Intel Announced 8-Core CPUs And Iris Pro Graphics for Desktop Chips 173
MojoKid (1002251) writes "Intel used the backdrop of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to make a handful of interesting announcements that run the gamut from low-power technologies to ultra-high-end desktop chips. In addition to outing a number of upcoming processors—from an Anniversary Edition Pentium to a monster 8-core Haswell-E — Intel also announced a new technology dubbed Ready Mode. Intel's Ready Mode essentially allows a 4th Gen Core processor to enter a low C7 power state, while the OS and other system components remain connected and ready for action. Intel demoed the technology, and along with compatible third party applications and utilities, showed how Ready Mode can allow a mobile device to automatically sync to a PC to download and store photos. The PC could also remain in a low power state and stream media, server up files remotely, or receive VOIP calls. Also, in a move that's sure to get enthusiasts excited, Intel revealed details regarding Haswell-E. Similar to Ivy Bridge-E and Sandy Bridge-E, Haswell-E is the 'extreme' variant of the company's Haswell microarchitecture. Haswell-E Core i7-based processors will be outfitted with up to eight processor cores, which will remain largely unchanged from current Haswell-based chips. However, the new CPU will connect to high-speed DDR4 memory and will be paired to the upcoming Intel X99 chipset. Other details were scarce, but you can bet that Haswell-E will be Intel's fastest desktop processor to date when it arrives sometime in the second half of 2014. Intel also gave a quick nod to their upcoming 14nm Broadwell CPU architecture, a follow-on to Haswell. Broadwell will be the first Intel desktop processor to feature integrated Iris Pro Graphics and will also be compatible with Intel Series 9 chipsets."
Re:8 cores? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Pointless (Score:2, Informative)
There's no reason for most programs to be 64bits. Most programs don't need to address that much RAM nor do they need the additional registers that you get with 64bit processors.
Now for programs that use massive amounts of RAM or need the additional registers, going 64bit makes sense, but it's silly to suggest that there's something wrong with 32bit programs in general that would be fixed by moving to 64bit.
Re:8 cores? (Score:4, Informative)
I believe cache is shared, and is believed to be one of the bottlenecks of the current AMD CPUs.
Re:8 cores? (Score:5, Informative)
They share everything except for the ALU, which is duplicated out.
Actually, in addition to integer execution units, they also don't share instruction decoders, L1 data caches, and integer op schedulers. ;-) They do share L1 instruction cache, L2 cache and the FPU pipeline (which is supplemented by the GPU units in ALUs anyway for FP-heavy applications, though).