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SSDs boost Intel's 'Nehalem' chip demo
Gets into overclocking too.
By Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service
Published: 10:22 GMT, 04 June 08
Intel showed off a PC running an overclocked version of its upcoming quad-core Nehalem processor at the Computex exhibition in Taipei, but the system seemed to get its biggest performance boost from solid-state drives (SSDs).
Nehalem, which is due later this year, is a family of 45-nanometer processors that combine processor cores and the memory controller - formerly part of the chipset - on a single piece of silicon. Nehalem will be the first Intel x86 processors to have this feature, which is already used on AMD's chips.
"Nehalem is very healthy," said Francois Piednoel, a senior performance analyst at Intel.
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Piednoel used the Nehalem-based PC to smoothly navigate a 16GB library of images, zooming in and out of various pictures. He then loaded a 1GB high-definition video clip almost instantaneously into a video editing application.
"Why did it load so fast? Because I had two of those babies," Piednoel said, pointing to an SSD.
He wouldn't reveal how fast the chip was running, except to say it was "massively overclocked" and running at a much higher clock speed than the chips will when they hit the market.
Other specifications of the system included 3GB of RAM and two SSDs, each with a capacity of 80GB and arranged in a RAID 0 configuration.
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