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Intel Ships Dual-Core Chips
Torrey Clark writes "Intel seems to be the first to ship a batch of dual core x86 64-bit processors to OEMs.
Intel's first dual-core chip is the Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 840. The new processor runs at 3.2 GHz, backs Intel's Hyper-Threading and is supported by the company's 955X Express chipsets, formerly code-named Glenwood.
Dell also announced that it would be one of the first PC makers to ship Intel's new dual core Pentium Extreme." Reader wyckedone adds "AMD is set to ship their dual core Opteron processor, designed for servers, next week."
I thought that AMD is slated to ship their dual core chip first? Is this Intel rushing something to maket?
Agile Artisans
Just last week we were all ment to assume that Dell (oops, I mean Intel) wasn't ready to ship dual core until Q1 of next year...
Now all of a sudden -- out of nowhere -- they launch a surprise attack and shipped the cores early, even before AMD's announced launch date. Sounds like some VERY hefty competition for AMD. They had been claiming all along that they would be the first with dual cores an it was even used as an "excuse" for Dell to talk about starting to sell AMD chips specifically because of this feature.
AMD had better look out! Their stock price will probably take a plunge due to this surprise announcement.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
The P-PEE?
...and? don't buy a dual core chip then - or buy the software from a competitor.
dual core chips are just that - two cpu's in one packaging, if you somehow as a software manufacturer have come to the conclusion that it makes sense to sell your licenses based on number of cpu's used to run it then it makes also perfect sense that you would charge the same regardless of the cores being on different pieces of plastics or not. otherwise you could just glue the dual cpu's together with a strand of wire and call it dual core(and paint yourself yellow and run around pretending to be bananaman).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Here are the nuts and bolts of the monopoly: The actual design doesn't matter too much, it is the manufacturing capability that keeps Intel ahead If AMD came out with 64-core, 10 GHz processor that comsumed 1 watt tomorrow, and everyone decided to buy it, AMD would be able to supply more than there current market share because they only have one Fab in Germany Intel has ten fabs and ten times the capaciy. It's not about choice, it about ability to supply that keeps Intel monopoly going
I would rather have faster processors than multiple cores, as it is not enough is multi-threaded. Even the highest end 3D apps, their render engines are SMP capable, but all geometry translation/deformation is not. That would be one core right? Unless multiple cores could show up as one single core/proc in the OS..
We should be worried about manufacturers charging per-core licenses for their software.
Why? Double nothing still equals nothing.
Let Larry E and the like go ahead and try to gouge his loyal cusomers even more - All the more motivation to switch to FOSS alternatives.
From ARS Technica
From AnandTech
While I might concede that the AMD 2.2ghz would probably trounce the 2.8ghz Pentium D, the 10x price premium for the AMD by far outweighs any performance increases. But again, the dual core Opterons aren't intended for home consumers.
Frankly, I'm bewildered at the responses here resisting the change to SMP. I've never understood the focus on pure MHz as opposed to parallelism and MHz. Anyone on an SMP box that is multitasking sees the benefits of SMP immediately. You can work with a completely responsive system even when you have a compute-intensive non-SMP-aware process hogging a CPU. This is not the case with single CPU sysems.
;). I'll settle for no less than dual dual-cores, getting more accomplished in a shorter frame of time with little to no effort on my part.
What we have here is simply the fact that, as always, software is years behind the hardware it runs on. This is a classic chicken-and-the-egg situation. "There's no SMP software, so why by a dual?" vs. "Nobody has SMP hardware, so why write SMP-aware apps?".
Thankfully, there are many SMP-aware apps available, not even getting to the fact that with single-threaded apps on SMP you can for example encode video and do other CPU-intensive tasks simultaneously and at their "native" speeds.
Games are probably the worst example to use for touting SMP benefits because they are written with the single-CPU mindset. This is a software shortcoming, yet many posters see this is a flaw of SMP? Silly. If you're using games as an SMP detraction, then you're not the target for SMP until the software is written to take advantage of SMP. Again, this is a software shortcoming, not a hardware flaw.
Then we have the "well office-type users have no need for SMP". Well, that may be true, but so is the fact that office use does not require >1GHz CPU's, yet offices are filled with >1GHz machines. The nature of the "CPU business" is such that your products must constantly improve, or you will soon become irrelevant. You can only make CPU's run so fast in the physical world, so after you've wrung all the easy MHz gains out of a process, what's the next "easy" gain? Parallelism. We don't expect Intel, AMD, et al to just say "Well, that's it, we can make them no faster", do we? Heck no. Instead of more MHz, we now have more cores. The software will follow, and in the meantime the hardware is usuable now.
The fact of the matter is this: there are real, physical limitations to the manufacture of ever higher speed CPU's. We're going to hit the brick wall shortly using current processes, so the next logical step is to parallelize the CPU. If you can't make 'em faster, then you divide and conquer.
As someone who runs a few SMP systems, I, for one, welcome our dual-core overlords. So I can run dual-core? Heck no, that's for the gamers and office-workers
This will lower the barrier of entry for SMP use for the masses. After they are dragged, kicking and screaming to SMP, people will notice a smoother, more productive computing environment. Also, us dual-CPU folk can now move up to quad cores with relatively little additional expense. As SMP moves into the mainstream, the software will follow. Any programmer worth his salt knows that it is trivial to parallelize many compute intensive tasks such as media encoding/manipulation, imaging, rendering etc. Now that the hardware is (almost) here, the apps will follow.
I am sincerely interested in hearing any response to these points I've made.
No, not flamebait at all...except for the fact that it's just speculation, the article is close to a year old, and you're a troll. But hey, what do I know?
Nice attempt at a karma whore, but someone will see through it eventually. I did.
I see it as a chicken/egg problem. You bet your booty Doom3 & Half-Life 2 could perform significantly better on multiple CPU cores - if they were designed to. So why aren't they designed to? Because there was not a significant market for multiple-CPU-core games. Once Intel & AMD's dual core CPUs hit the market, that will likely change, and we will see games & other applications start taking advantage of multiple cores, even though in their current incarnations they don't.
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
What I want to see is quantities.
Is this one of those announce and only ship a teeny tiny volume to top OEMs or are these parts really going to be shipping in volume to -- for example -- New Egg.
I guess my question is: did Intel do this announcement just to trump AMD, as they so often do, and not actually have volume silicon?
My prediction is: These will be hard to get, and the AMD parts will be all over the world on the day they announce.
Raydude
It does, in a sense that the more heat you waste, the more power you're paying for which never makes its way into useful calculations, and the more expensive cooling equipment you need to get it away from the CPU.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
It's cheaper. Everything boils down to that.
That AMD 800 series chip is for 4 way and 8 way servers.
ie 4 or 8 dual core chips for 8 or 16 processors
That is not a fair comparison to a single chip dual core design. The 800 series is deigned to compete in the high end server arena, not the workstation arena.
Wait till the AMD dual cores that are designed for single processor motherboards hit then compare the prices.
intel fanboy myth 1 AMD can't pump out the volume Dell needs Bzzt incorrect, AMD won't BEND Over, Kiss dell's shiny metal ass, and ship 95% of it's early production volume to dell so dell can 'trump' competitors. Intel has an entire devision dedicated to bending over backwards and kissing ass.
;)
Intel fanboy myth 2 AMD processors are less stable Bzzt wrong again, AMD CPUs have had as clean or better a 'stability' track record as Intel. 'but my windows crashes more using amd' This isn't a CPU issue, it's a software vendor issue, usually related to 3rd party drivers for sound cards etc, although if you buy a cheap chipset, instead of a quality one, the chipset could bring stability issues into the system, but plenty of tiwanese intel chipsets can be had too, and can cause as much system instability.
Intel fanboy myth number 3 (w)Intel platform is always a safe bet, if you want to keep your job. In some companies the FUD is piled high and deep, however, 'keeping your job' in a tough economy is going to be rough if some fly by night linux guru sells the board on some cutrate GNU/AMD solution that has a TCO of roughly 5% of you (w)intel platform. Taking risks can get you fired, but staying tried and true to the 'old' way is how k-mart and sears were crushed into bankruptcy by wal-mart. What good does it do you to get laid-off because your company was crushed by an upstart company, with a better revenue model, that no longer needs anyone to fill it's job openings
I'll give you point D. as it was the only point you made that wasn't either complete BS or fanboy ravings.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
B) The chipsets supporting AMD processors are less stable and would cause higher inidicent rates which would cost Dell more in support.
Care to back that up with some data? The reason Dell has not gone with AMD is because every time they threaten to Intel drops their prices. Smart on Dell's part.
I call shenanigans. Someone should take you back to school to remind you about the original 1.13GHz P3s that intel eventually recalled. They shipped DOZENS to dell because they had issues in production. As well, how about the original Pentium Pro. Dell waited weeks to get small shipments of those too.
Agreed, the Pentium system from Dell is $3000 U.S. which is an absurd figure, like back in the old days!
Opterons have trounced Itanics and Xeons even worse than the XP's Trounced the P-4s in value.
If you need an 8 cpu system (800 series) of dual cores (minimum 10 cores max 16 cores). Then you'll pay a premium but you'll be running in house code anyway so it will be a tiny drop in the bucket.
A question does anyone know why the low clock speeds? Marketing, Stability, Price?
I'm no Intel Fanboy, but let's look at points one and two, shall we. The third point was bad originally and the response even worse.
intel fanboy myth 1 AMD can't pump out the volume Dell needs Bzzt incorrect, AMD won't BEND Over, Kiss dell's shiny metal ass, and ship 95% of it's early production volume to dell so dell can 'trump' competitors. Intel has an entire devision dedicated to bending over backwards and kissing ass.
So AMD can't ship the amounts Dell wants without hurting other places, and Intel can? Intel may have a division dedicated to "kissing ass" as you say, but that means they can supply dell the chips they need when they want them and still supply other places as well. AMD can't do this, or simply won't, which still means they can't do it, just they willfully can't do it.
Intel fanboy myth 2 AMD processors are less stable Bzzt wrong again, AMD CPUs have had as clean or better a 'stability' track record as Intel. 'but my windows crashes more using amd' This isn't a CPU issue, it's a software vendor issue, usually related to 3rd party drivers for sound cards etc, although if you buy a cheap chipset, instead of a quality one, the chipset could bring stability issues into the system, but plenty of tiwanese intel chipsets can be had too, and can cause as much system instability.
So using AMD processors can cause more crashes than using Intel processors. It may be the fault of third party drivers, but that still means systems with AMD processors are more unstable than system with Intel processors, which is a bad thing. You may be willing to blow this off but the average user isn't. Just like people blame Windows for crahses caused by programs, spyware, viruses, and third party drivers, they blame AMD when a system with their processors crashes because it has the processor in it. Sure, it's Joe Blow Companies fault for the bad drivers, but they don't crash in an Intel machine.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
So using AMD processors can cause more crashes than using Intel processors. It may be the fault of third party drivers, but that still means systems with AMD processors are more unstable than system with Intel processors, which is a bad thing. You may be willing to blow this off but the average user isn't. Just like people blame Windows for crahses caused by programs, spyware, viruses, and third party drivers, they blame AMD when a system with their processors crashes because it has the processor in it. Sure, it's Joe Blow Companies fault for the bad drivers, but they don't crash in an Intel machine.
I've been using AMD's for a few years now, and I've found them to be pretty darned stable. I haven't had any driver conflicts, or other major issues crop up. I don't overclock, but I do undervolt my fans, and the stability per volume of the AMDs are better than Intel's current crop (though the P3 line was great). I also change hardware configurations frequently, have multiple HDD's, etc.
I do have a pretty good MOBO, though. Cheap motherboards are criminally unstable, and many people who go to AMD do so to shave money off their system, leading them to buy substandard motherboards. The same is true of cheap Intel motherboards, however, with the same results. It's amazing how much better a 90 dollar motherboard is than a 50 dollar one. That's not true about many or even most things in computing, but it's very true in Motherboards.
Overall, I'd pay the same for an AMD processor as an Intel one. The AMD's are just as strong but run quieter. That they're a little cheaper is just icing on the cake.
And the best response to Myth 3: Your job is never safe. Get over it. You can do the right thing and get replaced by the Boss's nephew, or you can kiss up and get replaced by the Boss's nephew. Either way you might as well do the job as best you can so at least you can sleep with yourself at night.
The ______ Agenda
According to The Inqurier here Intel's new EE model was scheduled for next month until shortly after it was leaked AMD was releasing dual Opterons this month in NY.
The Intel chip is in my opinion a proof of concept and will have the availability of the original P4EEs. Its also a pointless model, games aren't multi-threaded. AMD however is releasing a CPU aimed at the major multi-threaded market, high-end workstations and servers.
Having worked at Dell, and running AMDZone for almost 7 years I can safely say you are misinformed. AMD has a variety of fab deals, and a new 300mm 65nm Fab 36 running test wafers right now. They have plenty of capacity to handle a few orders from Dull. After all the white box market is far larger than Dull,and they handle that fine don't they? Sure, when I saw their internal testing results in 99, the Athlon was clearly faster than the PIII, but stability was not there yet. It was a chipset issue, that has long since been resolved. If you think anything else you are misinformed. Yeah, I don't have enough fingers to count how many crashing Dulls I've worked on over the years here Austin. Think of another excuse, or wait, you work at Dell or Intel? Probably an engineer on Parmer eh?
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com