky new CPUs benchmarked in a virtualized setup this week. I believe it will be a very new and interesting experience to see CPUs tested this way.
Last but not least, I'll be off to London this wednesday to meet Ronak Singhal. If you still have - after Anand's excellent article -an excellent technical question for the Chief Architect Ronak Singhal about Intel's Nehalem, I'll be glad to ask him this question. Understand that I probably only have time for the very best questions, but please feel free to either send me this question or post it here.
Basically, check out our IT portal regularly the coming days and weeks: you'll be freed of all that gaming stuff on the front page (*), and rest assured we'll show you some interesting things!
(*) Just Joking ;-)
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jones377 - Monday, September 22, 2008 - link
When are you guys posting your Dunnington review, if ever?v12v12 - Thursday, September 18, 2008 - link
Both are jokes if you ask me... WTF is a woman going to offer in writings about TECHNOLOGY Vs a man? NOTHING b/c technology is based on FACTS and benchmarks, not any slight of neither male nor female BIAS? If you WANT to hire more women to simply state the facts as the males on this site currently attempt (no offense) then so be it. But this drivel about "women's perspective" on technology is bullocks. Hell most women don't give a crap about tech, aside from shopping for it and it working. That's more than well accepted as social-FACT and not an opinion. If it were not there would be a much larger female audience participating, as nobody forces women to NOT read about technology. They simply CHOOSE NOT to do so in favor of other interests. Stop beating a dead horse... Again where do you see women clamoring on about "we NEED MORE male viewers," you don't b/c frankly they don't give a sh** about male viewership in their associated hobbies. But men ought to care about them? Just stick to the facts and benchmarks and if Sally or Molly or whomever wants to write about it, let them. Geesh...Alas... A.M.Doomed... You know as I sit and type this banter out, I look over at the machine I'm using to do it with: the FORMER TKO'ing-intel's-ass-CHAMP, Barton Mobile, OC'd a nice +30%(!!!); all I can do is LAUGH at AMD. Resting on their laurels like the Rabbit taking a nap, while the tortoise slowly sneaks by to an insurmountable lead. GET IT? AMD is bunk, and unless there's a literal miracle or MELTDOWN@IntelEvilEmpire.HQ—who cares about slow, uncompetitive (keyword) AMD chips? Any buyer STUPID enough to WASTE money on AMD "just b/c" or out of some blind loyalty, is a fool and another reason why hardware is so overpriced and the market flooded with junk. AMD has it's head in the sand, praying ATI will keep them afloat long enough for a crap-shot return to former CPU glory, until then A.T. need not WASTE time and effort testing bottlenecking *.AMD chips.
Yeah it's slightly biased and meant to be scornful, but then again, wasn't it AMD talking trash about "a whole new x86 redesign," and other FALSE MARKETING ATTEMPTS to MISLEAD REVIEW SITE, esp on BENCHMARKS—You all remember that right??? Nothing further from the truth could have resultant... AMD is Trash and now we're ALL paying through the nose for Intel's vastly superior, regime-price-control gems! THANKS A.M.Dullards
-Ciao!
erikejw - Tuesday, September 16, 2008 - link
"Is there any reason why you jump so quickly to the conclusion that we are favoring Intel?"Intel more or less financed Anandtech in the first years through "ads" and other money.
I know you Johan is not part of that group since you did splendid work at Aces but got no major backer like Intel or you wanted to do unbiased reviews.
Some old things stick like glue and the credibility of Anandtech is not very high among enthusiasts who been along long.
Would you beleive George Bush if he decided to support Iran to become a nuclear country?
"Secondly, Nehalem is not the CPU that is launched today, it is Intel's six-core Dunnington. It is not weird IMHO that we focus on a new launch and delay an already late article a bit more."
The launch press release says Xeon 7400 CPUs can improve performance by almost 50% in systems that make heavy use of virtualization.
AMD has owned the virtualization world for 5 years but 10 minutes after the release of a new core that blows AMD off the lead you guys decided to release the first Virutalization article ever, do I smell a rat?
Chad Boga - Tuesday, September 16, 2008 - link
Your claim that AnandTech doesn't have high credibility amongst enthusiasts should be reworded to "AnandTech doesn't have high credibility amongst the mentally deficient who make up AMDZone".
Finally - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link
Leaving your comfort zone is not recommended for anyone, so I agree.Nevertheless... why are all Benchmarks done with Intel CPUs? I mean, even if the Phenom sucks @ games, it still gets bought and people need comparisons for making educated choices. If you simply leave it out, no one will ever notice how small or big the difference really is.
Same thing goes for GPUs, which seem to magically disappear into thin air if they are only one [sic!] generation older than the one that is tested. Again, you take away from the people the ability to make educated decisions, because they can't compare anything.
Chad Boga - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - link
Benchmarks of video cards are done with Intel CPU's because you want to make sure you have as fast a CPU as possible so that when you compare GPU's, the results aren't blighted by being CPU bound.As AMD's best gaming CPU is significantly behind Intel's, that is why.
As for the rest of your comments, no site can be all things to all people, and often you see a range of CPU's from both teams tested anyway.
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, September 16, 2008 - link
Have you seen any independent virtualization testing so far that compares the different CPUs? That is because it is pretty hard to get it right and very labor intensive.When we try out a new way of testing CPUs, it will be always applied to a new launch of CPUs. When I try out MySQL and DB2, it was just a moment that AMD was very strong. So that makes me AMD biased?
When I used an improved version of that when Woodcrest was launched, I must have been Intel biased?
Isn't it much more likely that it is simply matter that the dualcore opteron and Woodcrest were the strongest CPUs when they were launched?
Anyway, just read my blogposts and you'll see that I clearly exposed AMD's strengths in HPC and some server apps.
erikejw - Friday, September 19, 2008 - link
No, I don't think you are biased at all.Actually I think you might be the one with the best and most indepth and interesting reviews on the www.
Anandtechs early days is a different story though when they were more or less financed by Intel. I only speculated on the timing of the virualisation review that I thought was funny.
Did you choose to do it yourself or did someone else at Anandtech advise you that it might be interesting to look into virtualisation and it just happens to be at the exact moment Intel smashed AMD in that regard and AMD has owned the v scene for years, only you know.
If you choose to do it and noone suggested it I think it is due to your interest in the techonlogy and the increasing importance it has.
If someone suggested it to you I believe it is someone with some close Intel connections and that contact suggested to him, hey guys, you migtht want to look into virtualisation :)
1.You are extremally unbiased
2.You make excellent unbiased reviews
3.Could not figure something out :)
Rav3n - Monday, September 15, 2008 - link
1/11th of your staff is female, and since you have at least one you are good to go? Fool-proof logic! What percent of your readers are female? Could it be... less than 10%? I'm not saying they correlate.I actually just looked around for bios. I think that might be the first time I ever looked. "About" had some stuff. Didn't exactly get the feel-goods from it.
FYI IT site is taking a really long time (2 minutes per page) to load. Maybe it's just that I dropped my laptop a few times, but the rest of the site seems zippy.
Gannon - Monday, September 15, 2008 - link
Givem the asymmetry of memory bandwidth and GPU bandwidth what does Intel have up it's sleeve in terms of main memory bus architecture? We've been hearing that GPU's and CPU's are becoming more integrated but I think the opposite is true. GPU's have ridiculous memory bandwidth that outstrips anything modern CPU's coupled with the old PC main memory architecture have... how are you going to deal with the threat should GPU computing take off? They are away ahead in terms of bandwidth. Or is there something else I am missing here?