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Intel's Quad Core CPU Reviewed
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Tue Sep 12, 2006 12:22 AM
from the core-buzzword-bingo dept.
from the core-buzzword-bingo dept.
Gr8Apes is one of many to let us know that Tom's Hardware Guide has posted a review of Intel's new Kentsfield quad core processor. From the article: "Even expert opinions are deeply divided, ranging from 'more cores are absolutely necessary' to 'why do I need something more than my five-year-old PC system?' Although the Core 2 quad-core processors are not expected to hit retail channels before October, Tom's Hardware Guide had the opportunity to examine several Core 2 Quadro models in the test labs. We would like to make it clear that these samples were not provided by Intel."
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Same old dilemma, new format. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Same old dilemma, new format. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Same old dilemma, new format. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And it was quite obvious which, parallelizable processes like media encoding saw 80% improvement. Some of the rendering tests saw very impressive improvement as well, but that's not really new and that's why those people have been paying for SMP setups in the past too. The gaming improvements were at the moment none, unlike the Core Duo which spanked the PIVs. They're really stretching at straws saying "it's a
Re:One other thing (Score:5, Funny)
Based on Intel's recent naming conventions, I think they'll call it the "Core 2 Duo Duo", so as to generate as much confusion as possible
Parent
Re:One other thing (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that's much to straight forward for Intel.
I expect something along the lines of: "Core 2 Tre Quad Pentium 405".
And AMD's AM3 5235+ 3.1G X4 Thunderon is faster and cheaper, anyhow.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:One other thing (Score:5, Funny)
"Well, they've had twin-core - let's give them FOUR cores! And an extra one on the back!"
"It's... it's brilliant!"
Yes, Intel are the new Gillette. ;-)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930 [theonion.com]
from intel's point of view (Score:3, Insightful)
The last couple of years I am finding it extremely hard justifying upgrades. I can surf fast, web pages render fast, can already watch a nice dvd movie or listen to fairly good sound, etc, and other multitasking things-all with a barely past 1 ghz cpu and half a gig of old slow RAM and a 45 dollar vid card. If I need some "upgrade", well, I still have two empty RAM sl
Re:from intel's point of view (Score:4, Insightful)
My previous development box was an Athlon XP 1700+. It did a full compile and test run of my current project in about sixteen minutes. I've just been upgraded to a Core Duo 2, which does it in three (make has a parallelise option, so it can use both cores). Give me a box that's twice as fast (which twice as many cores is, for compiling) and the compiler will finally be able to keep up with the coding, which means no time wasted sitting around.
Is it worth the money? For some people, yes. For others, clearly not. I couldn't justify getting a super expensive IBM pSeries box as a development system, but a cheapo x86 desktop doesn't even show up on the budget...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If your build system doesn't support parallelisation, you should look into switching build systems. Developer time is not cheap.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Vista will hopefully solve that problem, and 'progress' can continue unabated.
But you have excellent points, I would have modded you up but I would rather respond.
Processor makers need to really work on energy efficiency of all their desktops, these speeds were achieved through sheer increases in heat and power consumption, and its really flatly unacceptable (My current desktop heats up my office to a toast
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Processor makers need to really work on energy efficiency of all their desktops, these speeds were achieved through sheer increases in heat and power consumption, and its really flatly unacceptable
Didn't you pay attention in class? All the processor makers have started doing this. For the last one or two years, the mantra has been "computing per watt", pretty universally, no matter which company you were from. And by the way, if you compare your 386 and a modern computer, I'll bet the modern computer giv
Re:One other thing (Score:4, Funny)
Guess they should have called the platform Gettysburg.
Parent
Re:Same old dilemma, new format. (Score:5, Funny)
One core for physics calculations
One core for the game itself.
One core for OS, daemons and to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
Sure nothing for any -current- game.
Parent
Experts? (Score:5, Insightful)
These are obviously experts who have never heard of servers.
I'm perfectly content with my 1.2GHz single-core single-processor laptop, but I'd sure as shit like to have more muscle in the database cluster I'm responsible for maintaining at work. Whether these chips are a good solution remains to be seen, but that's a separate question.
Re:Experts? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Experts? (Score:5, Informative)
Intel's latest chips are fabbed at 65nm, while AMD is still only shipping chips fabbed at 90nm. This should give Intel a serious edge in the performance/heat ratio, but AMD's chips are so much more energy efficient that they are still competitive. (The current best performance/heat is the AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ ADD [lostcircuits.com] chip.) When AMD finally ships 65nm Opterons, those ought to be really great for dense server installations.
It's telling that even Dell is planning [com.com] to ship servers with AMD chips. They announced a 4-core server; two dual-core Opterons. It wouldn't surprise me if they will be 65nm Opterons when they finally are released.
The article says that Intel is going to transition from 65nm to 45nm sometime in 2007, and to 34nm sometime in 2009. They beat AMD to 65nm big-time. They may well be at 34nm before AMD can make it to 45nm! Just imagine some sort of server chip with 16 cores... or more likely, 8 cores and a whole bunch of cache.
But we shouldn't count those chickens before they hatch. Right now Intel is at 65nm and AMD will be there soon.
steveha
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not convinced, but that's one point of view that's often expressed.
Props for Intel for being early (Score:5, Interesting)
What's more quad-core surely gives more processing power per watt and per cubic meter which is a very important factor for big folks like Google or whereever hosting space is expensive.
Even John Carmack who used to be very much against multi-cores for gamins recently elaborated much on this area in his keynote. Practically any modern (lets call it nextgen
So I'd say overall it's nice that Intel is pushing this so fast, if developers start to realize that multi-cores are hitting mainstream, they will have to take that into account and by the time Intel and AMD launch 8-cores, there should be more software to take advantage of it.
but the real question is (Score:5, Funny)
Games are going parallel (Score:4, Informative)
"Multithreaded Game Engine Architectures "
http://gamasutra.com/features/20060906/monkkonen_
"Multi-Threaded Terrain Smoothing"
http://gamasutra.com/features/20060531/gruen_02.s
260 Watts! (Score:5, Funny)
If not Intel... (Score:3, Interesting)
Then who were they provided by, exactly?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
AMD.
Duo 2 Sexo? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
With four cores... (Score:5, Funny)
Bring on the more complicated architectures! (Score:5, Funny)
Exactly (Score:5, Interesting)
Its about fucking time...
Parent
FSB (Score:4, Funny)
One thing they didn't benchmark on it.... (Score:5, Interesting)
As a programmer, I want one. No, I want two
How long will it be ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's the bandwidth stupid! (Score:5, Insightful)
At any point of time in the history of computer performance, to say that, "it is stupid *anything*!" is much too simplistic point of view IMHO.
Osho
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
is the cause of the day and given coherency, its not trivial to
architect around. the parent may have been a little terse, but
as you point out, overall throughput doesn't go up if all the
cores are too starved to issue.
however the memory latency picture isn't changing very much, and the
most compelling method to hide it for general purpose machines is through
thread parallelism (ignore vectors for a moment, its kind of a special
case of the same t
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Ah, but the future is now. Cell has already addressed these issues: 25.6 GB/s main memory bandwidth, 256 kb of L1 cache per core, OoO sacrificed to minimize heat, maximal raw performance of CPUs in FP, integer, FP, load/store, FP, and main memory transfer (DMA engine) without any
Re:It's the bandwidth stupid! (Score:4, Funny)
Surely it's not necessary to sacrifice openoffice.org, can't it just be tuned a bit to keep its processor useage down? Maybe it will be the bottleneck for a few more years to come, but eventually it will make better use of system resources, I'm sure. Or are you just a Microsoft Office fanboy?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A BIG question??? (Score:4, Funny)
Kent's Farm is where Superboy grew up before he became Superman. It was a rights issue.
Parent
more power is often bad (Score:3, Funny)
Fans are noisy. This causes other people to accelerate your computer at 9.8 m/s/s. They can sneak up on you because you're going deaf from the noise.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Till Oracle and Microsoft revise their licensing terms to take into account multiple cores, that is.
Or do you think they're going to sacrifice all that potential revenue?
V.
Re:Us coders are delaying the Singularity! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it so hard to get developers to write decent multi-threaded code? It's not that hard,
Let me put it this way. If all the developers in the world were as smart as you think you are, it would not be that hard. As it is, however, coming up with scalable, manageable, efficient ways of writing multi-threaded code, in a way that is future-proof, as opposed to simply optimized for todays generation of hardware, is hard. Very hard. Not as in research-subject hard, but as in continuing-research-for decades-has-still-not-brought-us-much-closer-to-a- solution hard!
, and using threads properly can almost always improve performance and/or responsiveness on single proc/core machines to boot.
Let me rephrase part of the above sentence: "using threads properly can...". Did you notice which word I emphasized? Can you guess why?
Any idiot can use threads. The difficulty is to find the right granularity of threads (which is related to what kind of hardware you've got), which tasks are parallelizable, which parallelizable tasks should (or should not) get parallelized because of communication overhead and other factors (which is also related to what kind of hardware you've got), and so on.
It is also important to note, that few existing programs are designed from scratch today. In fact, almost all existing programs were designed in the past! In the past they didn't have affordable multicore (or multi-CPU) computers. And thus, those old designs didn't take that into account.
Parent
Re:Us coders are delaying the Singularity! (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.computer.org/portal/site/computer/menu
Basically, even the simplest tasks require significant armor plating to run correctly.
OTOH: Multi-PROCESS programming is far simpler than multi-THREADED programming.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Some things are easy to parallelise, a lot of things arent. Processing an image.. fine.. give each processor a chunk.. but wait.. you get edge artifacts since each pixel needs neighbour pixel information.. that has to be shared.. at what point does it take *longer* using multithreads.. doing a large matrix inversion that takes hours.. ok, parallelise it.. but wait.. standard algorithms that you can see in numerical recipes in C assume single thread.. u need a compl
Re:Us coders are delaying the Singularity! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it IS harder. It introduces new pitfalls (deadlocks, livelocks, race conditions), debugging is harder (gdb with multithreaded programs.. brrr), old paradigma have to be thrown overboard (and new ones introduced, such as task- or stream-based processing). Also, threads NEVER improve performance on a single-core machine. They do help with responsiveness, however. If you want performance boosts, use a multicore machine.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless you call blocking functions (like IO), where one thread'll block and the other(s) will keep going just fine. But yes, if you're 100% CPU bound then making it 2x50% won't help at all.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, I would see responsiveness as the bigger problem nowadays. It affects the user directly (for example, the file manager not reacting to any kind of input while scanning a