The Fastest Processor You Can't Run

auld_wyrm writes "Intel is trying to push the news of AMD's Barcelona launch out of the headlines with the release of the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770, a 3.20 GHz CPU that runs on a 1600 MHz front-side bus. It is the fastest consumer level processor that has come out, but don't plan on running it anytime soon. The ~$1200 price tag, and the lack of any motherboards that support a 1600MHz FSB will stop this unneeded answer to Barcelona from appearing in enthusiast's PCs for Christmas. Still, the benchmarks from this powerful CPU are something awesome to behold."

Huh?

[Bryansix]

How do you benchmark a processor when there are no motherboards that support it?

benchmarks

[wizardforce]

where are these benchmarks you speak of and why did they create this processor without a motherboard that is available for actual use?

Reminds me of stuff

[ackthpt]

Reminds me of all that stuff I read for years in Pop Science and Pop Mechanics -- ultra cool stuff you'll never lay your hands on. Well, this will be available, but probably not for 6 months. Meanwhile, I'm not about to upgrade my mobo for it anyway. I work in Photoshop on an Athlon 64, the cheapest one available about a year ago, and it's still no issue of speed, memory is the problem, having enough of it. Need mobos which can hold 16 GB of memory, not faster CPUs.

Welcome to 18th Century Economics

[NEOtaku17]

Do you make your own shoes and clothes or do you go out and buy them from "other" people outside of your household? Do you milk your own cow in your backyard or do you buy your milk at the grocery store? My guess is that you do what you do best in exchange for money and trade it for things that other make more efficiently. That way the total amount of production is greater because you and others are specializing in what you make. For the same reason it would be stupid to make all your own goods inside your own household it would be stupid for a country to make all of its goods inside of its borders. Comparative advantage increases division of labor which increases total production(AKA you become more wealthy). Making everything yourself is a good way to make yourself extremely poor.

Re:Just the things for Windows 7

[ceoyoyo]

Remember when there weren't any non-workstation dual core processors yet and MS was saying you'd need one for Longhorn/Vista?

bah (humbug)

[Anonymous Coward]

behold... the fastest Intel processor to date , watch it melt next to a Power5 or Power6 from IBM..

Re:Obviously you don't multi-task

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? Multitasking doesn't take much grunt. A 7 MHz Amiga can do it without any slowdown at all. And I have a 300 MHz Pentium II running a long, long pipeline of curl, awk, and a shitload of seds all the time, and it's almost totally I/O bound. CPU doesn't matter at all for multitasking.

It's all about the apps you're running, not how many there happen to be.

Re:Correct.

[Bryansix]

I work on one task at a time.
I have a laptop with apparently a ... 1.6GHz CPU and it works just fine, so what does an additional 2GHz give me?

Apparently nothing.

Re:Good news for Windows Vista and the USA

[necro2607]

"I wonder why no other country, even those technologically [more] advanced, have produced anything remotely comparable to Intel and AMD processors yet."

Well, let's just say, in Soviet Russia, CPU processes you!

Re:Good news for Windows Vista and the USA

[larry bagina]

ARM is british designed. SH4 is Japanese designed. Nobody else has produced anything remotely comparable to x86 because x86 sucks. There's a lot of smart people polishing that turd, but it's still a turd.

Re:What does 3GHz give me

[JebusIsLord]

Conversely, it allows developers to write programs that are easier to debug, faster to develop, and easier to add features to (that yes, take up more CPU cycles than an obfuscated, buggy "optimized" application).

Re:benchmarks

[wilsonng]

Well, if the speed limit is 65 mph, why do people make cars that can go 200 or 250 mph? why all the extra horsepower? If there are no speed limits on processor speed, I would expect the manufacturer to continually push the envelope. whether the 'rest' of us needs it is another question -- but there should be a good many who will need it and willing to pay a few extra hundred for it, I reckon. After all, why create computers with hundreds or thousands of processors running hundreds of teraflops?

Re:Welcome to 18th Century Economics

[quanticle]

Yes, in purely economical terms, you would be better off specializing in the goods and services that best suit you. However, there are other concerns besides economic ones. For example, lets say that the US outsources all of its electronics manufacturing to China. Then, if China wished to exert influence on US foreign policy, all they'd have to do is threaten to cut off the supply of new electronic parts. The US would have to consider China's opinion, or face large economic losses from a supply shortfall. Therefore, its in America's interest to keep at least some of its electronics manufacturing capacity, even when doing so is not economically optimal.

That's one of the flaws I often see in economists - the tendency to reduce everything to profit/loss equations, and disregard the fundamental fact that people are not the perfectly rational producer/consumer units in economics simulations.

Re:I'm actually grateful for that.

[ceoyoyo]

Hm... my $600 Mac Mini runs Leopard just fine and I fully expect it will run 10.6 as well. It's got as much processor power as the MBP I use routinely for heavy duty medical image processing development. The only thing it's lacking in, sort of, is 3D video performance, but it's more than enough to run all the eye candy in Leopard with some left over for a few image pro algorithms that run on the GPU.

It doesn't spend a core running antivirus or even half a core running DRM.

Re:Just the things for Windows 7

[Velcroman98]

I've been running Vista Business Edition now for 2 weeks on a Dell Optiplex 745 (E6700 chip) with 2GB RAM. Once I turned the User Account Control security crap off it's been a pleasure to use. Besides updates and new software installs I've only been forced to reboot once.

It's not as bad as all the /. members say. Corporate business users aren't running Vista yet; because all of their applications need to be certified to run properly on Vista before they will support it. It's the third-party vendor support that will make or break Vista, not QX9770 chips and a TB or RAM.

I understand this is a LINUX fanboy community (I run Debian on my crusty slow old laptop), but after a while it sounds like a broken record here.