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Intel and AMD's 2005 Plans Revealed
Takemedown writes "There's a good article on CTZ that talks about Intel and AMD's plans. Intel, continuing on their 18-month chipset refresh rate, will introduce their Glenwood and Lakeport chipsets for the Smithfield dual core desktop microprocessor in 2005. The chipsets will support SATA II, Matrix RAID and a higher system bus speed for the new Pentium 4 name holder.
As far as Intel's dual core strategies are concerned, they will most likely bring their dual core additions by the very end of Q2 or Q3 this year, so for those waiting for these next generation chips are better off with a due upgrade. Secondly, if you are hoping for a noticeable performance gain in regular computing tasks are in for a disappointment. Dual core microprocessors are for those who like to do multitasking or work on multithreaded applications. For example, if you are gaming and burning a DVD at the same time, dual core chips will come in handy and will definitely give a smooth computing experience."
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Is it more efficient memory sharing amongst the different cores?
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Only thieves burn dvds, so I see the MPAA stepping top stop this.
A plea to both Intel and AMD. Please make a nonexpensive SILENT cooling system.
Yeah fans are pretty good but let's be honest, they wear down and become noisy.
Water cooling is great but I've already got one aquarium in my room.
One core was bad. Two? Three? Twenty! Passive heat sinks, huge slabs of copper, whatever, just please, I can't hear myself think.
-Teiresias
I liked the photo of the Intel booth, which had the tagline "Upgrade your senses". For the life of me I can't figure out what that means. Are they planning on offering upgrades to give me better vision and sight? Perhaps a socket for the back of my head too? Or maybe their new cpu can now smell me and indicate when I need to shower?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Processor power has been overrated for quite some time. A lot of people don't realize that other components, especially RAM matter just as much, if not more in most every day tasks than pure CPU power. If I had a choice between 2GHZ and 1GB ram, vs. a 4GHZ and 512mb ram, I would definatly recommend the former. So although this technology will help some people, most people should stay away from it if you are just doing day to day. Does grandma really need dual core processors for sending email and browsing the web anytime soon? Hell, a 500mhz and 256mb is more than enough for a lot of people to write documents and browse the web, but you will never see such a system on Dell website for $120 :).
When did using computers or the internet become an "experience"? They're tools, nothing more.
Trolling is a art,
The real bottleneck for gaming these days is hard drive access. If you are burning a CD while you are playing a game, there is a good chance that the game will need to load something like textures while you are burning the CD (presumably from an ISO on your hard drive). On the other hand, with a 52X CD-R burning a full CD takes less than 3 minutes, so it won't kill your game. Unless you have two hard drives, in which case the above is irrelevant.
Burning a DVD is IO-bound given all the traffic on the PCI bus from the harddrive and to the DVD. Burning a DVD is not CPU-bound, so it doesn't seem like a dual core CPU would actually help that situation.
The reality is most of the server market is their Xeon line and the dual-core Xeons are currently planned for 2006 and maybe even later.
For example, if you are gaming and burning a DVD at the same time, dual core chips will come in handy and will definitely give a smooth computing experience.
Why, of course, doesn't everyone burn DVDs and play games at the same time? I usually burn DVDs when I'm playing GTA: San Andreas, so by the time the DVD is done I've forgotten all about it and the tray opening scares the living shit out of me, so I pull out my penknife and stab the DVD to its rightful death! So with this new dual system you're telling me the DVD will be done so quickly that I won't forget about it? Or will the tray slide out more slowly in a smooth and controlled manner as not to provoke me?
Dual core shares a memory controller, whereas dual processors have seperate memory controllers. AMD's Athlon 64 and Opterons have memory controllers on die, and were originally designed to be dual core. What this means is now two cores on die with one memory controller, communicating through a crossbar (think SGI) architechture. On a side not, imagine where AMD would be if they scrapped 64-bit from the start and released the Athlon 64/Opteron as a dual core from the get go.
I can already game and burn a dvd on a single core system. I'm using an Athlon XP 2500+ with a Plextor 8x DVD-RW drive and I've never seen a drop in FPS while playing SOL.EXE, Ever
On a more serious note my old roommate, the SCSI lover, could play Quake 3 while burning a CD because he was burning from SCSI HDD to SCSI CDR while playing the game off a seperate SCSI HDD. He claimed that the only thing making my machine slow while burning a CD was the CPU overhead involved in IDE.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Oh will they? Consider what frequency these chips will be running at... You won't be getting dual cores featuring core frequencies along the lines of current top end CPU's anytime too soon. This should tell people that gamers would be much better off sticking to their single core guns... If they want to encode and game at the same time, there computing experience is most definetly going to have to be compromised.
There is no other way about this considering current limitations... As the fab processes are refined and application of technology is perfected, we will see dual cores running at higher frequencies, but there are considerable improvements which will need to be made before dual core can be referred to as a formiddable gaming option for new releases at the top end of the system spectrum. (they might not even be formidable until the unlikely circumstance when gaming authors start coding for multicore platforms on a large scale)
For MANY people with top end single core systems currently, the move to dual cores will not immediately present what would be considered a smooth computing experience - there will be noticeable deficincies in various areas, the severity of which will be determined by the specific way their system is utilized.
Overclockers
Via has been offering very - if not the most - stable chipset drivers for Linux for ages. There were many occasions in the past when I specifically chose via chipset brand boards with amd cpus because good experience in the past with Linux. And I never had any bad experience. That doesn't mean I don't have and/or use other chipsets/boards/cpus with Linux on them, I do - but mostly @ work. It's just I never see much sane reason in arguing like I-went-intel-because-of-better-linux-drivers.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I doubt it. Today's personal computers are already like those 60s muscle cars from Detroit (a 400 horsepower engine bolted into a car with narrow bias-ply tires, drum brakes and a solid axle).
I was burning DVDs a couple of days ago. The system was mildly sluggish. The CPU meter was pegged at about 2% usage. Then I ran an md5sum to verify the whole disk, and the system ground to a crawl. The CPU meter indicated about 10% load. In both cases the sluggishness was caused entirely by I/O latency and/or all of the working set being flushed out of memory to make room for disk buffering. Dual-cores aren't going to do anything for that.