Intel Dual-Core Systems Begin Shipping Monday

ThinSkin writes "The wait for Intel's dual-core processor is over, that is if you're willing to fork over some dough for a Dell or Alienware system bundled with the chip. Intel just announced that Monday marks the first day dual-core systems hit the market with Dell's Precision 380 workstation and its next generation Dimension XPS desktop, which start at $2,999. PC Magazine got a chance to play with the XPS system and came away quite impressed."

An improvement

[Gr8Apes]

over their regular single CPU offerings for those of us that run multiple apps, but I truly would like to see the real heat/performance numbers, and whether the rumored performance throttling is enabled on these. If not, how bad is the heat generation?

From what I've read up to now, AMD's solution will outperform Intel's offering with significantly lower heat dissappation, making it a double winner. However, testing shipping units will finally quantify these processors. Can't wait for AMD's unit to ship and get compared.

Apple is already there

[canuck57]

Dimension XPS desktop, which start at $2,999

Now Apple already has a dual processor system in the marketplace. Just took a look at a dual 2.5GHz G5 model the other day. It was obvious it is a quality machine as it was quiet and smoking hot fast. And runs a stable OS with all the features one could want.

Nothing wrong with Dell systems, but they are over priced... The Apple has an OS designed for MP and is RISC based, and I suspect much faster than say a dual Intel Xeon at twice the price.

Imagine what a dual core, dual processor (G5 970MP) systems will be like!!! You might want to keep any eye on Apple for this.

HP already is selling dual core Opterons

[charnov]

HP has dual core Opterons in blade servers. You really have to dig through their website, but availibility was listed as 4/14...now shipping dates could months from now, so who knows.

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

"PLay a game while burning Mp3's... That will *kill* your single core."

Could somebody explain why burning takes so much CPU power? When you are burning, you are just copying data to the CD at very low speed (for example 16x burning speed corresponds to 2.4MB/s). Why would this require a fast CPU?

Pfft

[Anonymous Coward]

This Article lacks a lot of detail, and sounds more like a "advert" than a benchmark/test article.

Now if I were to spend $3,999US on a new computer, I would bloody expect one that PERFORMS remarkebly.

His mentioning of how a anti-virus and firewall can bring your computer the " slow their computers to a crawl" I can't say I have had that problem in years. And usally a good system tuneup/clean out/tuneup fixes the problem.

Your computer will run all your trojans/malware/virus's on one cpu while leaving enough "oomph" to play doom 3 or halo.

So what??

[jarich]

I've got a dual processor system. They don't cost that much more than a single... you won't pay a premium for a new "dual core" box, but you'll still get all the advantages of a fast responsive system. p. In my opinion, dual cores are for businesses whose rack space is at a premium and gamers with spare money to burn.

I don't get it

[Dolda2000]

What all this "news" about Intel suddenly doing dual-core? Isn't that what HyperThreading has been doing for, what is it, a year now?

Re:No thanks

[raxx7]

Multiple things.

a) "burning mp3". He might meant burning audio CDs from mp3, so you have the overhead of decoding mp3.

b) some CD recorders have none or limited suport for DMA modes. That means they take a bigger piece of CPU time to handle the data transfers than you'd expect.

c) Exactly much depends on the recording mode, but the cd recording software usually has to handle quite a bit of the low level details of recording audio or data in the CDs. In particular, it may need to transform the data you have in the disk into another form suitable to be burned into a CD.

d) Recording CDs is a real-time process. With buffer underun protection less so, but things can go bad if the drive has to wait for data from the system.