I see that Intel announced their new 45nm based chips this week. Mac Pro thought to be one of the first targets. Interestingly, as part of the announcement:
"The move from 65nm to 45nm involves more than just a shrink of current chip designs, Intel explains -- the processors include such additional features as new Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions 4 (SSE4), which are 47 new instructions that speed up workloads including video encoding for high-definition and photo manipulation, as well as key HPC and enterprise applications."

I like the the sound of that, but was wondering if anybody has any direct knowledge of what SSE4 might really encompass..

ken

I'm still hoping for a Quad-Processor Mac Pro. A man needs 16 cores! :D

I'm still hoping for a Quad-Processor Mac Pro. A [REAL] man needs 16 cores! :D

:D

The Sacramento Bee has a pretty good story today (11/12/07) on these new Intel "Penryn" processors and their benefits, one of which is video compression and decompression. See the piece here:

http://www.sacbee.com/140/story/469279.html

yes - good article - thanks for the link Geo...

ken

The big L2's on those is very nice, it is impressive to see Intel come out with a better, more powerful chip that even sips the electricity more frugally while being faster. The new quad core chips use less than 4 Watts at idle which is amazing.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/29/intel_penryn_4ghz_with_air_cooling/page4.html

They have some info on SSE4 on that page and later in the article they have some benches for video encoding, which probably will only get better when apps are actually tweaked to take advantage of the new SIMD extensions available, pages 36-39.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/29/intel_penryn_4ghz_with_air_cooling/page4.html

They have some info on SSE4 on that page and later in the article they have some benches for video encoding, which probably will only get better when apps are actually tweaked to take advantage of the new SIMD extensions available, pages 36-39.

thanks Jerry - nice link; Looks like the SS4 instruction set alone can cut encoding and other video processing by 25-30%. I'm also impressed with the energy preservation characteristics. I wonder if Apple has this targeted for a new sub-notebook;


ken