[Beowulf] Nehalem Xeons

[Greg Lindahl]

> Sounds like Intel has something to hide.

Often companies like Intel have an embargo date solely to make sure
that all the great new performance news arrives at once, generating a
lot of press alongside the formal announcement of availability.

I also had one case years ago where I was doing a big benchmark for a
bid on a new processor. We had pre-release parts. The release parts
were 10% slower, across the board on all of our benchmarks. Memory
intensive, cache intensive, fp intensive, int intensive, it was all
slower by about the same amount. That was a real head-scratcher, since
the cpu clock was the same.

AMD sends out pre-release Opterons to partners, often times running at
pretty low clock rates. It's very useful for compiler testing, and can
provide more opportunity to find chip bugs. Needless to say, no
benchmarks from these really slow parts can be published.

-- greg