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."

Is anybody using Barcelona yet?

[coult]

Outside of giant clusters, is anybody running Barcelona yet either? I have been unable to find any systems available for purchase. Word on the street is January before they are available in quantity to the general public.

Unavailable?

[owlstead]

Of course it is unavailable. It will be available when it hits the $999 price tag. Or is Intels highest desktop price susceptible to inflation as well? In that case, lets hope that they don't do a 20% increase every 2-3 years. It seems technically we are now at the P4 GHz range again, but now with well performing and full featured CPU's. Maybe we should call this a green paper launch.

Re:Good news for Windows Vista and the USA

[GuidoW]

The Core line of processors is based on the Pentium M, which was developed in Isreal.

Re:Huh?

[Wavicle]

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

Simple, you test it on a motherboard that supports it. "But wait," you say, "the article said no motherboard does." Yeah, they often get it wrong, welcome to slashdot. While Intel does not have a chipset that officially supports 1600MHz, there are X35 boards out there from manufacturers such as Asus and Gigabyte that have bumped the FSB frequency anyway. Somehow, even under load, the platform is stable.

You're all missing the point...

[legoman666]

Anandtech had a good insight about this release. I'll just quote it directly instead of trying to paraphrase:
"Almost as soon as we had Phenom samples, Intel made the decision to sample a CPU requiring a FSB that wasn't officially supported by any chipset at the time. No, 1600MHz FSB support won't come until next year with the X48 chipset, but it didn't matter to Intel; we were getting chips now.

Take a moment to understand the gravity of what I just said; Intel, the company that would hardly acknowledge overclocking, was now sampling a CPU that required overclocking to run at stock speeds. Even more telling is that Intel got the approval of upper management to sample these unreleased processors, requiring an unreleased chipset, in a matter of weeks. This is Intel we're talking about here, the larger of the two companies, the Titanic, performing maneuvers with the urgency of a speed boat.

It's scary enough for AMD that Intel has the faster processor, but these days Intel is also the more agile company."

http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3153&p=2 [anandtech.com]

Jane and Joe user

[Nonillion]

Raw CPU speed is nice but when are we going to make the busses fatter. Most of the bottle necks are in the memory and hard drive subsystems. My Sun Ultra 2 for instance, it has two 64 bit 400 MHz processors, a 576 bit wide memory buss and a reasonably fast SCSI interface. Even though this thing is a dinosaur by todays standards it easily kept up with an old dual 1GHz PIII.

Besides, just how much unwarranted computing performance does Jane and Joe user really need to surf the net, do e-mail, instant message, play music and do home office chores.

More Benchmark Detail Here, Not Just Synthetics

[MojoKid]

FTA at HotHardware.com: http://www.hothardware.com/articles/Intel_Core_2_Extreme_QX9770_Performance_Preview/ [hothardware.com]

"Cinebench is perhaps our most favorite "quick and dirty" test for gauging how fast a new CPU core is. If you're looking for a general quick-take view of system performance and CPU power, Cinebench consistently gives results that we rely on here in our labs. In the multi-threaded version of our this test, the QX9770 is 63% faster than the Phenom 9700. And with only a 33% clock speed advantage over the new Phenom, obviously the new Intel core is significantly more efficient clock-for-clock with a higher IPC (instructions per clock cycle) throughput."

"The fastest single processor for gaming from the AMD side of the house, generally speaking according to these two tests, is the Athlon 64 X2 6400+. Again, that's according to the game engines at work in Crysis and F.E.A.R. The fastest processor of Intel's offering is obviously the QX9770, which looks to be 6 - 8% faster than its 3GHz counterpart, the QX9650. In general though, the AMD systems are easily outperformed by the Intel-based setups, in some cases by a large margin."

Re:Why must you people exaggerate!

[CastrTroy]

Meanwhile, Linux keeps on getting faster and faster. I'm running Mandriva 2008, with Compiz Fusion on a Celeron 1.5 GHz, 512 MB RAM, Intel GMA, and it's faster than Vista without Aero. It's also faster than XP. I think that Linux will really take off if MS can't make their next OS consume less resources. When the choice for the average consumer becomes, spend $50 on a Linux computer, or spend $800 on a Windows computer, I think that most people will begin to switch. If things keep going the way they are, this is how the situation will become.

Re:Welcome to 18th Century Economics

[Anonymous Coward]

"Making everything yourself is a good way to make yourself extremely poor."

True, but if you have the capital, it's a robust solution.

What happens when the grocery store runs out of milk, or the price doubles?
What if they find bacteria or mad-cow in the store-bought brand? What then?

If you want something done RIGHT, you do it yourself. And you spend the money,
and you write it off with the huge profits you make because you are a marketing behemoth.

Not only that, but your competitors can't squeeze you when they buy all the dairy farms.

This is called in house procurement. Welcome to 20th century economics.