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Preview of Intel's Dual-Core Extreme Edition
ThinSkin writes "Intel let ExtremeTech.com sneak behind the curtain of its anticipated Dual-Core Pentium Extreme Edition processor for a full performance preview with benchmarks. Bundled with essentially two Prescott cores on one die, the Extreme Edition 840 processor clocks at 3.2GHz and contains a beefed-up power management system to keep the CPUs running cool during use. Expect Intel's dual-core line to hit the streets sometime this quarter. No word on pricing yet." Update: 04/04 17:26 GMT by T : Timmus points out FiringSquad's preview, too, writing "The benchmark results are mixed, with a few applications taking advantage of the new CPU, and some that don't." And Kez writes in reference to this article to say: "Our article on HEXUS.net, covering the P4 EE in detail, states the price as £650 (that's what we're looking at in the UK anyway, not sure about the U.S.)."
On SlashMark? Namely, how many seconds does it take to compile the Linux kernel? :P
unixkb.com -- articles on practical Unix issues.
Nice, beucase I didn't think thier current Extreme Edition was expensive enough. What gamer has the budget for these chips?
"Yeah, by today's standards it's EXTREMELY slow!"
"Only dual core, ha ha ha ha hah!"
I guess they can't very well call it 840i, as they've already used that for a chipset, but maybe Intel should stick to names ending with -ium and -on instead of something which timelessly proclaims some chunk of doped silicon as superior.
Next up from Intel, the Ultra-Spifftronic-Wowee-Zappo Triple Core, with extra schmaltz!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
... something else we can use to make breakfast with!
We recently returned from a road trip to discover a very large box waiting for us.
If the processors that big how the heck will I fit it on my motherboard?!
Running cool during use? It seems to me they'll need the power management to keep it from melting itself, judging from the heat output of just one of those beasts...
we just call it what it is, a two-die module. This is not true dual core but two cores slapped into one chip package... Sure you'll only be using one socket but thats about the only different. Architectually, you will need to look at AMD's offerings for true dual-core.
If one of the cores generates a floating-point error, the other core can be used to correct the problem by adding both errors together to derive a slightly larger error.
Intel is just playing catch-up now to AMD. With AMD's 64-bit architecture being chosen by the market over Intel's shoddy architecture, Intel is ahead only in name-recognition. As the article says, AMD has been working on their dual-core offering for a year longer than Intel. AMD is a year ahead in development. Their offering is likely to be much more robust than Intel's with that extra year.
But, who knows? Intel seems to be shipping first. And we all know, Real Artists Ship.
I think it's great that you are developing new products.
However, because of your poor form of not making documentation or firmware freely available, I will instead be sending my personal dollars, and (significantly larger) work budget, to AMD.
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Why do intel marketers think that if they name it "extreme edition" it will sell more?
If I wanted to build a Windows system for gaming, would I have to buy Windows XP Pro for multiprocessor support...or is this dual core configuration invisible to the OS, meaning I could get away with XP Home for $100 less.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I think the value of a dual processor is not shown well in these benchmarks since the dual cores are each at 1.6ghz. Since P4 is reknowned to be a bad performer at lower ghz, I think it's best we wait for AMD's solution to dual core to get a better idea of dual core performance.
I think Intel's decision to leave out extensions developed by AMD are going to kill to processor fairly quickly. Granted they bought the rights to them from AMD, but their must be some royalty type deal here, because Intel is only including a handful of them. That will make their processor increasingly incompatable with the already accepted AMD architecture. Why is Intel so grudging to admit they are behind? They are going to kill themselves with that attitude. A couple more processor iterations and failures like this, and I expect Intel to make moves to get out of the desktop processor market altogether.
People are actually asking how much it's going to cost?
The Answer is simple
An arm, a leg and your left testicle* - it's Intel afterall
--------
*or ovary if you're a woman
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
It looks like gamers won't be all that interested in this offering. Even once games support mutli-threading, this wont end up boosting their framerate much. Instead this will raise the lower framerate and give them smoother gameplay. While this is a great improvement unfortunately most gamers seem only interested in their max fps and not the minimum. However for workstations this will be great, lower cost than dual procescors means graphics design companies and advertising agencies can get their job done quicker and more efficiently.
So in other words... unless you have extreme cooling this thing will never run at full speed for long. Because when it does, it will quickly heat up and this power management will throttle the clock speed and core voltage. Apps may start up a little faster, but long-term consumers of CPU cycles (e.g media encoding, some games, etc) won't see much improvement. But I'm sure lots of clueless consumers will go for this new eXtreme CPU. Can't wait to see what bullshit analogy Intel will come up with for the TV ads...
However, because of your poor form of not making documentation or firmware freely available, I will instead be sending my personal dollars, and (significantly larger) work budget, to AMD.
Dear Intel,
I think it's great that you are developing new products.
However, because you are lagging behind we are forced to wait for your next iteration of affordable business machine processors. Please alert us when they become available as we refuse to spend any funds on AMD processors as they do not have the name recognition you possess.
We are patiently waiting to replace of 5000 + machines on a 3 year time scale.
Sincerely,
IT purchasing for State of XX Dept of Labor
Why do we have dual cores? Everybody's admitted they are going to be prohibitively expensive, so is it just for show? Let's see some AFFORDABLE dual cores before we start heralding them as the future of processors.
Does that mean I'll be able to fry two eggs at once ?
Does it have a hemi?
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
Some people might see Intel leaving the processor market as a huge jump in conclusions. It's not really. The desktop processor market has not been among Intel's more profitable centers as of late. Even with their still huge marketshare numbers, they aren't making much money for their efforts in that arena. The Itantium represented a huge loss to them in terms of the amount of R&D, marketing and manufacturing that went into the product. Don't get me wrong, the Itanium is a fabulous processor, it's just that nobody wants it. It actually leaps a generation of processors and people are not willing to throw out their proven strategies, software and hardware to go in that direction. It's not that they lost their touch in making a great processor, it's that they lost touch with what the market is demanding. It's terribly hard to sell a product no one wants. That's where they really are.
As far as dell goes, I think they are great for their niche. I would never own one, but I would recommend them to my family members who need the great dell support when they do stupid things and bust the machine. That's Dell's only strength in my eyes. I much prefer the AMD chips, simply for their price points, if nothing else. That's going to be the new problem for Intel if they don't wake up soon. They could always get away with charging more for their processors than and equivalent AMD because people percieved that they were simply better. With that perception failing that pricing structure will either have to descend to or below AMD's, or they will see gtreatly decreased market share over then next 12 to 24 months.
Now the spyware on all my users's machines will have a processor all to themselves. That means the users will have the second processor to run Word, excel, et al...
That means they'll leave me alone and quit bitching about slow machines for a while! Woohoo! Oh, and will help that winword.exe that keeps crashing and staying backgrounded. Woot!
(Yes, I know the spyware will take over both proc's. Let me dream)
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
I feel bad for the engineers who come up with these designs which are then crapped on by their marketting department.
You do realize that starting pay for expereinced R&D designers is about $120,000 a year. I don't feel bad at all. They could call them "ILoveGayCocK" chips and I still woudln't feel bad for the guys who get to make huge amounts of money doign what they love.
Reminds me of the turbo button on 386 machines. It was sort of like a "don't suck" option you could turn on.
Deluxe is probably my favorite word for greatness that invariably means crappiness. Extreme is so late 1990s.
two of these (4 CPU's)
compared to two AMD (4 CPU's)
and then 8
one's gonna scale MUCH better than the other.
but who cares for desktop.
Intel is playing the VHS side of the VHS-Beta game
and I fear ubiquity and hype will win out over the better product.
1)Intel EMT-64T vs Athlon 64
2)Intel DC (which BTW is not 2 x EMT-64) vs Opteron DC which is 2 x 64bit!
But the bulk of the market doesn't give a shit as long as it shines, uncompresses porn, plays video games, and runs a web browser
Insightful?
/. could a post like this be "insightful".
How?
This same lame argument was made before with single core speed-step processors and was proven to be completely wrong!
This is just more baseless, idiodic bashing of a product that the poster has zero experience or knowledge about.
Only on
Excuse me if this sounds unusually stupid at Slashdot, but they will in other words release 3.2 GHz dual core models initially? Won't they then have developed a new technology just to hit problematic clock frequency spoken of at ~4 GHz almost immediately? I was always thinking of something like two 1.6 GHz cores possibly with some tricks to achieve similar speeds as a current 3.2 GHz P4... Am I missing something here or is this just an unusually short term solution?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I wonder how it will compare to a dual core G5 chip from Apple.... whenever they get it out, which with all this dual core news from Intel, I would think it would be soon.
WWDC perhaps?
It's more like a short term flop in my eyes. With this Dual core bearly beating a slightly fast clocked single core procesor in only a small handful of tests coupled with it's extremely high cost, it's dead before it even hits the streets. People are not going to spend 2 or 3 times the amount of cash for that kind of performance. It's just not going to happen.
I agree that the expectation is double the core, double the power. This test processor is dismal in that regard. I guess we will all have to wait until AMD releases their product results, so that Intel can see how it's supposed to be done.
When it comes down to actually purchasing anything "dual", the price always leads me to buy two seperate systems with money left over to bank.
In the future no doubt more applications will include multi-threading, but I'm not holding my breath.
What do you think the stability will be like with yet more bloated code?
When setting up servers, you will most certainly find that "dual" is something to stay away from. Running multiple machines is far more economical, easier to replace components, and moving your eggs out of one basket in a client/server environment is really a good idea unless you enjoy the pressure of having a company go completely offline in one shot. Anyone have instances where this is contrary?
At least it's not XTREME!...
So does anybody think it would be worthwhile to put a GPU and CPU on the same die instead of two CPUs. Or even a GPU/CPU/and PPU (Physics Processing Unit previously discussed on slashdot). Maybe this would do more for the average user or gamer than two CPUs.
...I wonder if they'll be able to properly filter out all of the bad April Fool's jokes posted on /. last Friday.
The review is useless without comparing their test box to an Opteron dually. Since the details regarding how AMD is going to implement dual core is well known, they could take an existing AMD dually, and hobble it with a slower hypertransport setting which would give a pretty accurate simulation.
This lack of comparison indirectly tells me that AMD's dual core solution is going to wipe the floor with Intel's, even more so than the current AMD performance advantage over Intel on single core procs.
I wonder how big a gun Intel put to their head. I also wonder how much AMD is pissed off at being "scooped", when they've been working at this for a much longer time.
jh
Is the way they benchmark it.
Listen, for office productivity and "how fast can I open spreadsheets", nobody SHOULD need more than one CPU.
The rendering tests were a little disappointing (I seem to recall a bigger gap in the AMD benchmarks), but really the point of dual CPU's is, as anyone who has used one knows, responsiveness.
Yeah rendering times dropping to 60% of normal is nice, but let me tell you, where a normal single CPU system would sit there gurgling and choking on its own vomit because some dirty little application decides it MUST use up all the CPU time, dual CPU systems just go "eh, whatever, hes being a jerk, I can help you over here."
It is SO nice to use a dual CPU system in daily routine useage (which for me is QUITE varied) just for the increase in responsiveness alone.
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
Multi-processor systems, which includes multi-core, and AFAIK, hyper-threading, need an OS which will reasonably distribute tasks across computing resources. Under DOS...er, Windows, this seems to be the app's responsibilty, since the article refered to "threaded applications, such as 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, and Premiere.". I know that Perl (ActiveState) doesn't have thread support under Windows. I haven't tried it under Linux.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
You are correct. A "two die module" would have two separate pieces of silicon, interconnected through one of several techniques.
But this is /., where you're supposed to cheer for
AMD and mock everything Intel ever does.
Just remember this, and you can get lots of 'Informative'
mod points, even if you don't understand even the
most basic terms of chip manufacturing. At
least that's what I can figure by looking at what
gets modded up around here.
IBM had dual cores years ago.. about time..
I hate to be anal, but Apple doesn't make G5s, or any processor for that matter. IBM does. Apple just puts them into systems and sells them.
even the Extreme Edition dual core CPU only has an 800MHz effective FSB, not 1066MHz
It doesn't make much sense to put two processors on the same bus, and then lower the bus speed. And, as the benchmarks showed, single-threaded applications ran slower on the dual-core processor than on the regular P4
I understand "dual core" has a certain market appeal - much like faster clock speeds. Never mind the fact that bus bandwidth and hard drive speed have a greater overall effect on system performance.
Those who want dual cores would be better off buying a computer that was designed to support multiple cpu's - for example, a UNIX workstation. It doesn't matter how many cores you put on a chip if your memory bus can't feed them:
- An P4 can theoretically execute 2 instructions every clock cycle.
- Make that 4 instructions/clock for a dual core.
- Each instruction averages 4 bytes of data access. Since we'll consider the instructions to be cached, we'll ignore the memory access for them, for now. So we're up to 16 bytes of throughput per clock cycle.
- At 3200 MHz, times 16 bytes/clock, we're up to 51,200 MB/s theoretical throughput.
- Yet, the 800 MHz FSB (which transfers 8 bytes/cycle) can only do 6400 MB/s throughput.
Granted, 6.4 GB/s is very fast - But even a single core P4 can saturate the memory bus. What point is there in adding another core (aside from marketing hoopla), when the bus can't run fast enough to support it!It seems to me that Intel added the power management features to the chip because they knew that the second core was going to be idle most of the time.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
130W design power consumption, impressive number, right?
On the other hand, Free scale e600 dual core has a power budget of 15W.
If I am the designer of next hybrid car, I go after the second one.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Are still wating for the 12 sided die...Oh, wait...
more sense?
Seriously, what's the point?
Nothing wrong with dual CPU servers, heck, I've got two Linux dual-CPU boxen sitting at home, but in terms of ROI, it would make far more sense getting better bandwidth or just giving the machine more RAM or better disk access, than it would wasting all that money on the CPUs.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
When dual core prices start coinciding with reality, there might be a point to buy one, but not at the moment.
I had a dual CPU pentium pro many years ago. For the scientific application I was using it for it was an absolute steal. I think the thing is to differentiate between whats for the consumer and whats for the specialist application. Unfortunately marketers are always keen to initially pretend they are marketing the solution to life the universe and everything when in fact its for a niche audience (or at least early adoption is).
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
You'll need to double that up for the dual-cores.
ON a quantum compiler, it's both compiled (with avery combination of options) and not compiled already :)
hawk
What is it with all these enthusiast sites that run huge suites of 'benchmarks' on CPU's that measure just about everything except actual CPU performance? Are they unable to come up with the scratch to buy a copy of the SPEC benchmark suite? Is it really a surprise that Dual Core CPU's don't help much for running games or MS Office? Did anybody really need to test this? By contrast, it would be nice to know what the SPECRate FP and SPECRate Int is for these chips. For thwt matter, does anybody really care about the performance of a chip that you can't buy? For future reference, if you want to have a pretty good idea of the 'guaranteed not to exceed' performance for a CPU that you can actually purchase, go to http://www.spec.org/ and get the numbers without the ads.
Seems that the Front Side Bus (FSB) speed is still the most important factor in a desktop system. I've experimented with several processors, motherboards and cooling systems and have learned this is the greatest advantage, despite cpu clockspeed or memory latencies. Personally I'd still rather have a 3.43 or 3.73 GHz P4 Extreme Edition with 1066 FSB than any other intel processor available including the dual core setup.
Don't forget that intel 130W is in "normal usage", which is not 100% CPU load ...
So you'll probably reach easily >150W.
#include "coucou.h"
...leave your drier on for hours straight, do you?
The filesystem is the package manager
One of the goals with a dual core CPU chip is to lower the cost for SMP computing. In theory, as long as the CPU manufacturer doesn't price gouge, a single CPU motherboard with a dual core chip is supposed to cost less then a dual CPU motherboard.
AMD has this planned out nicely. Now we'll have to see what the special MB's for Intel's solution are going to cost.
I'm a gaming nut and have traditionally spent lots of money on having a monster system, however getting married and a brand new baby have meant I haven't upgraded my rig (except for my monitor) for 2 or 3 years now.
My machine has an old 2.53 (non-hyperthreaded) pentium 4 and a geforce3 card. In hardcore gaming circles, my current system is laughable but I managed to get to the end of Doom3 with it fairly comfortably. It did crawl at times though, and it just can't deal with halflife2 so I decided to upgrade.
I suspected my system's worst bottle neck was the graphics card, so I decided to buy a geforce 6800 ultra. But I faced the dilemma of either buying a dead-end-technology AGP slot version or ugrade my whole PC to PCIe, socket 775 etc. to future-proof my GPU investment.
Anyway I ended up taking a chance on being a cheapskate and bought the AGP version. I was very surprised to find that my PC now benchmarks up there with most of the latest p4 systems running the same GPU. even at my monitor's native 1920x1200 resoulution. I'm totally glad I didn't waste all that money on building a whole new PC as my old system will probably last for another 2 or 3 years effortlessly now.
It really made me realise that Intel processors probably haven't significantly improved noticeable performance for at least 3 years. Also, all the hype that most gaming websites put out about needing the latest CPU for the latest games is largely bullcrap.
OK, so if even gaming doesn't need the latest CPU's, then who really does? Most people are just opening word documents or websurfing. Maybe there are a few people that regularly do bulk processing, but I bet there's not really that many users that would notice upgrading to these CPU's.
Sure, everyone is impressed by a huge penis, but who the hell is impressed by someone with two penises? That attach to the same base in a scissor-like configuration? People might be impressed in a "whoah that's really fucked up" kind of way, but certainly not in a "wow, that's awesome" kind of way. Ewww.
Eventually, that won't be an issue. Procs will run so fast and have such good power management that the only time you'll worry about cooling is the very second you tell the computer to do something. Then, in a huge explosion of activity that lasts a few microseconds, your computer will do everything you wanted it to and silmulaniously eject a molten wad of copper that used to be your heatsink. If you have liquid cooling, your head will explode.
Yes, the Price/Performance ratio sucks, but with the slowdown in the speedup of clock rates multiple CPU's are going to get more and more common, and as the problems are worked out, cheaper and better.
Meanwhile; operating systems, device drivers, devices, cooling systems, cases, services, applications, and etc. are going to have to be adapted, and bugfixed for the forthcoming environment.
You may not be able to justify the expense, but I bet Microsoft, Intuit, and Oracle can, and I bet Linus wouldn't mind a couple.
After they've had them for a while, then the market can explode.
you obviously didn't see the anandtech review
3 88&p=15
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2
single-core totally nonresponsive, dual-core smooth as silk
A dual core CPU in a single socket MB will be less expensive than two CPU in a SP motherboard. The dual core solution may perform worse but will represent a good value potentially. What a person would be better off buying depends on what he wants/needs.
Performance is a far more complicated subject than you suggest as well. Not all operations are memory limited as the article's benchmarks clearly prove and a single P4 can saturate memory only under some conditions. If one core was always starved for memory bandwidth then the second core would never help, now would it? How do explain that it clearly does?
i guess intel wants to plunge us down the 32 bit dual core path. on the other hand AMD has a mature 64 bit solution and is therefore more comfortable head us down the 64 bit dual core path. we are currently (slowly) transitioning to 64 bit (single core), and are about to transition to dual-core, so why cant the market behemoth make the mental leap of skipping 32 bit dual-core all together?...Me thinks its cos intel wants to slug us all with a second round of upgrades in 3 years time when they hail 64 bit dual-core as the...second coming...
Not to mention all that software that will have to be rewritten and, rebrought...boycott Intel 32 bit dual-core. Feel the lovin' that is AMD 64 bit dual-core!
Real world AMD is getting respect in servers. Sun has shown exactly how much better the memory performance is and it shows in many applications. Not to put down intel who's nocoona Xeon chips are pretty nice, but right now opteron has a decisive memory performance lead important in many applications.
I've witnessed plenty of people buy new computers when they don't need to. Very, very few people actually benefit from having a computer that's less than 5 years old. We had 1GHz machines by 2000. SO MANY fools want to spend money upgrading their computers, when they could instead spend the money on a better monitor or chair--something they'd actually notice.
Almost everyone doesn't optimize their OS. That's what changes performance from users' perspectives, and yet that is still largly unoptimized. I find it absolutely ridiculous.
All options except syntax checking, I guess.
Spoken like a Windows, or a Linux desktop user. This is not what computers were originally designed for! I'm thinking batch processing! Keep modding me down you fools!
Ok I'm done now.