Intel Skulltrail Benchmark and Analysis 111
Tom's Hardware has a detailed benchmark and analysis of Intel's new Skulltrail offering, taking a look at 8 vs 4 cores. The comparison uses games, A/V applications, office applications, and 3D rendering tools to help demonstrate benchmarks. "We were disappointed by the Skulltrail platform. Although we have tested and reviewed numerous Intel products, we have never had such a half-baked system such as this in our labs. If this sounds harsh, bear in mind that all we have to base this conclusion on is the Skulltrail system itself in its current state, which Intel provided as an official review platform. We do not know whether Intel plans to revise and improve the platform before the final versions ship to retail."
A question (Score:5, Informative)
Are these games and benchmarks actually making.. you know.. use of all the 8 cores? i.e. were they modified so that they can make use of multicores efficiently.
Multicore machines are useful when either you run multiple applications or if you want to run single app and make use of the cores, then the apps have to be updated so that they can make use of these multiple cores.
Re:A question (Score:5, Funny)
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Many peoples computers run significantly slower because malware is utilizing the majority of their system resources.
If the malware is running parallel to the users they probably won't even notice.(not that they noticed before...)
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On the other hand, I know that Blender atleast lets you specify the number of threads to use while rendering. I would hope that the OS would be smart enough to put each thread on a different core but don't know for sure.
Re:A (Obligatory) question (Score:2)
For the informative TechReport Article on Intel's 'Skulltrail': http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14052 [techreport.com]
Personally, I'd prefer a Seaburg chipset server board as photographed by TR's user "Leor": http://www.techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=55937 [techreport.com]
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Yes and no (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe.
The problem is that your app might be multi-threaded up the wazoo, but you're at the mercy of the OS (Windows here) to actually put the threads on separate processors/cores. You can *request* a thread on a separate processor (SetProcessorAffinity(), if I recall..it's been awhile), but the docs state that this is merely a request, and the operating system is free to ignore it if it thinks it can do better. A lot of time I observed that Windows doled out threads to other processors very grudgingly, and I was told that it's because to Windows, the overhead of keeping track of what thread is on what processor was, under a lot of circumstances, more expensive (read: slower) than if it just kept them all on processor 0 and just context-switched (which it was going to be doing anyway)
Most games have been, as I've seen, multi-threaded for awhile now; the complexity of these games means they'd have an event loop that's a million lines long if they didn't (and probably do anyway), but your performance is always going to be only as good as the hardware, and the operating system, let you.
Re:Yes and no (Score:5, Informative)
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Also the reason that affinity requests aren't hard is that otherwise it would have to throw an error if that processor wasn't available either due to hardware issues or due to the process attributes being set so that it can't see that processor.
That's a stupid reason.
All the big unices have no problem with hard-locking a process/thread to a specific cpu.
If the cpu isn't available at the time of the lock, then the lock call returns an error and the process remains free-floating. If a cpu gets oversubscribed, the processes just get smaller time-slices (or none depending on their priority) and it is up the programmer to deal with that contingency.
If the cpu goes away (like a hot-plug event) then the processes get migrated somewhere else and may or
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That's not my experience at all. Windows seems to balance the load pretty well, even if the system is 95% idle, all cores seem to have an equal chance at getting the load. It's not very often where I see one core getting a lot more load than another.
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I tinker with CFD and various simulation codes in my spare time, multi threaded based on the number of cores available. I could put all 8 of those cores to work, easy
No, they aren't (Score:5, Informative)
I think this is mostly targeted at the "My ePenis is bigger than yours," crowd. There are a non-trivial number of people out there who are willing to just drop obscene amounts of money on gaming rigs, and Intel wants to suck every dollar they can out of their pockets.
Same sort of deal with nVidia's new triple SLI boards. At this point even 2 card SLI isn't a great idea because it costs so much (literally twice what a single card does) and the benefits aren't that great. There isn't a lot of need for 3 card SLI. However, people will spend the money, so nVidia will happily make a product to take it from them.
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Same sort of deal with nVidia's new triple SLI boards. At this point even 2 card SLI isn't a great idea because it costs so much (literally twice what a single card does) and the benefits aren't that great. There isn't a lot of need for 3 card SLI. However, people will spend the money, so nVidia will happily make a product to take it from them.
I'm not a gamer, but I do know that a few maniacs like to play their games on 30" LCDs at their native 2560x1600 resolution. Wouldn't multi-card SLI benefit them? Sure, the market's not big, but I don't think they're all wasting their money on nothing.
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This chipset uses FB ram. It is a good bit slower then DDR2 or DDR3 desktop ram.
The other issue has to do with the FSB. I read that the Intel memory system starts to falter at 4+cores. Memory access is one of the few areas where AMD still has an advantage.
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Spend Millions to Rewrite Games for 100 people (Score:1)
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Are these games and benchmarks actually making.. you know.. use of all the 8 cores?
No they are not, the article goes on to say the 2nd processor is basically left unused and even current quad core designs are out performing skull trail.
The problem lies in the fact Intel released this platform as a gaming platform. However they reached into their workstation kit to pull out this hardware. Dual processors are a nice bragging right for enthusiasts, but only if the performance is in the very top tier with software actually in use. And using fully buffered memory, is simply a big no-no when
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Raytracing has long been done in parallel, right from the days of the amiga with screamernet clustering and probably long before that too. Frames can be rendered out of sequence and recombined later with pre-rendered scenes, that's not the case with realtime rendering of games. It doesn't matter if one frame takes longer than others to render either.
Games simply aren't written to take advantage of lots of cpus, raytracing programs are and have been for years.
You also make a val
Or... (Score:3, Interesting)
Multicore cpus and threaded games and applications (Score:1)
Can all of these be enjoyed on a single-core cpu? Absolutely.
I have a dual quad-core computer, similar to Intel Skulltrail system, that dual boots Windows Vista Ultimate, 64-bit, and Fedora 8 Linux, 64-bit. Many programs do take advantage of this system, including modern PC games, such as Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3. UT3 does use all
Missing from the review: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Missing from the review: (Score:4, Funny)
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Parallel programming now! (Score:5, Informative)
Here is what the article says:
To be fair, though, it is not Intel's hardware that is at fault here, but today's software. If a program only uses four of the eight processor cores, then the Skulltrail system is noticeably slower than a single-socket quad-core computer. Since there are practically no current games or desktop applications around that can utilize more than four cores (if that many), the Skulltrail system does not offer any benefit here.
Read The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View From Berkeley [berkeley.edu] which has the description of why, this time, there is no getting around parallel programming.
Also examine NVIDIA's CUDA [nvidia.com] platform, which scales from a handful of processors on your PC's NVIDIA chip to the 128 processor NVIDIA Tesla [nvidia.com] card. Scalable parallel processing is the future.
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Re:Parallel programming now! (Score:4, Informative)
It's going to depend on whether those ten applications are actually making ongoing use of your processor. Encoding a movie whilst listening to music and editing photos - yes, proper use of multiple cores will see big benefits. But if you're talking about some spreadsheets, word documents, browser and an email client, then less so because no matter how quickly you think you're switching between these applications, it's going to look like slow motion to a CPU swapping processes. With this sort of usage, a CPU is actually sitting idle a lot of the time waiting for the next eternity between keystrokes to end. I'm not saying you wont see a benefit, but the benefit really kicks in when you've got multiple applications that are really doing something. A lot of applications (and probably the ten you have open at work) simply don't fall into that category.
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Somebody mod the parent up, please. AC is right to state that these could benefit from multiple cores. My point is that you're not going to see so much benefit from them as with applications that are "continuous." The thing with all these examples is that they do a task and then they reach another static point and stop. Yes, doing some calculations with a spreadsheet might cause a temporary slow-down, but it probably wont be taking long enough that you're going to go back to your Word document and do some
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I think we can all agree that spreadsheets won't be a particularly taxing task. But ya, music/encoding/compiling/SETI/virus-scanning/searching-indexing/updating/archiving are all fairly common background tasks that have at one time or another probably impacted all of us.
I'm just wondering if the fellow who did the tests in the article would have been disappointed with the system performance if he'd used it over time with heavier (application) u
Nope (Score:2)
CFOs and other executives would love to have a real time update from their books to a spreadsheet and have that data sliced a hundred plus way. With Color, graphics and an embedded video on different sheets.
They don't want there SAP, or any enterpri
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Once 64bit has been common in the business workplace for a few years, Spreadsheets will burst in size. There are large companies who are frustrated because their spreadsheet are limited by a limitation built into them bacause of the memory addressing space issue.
There's this thing called a database - anything big enough to care about the 4G limit should be in one.
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What's stopping you to buy 4 250GB drives and stripe them? Almost 150 MB/sec sustained speeds. And how much is a 250GB drive, 80 bucks? You'll get four of those for the price of a quad core.
Not like you need any RAID cards anymore, as any decent desktop motherboard has like 6 SATA ports and a onboard RAID controller.
HDDs are commodities, almost in the same way floppies was in the 80's.
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Google for some benchmarks. Here is one, appears to be in french, but luckily pictures are language independent.
http://www.matbe.com/articles/lire/357/ddr2-400-533-667-800-1067----que-choisir/page14.php [matbe.com]
Comparing DDR2-400 to DDR2-1067, gives like 20% more performance. And that's on a core 2 platform, which is supposed to be memory starved. That is 2.5 times faster memory and a 20% performance increase.
And, you have backups right? That 4*250 array is good to mirror overnight to a terabyte
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As for memory slowdowns- are you for real? Memory is *the* biggest bottleneck
Get parity (Score:1)
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If you really need that last 10% of a quad core, you need a workstation or server, and not a living room media machine
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Are you like my roommate, who likes to use firewire/800 for his external HDD instead of USB2, as "FW is so much faster"?
Yes, FW is faster than USB, but both still outperform everything but the fastest 15k rpm drives.
And internal buses? Please... Remember good old PCI, bandwidth 133 MB/sec. Beyond any single harddrive. If that's not enough, get a new-ish computer with PCI-E. Bandwid
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Are you like my roommate, who likes to use firewire/800 for his external HDD instead of USB2, as "FW is so much faster"?
He might not be talking nonsense. While USB-2 has a 480Mb/s line speed, you'll be lucky to get more than about 30MB/s through it, which is the speed of my laptop's internal drive - my external disks peak at about 40-50Mb/s and can handle sustained transfers of 30MB/s. With FireWire 800, I can chain two disks together, have one wire going in to my laptop, and not be limited by the interface speed.
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I don't buy the HD speed issue, since that can be solved with RAID and eventually RAIDed Flash solid-state.
Memory speed is a different issue - the only solution is to dramatically change how we think about memory from some chips on a bus to being intimate with and connected to in a parallel fashion to CPU cores.
The "The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley
The desktop doesn't need N CPUs (Score:2)
What I find rather humorous is that we currently try to consume any excess CPU performance by using less efficient languages... We make 100 million people spend another $1,000 each in order to save $500,000 worth of cost in programmer time... Then justify it as cost efficiency.
To really make use
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Much in the same sense that you can have 8 gigs of memory in your computer and you can't take advantage of more than about three gigs of it due, again, to obsolete softwar
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About the 3GB RAM limit, way I see it MS is on the way to fix that by making this memory hog called Vista - people are going to go 64 bit just to be able to use enough RAM to run it efficiently.
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As for the 3GB RAM limit, I'm glad MS is forcing the issue. In the short-term, more x86 applications need to be flagged as large address-aware (to take advantage of more than 2GB of virtual memory) and in the long-term more applications need to be compiled for x64 only. Migration to x64 is inevitable. Games today are already pushing those limits. As for the O
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Skulltrail is a proof of concept of course, but I think there are a lot more people that could really put those eight cores to use than most posters seem to think. Pretty much everyone involved with 3D animation for example.
And for those that get such a system for the bragging rights - well, chances are they at least run some distributed computing client, so it's not a total wa
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Or better yet, go back and clean out all the useless crap that's been gradually added to software in the past few decades.
Stop writing crap code or using java & .net (Score:1, Troll)
64 cpu quality out of c++ in 4 cores. Sure, I agree many solutions dont need it since they are crappy little tools that never use much cpu, but may use lots in doing
simple things like making thumbnails out of 24 images.
Im glad we've hit the wall on Ghz, it means these java/.net programmers cant assume in 3 years time their software will be fa
More Cores (Score:2, Interesting)
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liesdamnliesbenchmarks (Score:5, Insightful)
shocked, i tell you! shocked!
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accelerated gestation! Woohooo... OMG... hurl.
I know you're trying to be funny... (Score:3, Insightful)
My guess is that the memory controller is now becoming the bottleneck, sinc
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Page 1 of 25 (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't even get that far (Score:2)
Re:Page 1 of 25 (Score:5, Funny)
I used an 8-core CPU to read the article and was able to get through it in just a little more time than a 3-page article would take.
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http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/02/08/intel_skulltrail_part_3/print.html [tomshardware.com]
That gives you a long single page. It's not perfect but it helps.
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Tip: add print.html to the end of any THG URL, and you can read the entire thing on one page. THG would be completely and utterly useless otherwise...
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At the bottom of the linked page I saw "Page 1 of 25" and I gave up. Bad submitter! Bad! Bad!
I know you were probably joking, but Slashdot comments have taught me the non-obvious way to get a single-page view of Tom's Hardware articles:
If clicking that link directly results in a redirect to the multi-page version (for some reason Opera is doing this for me), then copy-and-paste that address directly into the address bar.
3D Rendering... (Score:3, Informative)
Why it works for video compression (Score:5, Informative)
So video compression isn't one of the areas where it isn't an advantage to have multi-cores.
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created. You normally do this by computing frames from the last key frame (and
then sequentially from each subsequent computed frame) until you reach the
point at which the error in the calculated frame is too large. At this point
you add a new key frame. This is a serial process (in terms of frames) so does
not parallelise well.
There are some approaches to parallelise this but they do not scale well to
large numbers of processes/threads/
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The question is how much can you cache - you can throw a GOP at a core, you can cache the I-frame on chip and predict from that.
Or you could do the annoying solution and break up the frame spatially and work each "quadrant" or "region" on a separate core (though motion prediction between cores becomes troublesome).
There are fol
FB-DIMMS + a high number of chips on the MB = high (Score:2)
The mac pro may end up costing less then this and it will likely use less power and give off less heat and it has pci-e 2.0.
If amd can just make some good quad cores then a amd based system with a AMD / ATI chip set or a nvidia one with PCI-E 2.0 in all slots with DESKTOP ram will blow this away.
Someone at intel likes DETHKLOK (Score:5, Funny)
I for one (Score:2, Interesting)
People still read Tom's? (Score:1)
And guess what? My psychiatrist said my misanthropic tendencies were counter-productive to my welfare. So I'm even giving you the single page version!
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3216 [anandtech.com]
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Where this processor excels... (Score:3, Funny)
XP performance? (Score:2)
switching until at least Windows 7...
I think you have a typo (Score:1)
But... (Score:2)
I think it may be worth asking the people at Bestofmedia if it runs Linux and what the compile, I/O, etc benchmarks are like with 8 cores.
An alternative to the Mac Pro. (Score:1)