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Dual Core Intel Processors Sooner Than Expected
Hack Jandy writes "AnandTech reports that Intel's Smithfield processors are going to get here sooner than they originally predicted; most likely within the next few months. Apparently, the Intel roadmaps reveal that the launch dates for next generation desktop chipsets, 2MB L2 Prescotts and Dual Core Smithfield processors (operating at 3.2GHz per core) are almost upon us - way ahead of the original Q4'05 roadmap estimates. Hopefully, that means Intel will actually start shipping the new technology instead of waiting four months after the announcement for retail products."
I ran dual P3s for a while last year. While I loved the responsiveness of the system, I hated the lack of programs avalible to take advantage of SMP.
How is this year going to be different?
Even if you *could* get SMP aware versions of your software, would it be worth it? Lots of problems are harder to solve when you add SMP to the mix.
Gamers will be put off by the fact that games can't take advantage of SMP.
Home users will be put off by the fact that their $500 Dell surfs the world-wide e-mail just fine.
Buisness user may take advantage of this in servers, but there's only so much cooling and power you can provide to a 1-U server.
So, how is dual core going to ever be anything bigger than Itanium, Xeon, or any of the other technologies that fail to meet customer expectations?
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
You don't generally run one application at a time, right? So I don't see the problem.
Want to change Intel's behaviour? Don't give them any press when they announce "real soon now" stuff, only when they actually ship. But if /. (and other media) print every press release, the press releases will keep coming.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
Has anyone stopped to look at modern software while thinking about Dual-Core?
Both Intel and AMD have decided upon dual-core as the future of desktop computing. There will be no more massive Mhz increases... instead the focus is now on parallel computing.... But, seriously, how many CPU intensive applications outside of the server arena take advantage of SMP?
As someone who has ran dual-cpu workstations for years, I can personally attest to the fact that 99% of CPU heavy tasks do not make use of SMP.
Think about it... That copy of Doom3 or Half-Life 2 that you just bought, that runs like shit on even top-of-the-line hardware, isn't going to run any better on Dual-Core, because these games are not designed to run multiple threads simultaneously. Neither do most archival programs (WinAce, WinRar, WinZip, SevenZip, etc etc). Nor do many of your encoding tools (though FlaskMPEG and GoGo-No-Coda are noteworthy exceptions).
As a geek, I can attest that the *nix arena isn't much better. Just because the source is open and available does NOT mean that the author(s) ever considered coding CPU intensive tasks for multiple processors. And "porting" tasks from single threaded to multiple threads is NOT a simple task. This is one of the reasons that there are Computer Science degrees -- writing good SMP code isn't something you learn at technical schools (or even half the full Universities out there).
Don't get me wrong... as someone who has ran SMP boxes for the past 10 years, I'm really excited about Dual-Core. But don't expect it to be worth a whole lot for the immediate future... as no one outside the server arena really codes for SMP.
/dev/random
You do know that when playing a game, it is not the only executing process on the system. The graphics and sound subsystems are all heavily used and take cycles away from the game.
Sure, the speed-up isn't nearly as large, but having a spare core sure would prevent many slowdowns.
Im a software developer and REALLY hate the movement towards dual-cores. While dual-cores will be great for some things (I tend to write everything using threads where its easy to leverage performance) there are many apps (many of which I have no control over, no source access or the cost of re-writing (legacy apps) to be multi-threaded is too high) which need pure-raw processing power and this means its going to take far longer for that power to be available.
Its a bad move IMO on AMDs and Intels part - personally rather than head to dual cores I'll be looking more and more towards how to get the maximum (i.e. overclock) out of the higher rated single core processors - and this is from someone who normally upgrades every 12-18 months.
That said if the dual-cores overclock well my stance may change....
I wouldn't write Intel off that quickly, but yes, AMD offerings are much interesting from every conceviable point of view: performance, price and power consumption. You can get yourself a dual AMD Athlon64 system for the price of a single DC Intel Smithfield. It will run cooler aswell and most likely perform better.
I don't know what's up with Intel lately. They're giving too much away in the x86 market to AMD, and they can make good processors (P-M, for example).
Remember: Heat dissipation (aka. Power Consumption) is directly relevent to building a system. I don't know how you'd cool an 8-core Pentium IV (What, 600 Watts or something?), on the other hand - an 8-core Pentium M might only take 200 Watts - similar to a high-end graphics card. And if you could get 600 Watts, why would the Pentium IV * 8 be better than the Pentium M * 24 (or the Pentium M LV * 60). ... This is all assuming your application is parallelizable, but most of the raw number crunching that a Pentium IV is good at is pretty easily paralleized.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Your right that GPU's are ahead of CPU's but games need to be written to take full advantage of dual cores/cpus. At the moment they are not.
-1 wrong. Microsoft has cut support for itanium.
Nice bit of patronising that.
On of the main reasons that P4s have deep pipelines is to compensate for the fact that memory speeds have not generally risen anywhere near as much as the chips ability to consume the memory bandwidth. This problem doesn't go away with your multiple 3.8Ghz 386's - if anything the problem is compounded (much as it will be when there are two P4 cores sharing the same memory bandwidth as a single P4) so your 386 will sit there spinning it's little 386 wheels everytime it needs some data or cocks up a branch prediction.
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF