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Intel Dual-Core Systems Begin Shipping Monday
ThinSkin writes "The wait for Intel's dual-core processor is over, that is if you're willing to fork over some dough for a Dell or Alienware system bundled with the chip. Intel just announced that Monday marks the first day dual-core systems hit the market with Dell's Precision 380 workstation and its next generation Dimension XPS desktop, which start at $2,999. PC Magazine got a chance to play with the XPS system and came away quite impressed."
At least cooling won't be a problem.
Is just that -- a review of Dell's XPS Gen 5, rather than a review of Intel's dual core, actually. Still,I guess there's a bit about dualcore.
HP was, and still is taking orders for Dualcore Opterons systems:
http://theinquirer.net/?article=22553
This is my sig. The post is over.
I still haven't found anything that truely taxes my existing 3.2ghz P4. Games push the video card, not the CPU... I'm sure servers could benefit, but I don't see a major improvement in end user experience for these gaming systems.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
What a massive co-incidence that Dell threatened (again) to look at supplying AMD chips just days ago. Not.
I wonder if the threats did them any good, or if Intel have now got so used to the cries of wolf that they called Dell's bluff? Intel probably told Dell to shut the hell up or miss out on the launch.
pic.
but 4000 bucks.. well, it SHOULD be impressing.
but seriously though.. it seems like a "thank you mates! were so happy we actually GOT this thing and not having to just do a paper review on your paper launch".
just check these:
"
Subratings (out of 100):
Video: 100
Gaming: 100
Music: 100
Photo: 100
"
ok.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The system doesn't quite hit the perfect 60+ frames per second score in Doom 3 at 1,600-by-1,200, but no single graphics card solution has so far, and 40 fps is still quite playable.
Yeah, but Athlon 64 SLI graphics card solutions have. Oddly enough, PCMag only directly compares this Intel Pentium EE 840 box with an Intel Pentium 4 EE 3.73GHz box. Any hard-core gamer who buys an Intel dual-core machine to play his SINGLE-THREADED GAMES instead of an Athlon 64 dual video card SLI box is beyond hope. Torch your money responsibly, kids.
Dell and Intel get 100% from PCMag for "Best Bribes Paid". Geeze.
over their regular single CPU offerings for those of us that run multiple apps, but I truly would like to see the real heat/performance numbers, and whether the rumored performance throttling is enabled on these. If not, how bad is the heat generation?
From what I've read up to now, AMD's solution will outperform Intel's offering with significantly lower heat dissappation, making it a double winner. However, testing shipping units will finally quantify these processors. Can't wait for AMD's unit to ship and get compared.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Yeah, but Athlon 64 SLI graphics card solutions have
Oddly enough, Pentium 4 SLI graphics card solutions have too!
Gee, what does the chip have to do with the capability of the fact that this was a single video card box?
These are hitting the market but won't be shipped for a few weeks - or so I gather from what I read in TFAs. By "Hit the market" they seem to mean "vendors are taking orders" which - to me - seems meaningless.
AMD claims not to do this in one of the articles:
""'t is important to note that AMD only announces products when we are able to immediately begin shipping for revenue and that we have been shipping dual-core AMD Opteron processor production samples to customers and partners since January,' the statement added."
I guess we'll just have to see if AMD actually has products available at their release or if they're just doing the same thing Intel seems to be doing here.
Yeah, but Athlon 64 SLI graphics card solutions have. Oddly enough, PCMag only directly compares this Intel Pentium EE 840 box with an Intel Pentium 4 EE 3.73GHz box. Any hard-core gamer who buys an Intel dual-core machine to play his SINGLE-THREADED GAMES instead of an Athlon 64 dual video card SLI box is beyond hope. Torch your money responsibly, kids.
I thought a version of nForce4 was available for pentium now. So won't it be possible to use SLI with Pentium EE 840?
(If this is a naive question, sorry... I've never seriously considered wasting [$$$] on dual graphics cards, let alone a Pentium EE!)
MS already has plans for your second core.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Is this the same "Dual Core" that will be featured in the XBox? If so I wonder what percentage of the "millions" of chips anticipated to ship will go into the XBox 360 or whatever its called.
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
I suppose they gave the task of upgrading the driver to a summer intern or outsourced it to someone who didn't give a damn about HP's reputation. I've considered getting a dual core box but the idea of upgrading the hardware because some idiot didn't know how to write a printer driver properly just doesn't sit too well.
Dimension XPS desktop, which start at $2,999
Now Apple already has a dual processor system in the marketplace. Just took a look at a dual 2.5GHz G5 model the other day. It was obvious it is a quality machine as it was quiet and smoking hot fast. And runs a stable OS with all the features one could want.
Nothing wrong with Dell systems, but they are over priced... The Apple has an OS designed for MP and is RISC based, and I suspect much faster than say a dual Intel Xeon at twice the price.
Imagine what a dual core, dual processor (G5 970MP) systems will be like!!! You might want to keep any eye on Apple for this.
HP has dual core Opterons in blade servers. You really have to dig through their website, but availibility was listed as 4/14...now shipping dates could months from now, so who knows.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
The UltraSparcIV is a dual-core chip. Been shipping for quite a while now - maybe even more than a year.
And just like the first UltraSparcs from about a decade ago, it's also fully 64-bit....
Is not the single thread performance or how fast can you finish task X. ;)
Its responsiveness of the system. I'm using A64 3000 and I get annoying stalls on system level.
The CPU spends time with the backside thread, while I would love it working on UI, there is annoying stall. Multiple CPU:s according to reviews remove those issues. And don't say having 20% higher processor clock speed is going to help, its by simple fact that CPU was just doing something else at a time I would of loved it to handle UI events. Having 2 cores means, that responsiveness of a system is greatly improved, atleast until people write most of their applications to tie up more than one core
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Oh man,
I can't wait to get dual cores on my desktop. And to me the biggest advantages are responsiveness and better multitasking.
I really dislike how unresponsive my computer gets when I'm doing something computationally intensive, such as maybe ripping a CD.
I would also love it if my firewall and antivirus protection could be offloaded to another processor.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
why go 64 for 32-BIT GAMES
This Article lacks a lot of detail, and sounds more like a "advert" than a benchmark/test article.
Now if I were to spend $3,999US on a new computer, I would bloody expect one that PERFORMS remarkebly.
His mentioning of how a anti-virus and firewall can bring your computer the " slow their computers to a crawl" I can't say I have had that problem in years. And usally a good system tuneup/clean out/tuneup fixes the problem.
Your computer will run all your trojans/malware/virus's on one cpu while leaving enough "oomph" to play doom 3 or halo.
I've got a dual processor system. They don't cost that much more than a single... you won't pay a premium for a new "dual core" box, but you'll still get all the advantages of a fast responsive system. p. In my opinion, dual cores are for businesses whose rack space is at a premium and gamers with spare money to burn.
Agile Artisans
winxp to processor1 : please open this window.
P1 to winxp: No I'm busy, ask P2
winxp to P2: open this window
P2 to winxp: ask the other lazy sod
winxp to all: please or I'll BOS
P1 and P2: go on then, we don't care
user: ?
For four grand, I would rather go pick up a dual 2.5 ghz G5 Powermac and then buy a nice $1k LCD screen...
PLay a game while burning Mp3's... That will *kill* your single core.
That's completely wrong, I've played MMOs for years, all with sound off and winamp in the background.
He's an apple zealot. You can't expect too much from those.
That picture of the Dell XPS Gen5 uses the same casing as the PowerEdge SC1420.
The ironic thing is though that the Sparc IV gets destroyed by the single core AMD and Intel offerings, not to mention the IBM POWER (dual core) CPUs. For Sun, going dual core was just limitation of damage.
It wasn't meant to be +5 funny, but maybe it deserved a +5 clueless. I was just trying to make a point about multitasking.
A more accurate example for me would be that I enjoy playing EQ2 and at the same time I'd like to have the following programs running:
1) Teamspeak
2) Symantec Antivirus (not because I really need it while gaming, but because I don't want to turn it on and off).
3) iTunes (I like music)
4) My software firewall
5) I've got two screens and in one screen I browse for quest stuff and read the guild boards.
In some of these cases I don't want the other programs to ruin my gaming experience.
In some cases I don't want EQ2 to make my program unusable (such as maybe my browser on the second screen).
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
And it's the reason why I only buy dual processor motherboards.
... it sort of slides around and stays out of the way.
... anything else is a compromise, and suboptimal.
It's not about speed, it's about your work not stalling every time that the system needs attention.
I tend to think of it as the kernel being "slippery" on dual processor (and now, dual core) machines
Another way of looking at it is that the operating system really needs its own processor
And I was playing Descent on Dual PentriumPro in 1995... so ? There where even Dual Pentium I motherboards then...
Heating for the rest of the tent won't be a problem either!
To get SLI on an Intel CPU, you need an nVidia chipset. Given Dell's relationship with Intel it could be that Dell are either forced to use Intel chipsets, or gets them very cheaply.
"nice" was meant for this.
With Linux you can also use "chrt" to specify that some task is "realtime": it will always get as much scheduling as it wants (make sure it will not loop endlessly though).
According to the article, the Dell includes a 20" LCD, a high performance graphics card, a DVD-ROM and a dual layer DVD+-RW, 500GB of disk and 1GB of ram. It may also include the speaker system and has the dual TV tuners. An Apple dual G5 configured that way, though not possible through the Apple store, would cost over $5000. $5K at Apple gets you the memory, disk, monitor, video card and base system without the speakers, TV tuners or similar optical drives. The Apple G5 is 30-35% more money than the Dell.
What all this "news" about Intel suddenly doing dual-core? Isn't that what HyperThreading has been doing for, what is it, a year now?
With all the spyware running on boxen these days, it's finally nice to have a CPU dedicated to spyware thread processing.
Why should users prevent and remove the stuff when they can just throw more CPU cycles at it just to keep the PC responsive?
And yes, the whole premise behind this is absurd. But people often have and do throw money at a solution out of acts of being lazy/responsible when it comes to system maintenence.
Life is not for the lazy.
Remember, these are desktop processors that Intel is releasing. AMD is slated to release dual core OPTERONS. Those are server cpus, much more important than the puny stuff Intel is putting out.
This comes up all the time. Apparently it's very hard to understand that 64-bitness is but ONE of many aspects of these new processors and that, by the way, there are no non-64bit high-performance CPUs manufactured any more, so if you want the fastest (like you want for gaming), you don't actually HAVE A CHOICE.
I can build a quad Opteron machine for that and still have change. The gfx will suck. 4-way board = $1400 Opteron 346 = $315 each That leves a good chunk of cahnge for the rest.
No matter where you go , there you are.
The biggest thing that I need is processing power and lots of memory. I was just about to get a Dell XPS Gen2 or the Dell 9300, but now I'm starting to think that it may make more sense to wait a bit and see what dual core will bring to the game. I've also looked at some of the AMD64 machines but I really haven't seen anywhere that gives a side-by-side comparison of current notebooks and their overall performance ratings.
The real meat is here (two links in... why don't people link to the interesting content anyway?)
Test-Driving the Dual Core Pentium EE 840
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
I ask because our calculation-heavy product actually performs worse with multiple threads on an HT system, but speeds up by a factor of nearly 2 on a true multi-CPU system. I know how to test for HT and whether it's enabled, but how will we differentiate HT packages and dual-core packages programmatically?
We're Sorry We're unable to process your request. Please check back with us soon to customize this product, or click below to continue shopping Plus the customer service rep was clueless.... http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/nodata.aspx ?cs=19&kc=6V411&oc=XPS5PC&x=10&y=11
The 386 was Intel's 32-bit Desktop chip. It was released in what, the mid-80's? Look how long it took before there was a full 32-bit mainstream desktop OS (Windows XP). Being able use 64 bit memory addresses is just one aspect- everything else is what you buy the chip for.
I wish I could write clever and witty sigs.
As someone who has ran dual-processor rigs for years, I can tell you that system responsiveness requires more than just a pair of speedy processors.
For example, if your hard drive or other I/O devices are being taxed, your entire system will run slowly... which makes that second processor about worthless.
The biggest benefit of dual processors are when you are running a single-threaded application that only taxes the CPU, or when you are running a pervasively multithreaded application (like, say, video-encoding utilities).
On my Windows box, even with dual-processors, 2gigs of ram and a 10,000rpm SCSI hard disk.. the machine manages to hang at some simple dialog boxes. Go Windows!! wooooo.
Basically, what I'm getting at is this: don't expect dual-core to be some miracle cure to UI responsiveness. 9 out of 10 times, it won't be. The cure to better UI responsiveness is a better OS.
/dev/random
I'm not sure cell is all hype, it may or may not be, and POWER and PowerPC are proven. The problem with say may simply be that its complicated and may take a while top figure out. The first round of games may be weaker than later rounds of simply because people will be inexperienced during the first round. POWER and PowerPC have an advantage that there is quite a bit of experience, compilers are a little more mature, etc. Just some random thoughts.
Was available in 1988 and was a full 32bit desktop OS that was primarily sold to Wall St. traders as a desktop trading platform. WinNT was 32 bit from the start and was available shortly later. NeXt was 32 bit as well. These were hardly the first 32 bit desktop machines, but they certainly qualify as mainstream. 32 bit computing didn't become mainstream in the consumer market primarily because Microsoft used their monopoly power to make sure that it didn't happen until they were ready.
For Sun, going dual core was just limitation of damage.
Actually, Sun is less interested in the Intel marketing game and more interested in throughput. Just wait for their 32-way Niagara next year. Their USIV should be doubling speed this year, too (USIV+).
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Wouldn't fixing Windows' (and to a lesser extent Linux') time-slicing be a much less expensive solution to all of this?
This problem isn't inherent; it's an OS artifact. FreeBSD has been able to run without X getting choppy at sustained loads of 20 on a single processor at least since the time of the K6. I had it at something like 80 (admittedly with dual Xeons with huge caches) a couple of weeks ago, and the interface was still perfectly smooth (though mozilla turned to a slug).
Linux seems to be much better these days (though I rarely use it and can't fully verify it), but back when the K6 was still state of the art, at a load of 5 it got noticably chunky in response (though I belive time slice adjustments could alleviate that).
hawk
dual hyperthreaded dual cores :)
.
A bit more seriously, a hyperthreading mechanism that allowed the virtual processors to use units from *either* core would be interesting--or just drop the distinction between cores, double the number of execution units, and have four virtual processors . .
hawk
IMO Sun is (also) playing the marketing game with its Niagara thingy. They didn't start to sell Opterons just because they liked to, they did because they can't compete.
I expect Niagara to be competitive in certain task, and better than the competition in very specialiced task, the jury is just out to decide if these specialiced tasks do matter in reality. And despite what Sun wants me to believe, I don't expect Niagara to magically show superior results on Java Appservers in general.
I'm fairly certain I was using purely 32-bit binaries on my Pentium MMX system back in 1997 under linux. Yes, it was a desktop system and not a server.
I've been doing that just fine for the last 8 years. MS is just behind the curve.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
To be honest, I just came across the hyperthreading thing completely by accident. I fitted a NVidia 5200 graphics card into my work Dell Optiplex GX270 and thought I'd check out the BIOS config after the reboot.
It turns out that my work machine with a P4 3GigHz, which I've been using for the last 6 months has HT, but didn't have it enabled.
So I enabled it, and sadly it doesn't really seem to have affected the performance to any noticeable degree.
I generally run at least 2 if not 3 copies of MSDEV for different codestreams, and doing batch-code debugging, and with 1 Gig of memory the desktop can get pretty unresponsive, but it does ok.
The only major change is that on a compile, the fan gets much louder, so it must be doing some more work.
Overall I'd rather spend the money on a faster disk or graphics card than more processor cores. And if you're a developer, running a couple of screens may be one of the smartest buys you can make.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
Heh, on WinXP, you don't even need to be encoding a dvd, burning one is already too much. (or just copying files...)
Any large file IO results in nearly every last bit of any running applications being paged out. Then you may sit for half a minute or more with the system frozen waiting on disk IO.
Until M$ can figure out how a buffer cache should work, no number of cores will be enough to give you a responsive system.
They didn't start to sell Opterons just because they liked to, they did because they can't compete.
...I don't expect Niagara to magically show superior results on Java Appservers in general.
It's more complicated than that, IMO. AMD plays the Intel Marketing Game even better than Intel does. If you look at the Opteron architecture, it's actually very similar to that of the UltraSPARC IIIi (JBUS vs. HT) and light years ahead of the Xeon architecture. For an x86 architecture, the Opteron fits really well into Sun's overall product line and is good for customers who need x86 interoperability.
The jury will be out until Sun actually starts shipping systems. However, the general knowledge floating around is that Niagara will have multiple memory controllers to feed lots of bandwidth into its eight cores. The cores internally have rediculous bandwidth between them, so thread scheduling should go really well.
We'll just have to wait and see, but Sun is betting on their observations that typical workloads are only 25% efficient on today's CPUs. They had a presentation slide showing that moving from a ~1GHz Pentium to a ~2GHz pentium resulted in far less than twice the performance on a business-like benchmark but it also had far more than twice the power consumption. Not a good sign for modern single-threaded super-hot CPUs.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Depends on which benchmark you're going for. Running things designed to run on the x86 single threaded model desktop systems like office apps or games, yes. Try running a massively network app with hundreds of threads though, and a different picture emerges. Don't buy a Sun to play Doom. Do buy a Sun for a Web/Application Server.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Umm. By 1997, pure 32-bit Windows binaries were plentiful. The OP was talking about 1987.
Incidentially, this was largely IBM's fault for targeting OS/2 1.0 to the 286 rather than the 386.
I use Linux on a daily basis on my personal computers, and I love it, but Windows XP Home was the first consumer-level desktop OS that didn't have its roots in DOS. As much as I'd love to see Linux being sold on computers in Best Buy/CompUSA/Fry's, it's just not happening at the moment.
I agree that MS is behind the curve, but my argument was that people bought 386, 486, Pentiums, etc. for reasons other than 32-bithood, much like today when people buy 64 bit CPUs who aren't even using half of the address space of 32 bits. At least Microsoft is a bit more uppity with getting 64-bit editions of Windows out the door.
I wish I could write clever and witty sigs.
The whole reason to buy an Intel chip is got an Intel chipset, which are the most stable chipsets around. To spend all that money on an Intel CPU and then use a nVidia chipset would be lunacy.
For the record, I use an AMD chip on a nVidia chipset.
Dude, I'm not comparing a single Proc PIV against these things. Part of my job is to decide which hardware will be bought for mid sized mission critical application servers (like the V40z and the V490/890).
And Sun Sparcs at the moment simply do _not_ offer a good price/performance ratio, simply because this CPU is so damn slow, at it has been that way for a while. Please pay Spec or TPC a visit to inform yourself about this stuff.
Someone please answer this question for me: Why? Why does the average consumer need a dual-core processor? For that matter, why does the average consumer need a dual processor configuration at all? Are the people buying $3000 dual-proc G5s just being elitist?
My point is this. Let's see what the average consumer does with his computer:
- Surfs the Internet
- Reads email
- Watches DVDs
- Plays music
- Plays games
- Maybe does some work
Note that among all of those things, people rarely do them all at once (and I am not talking about the Slashdot population that does work, listens to music and has browser windows open all at the same time).
Games are the only taxing item there, and most PC games are not even multithreaded. Gamers that buy the Alienware system are literally just wasting cash.
On top of all of this, no matter how much you do, your CPU spends quite a bit of time (upwards of 85%) in the idle thread (aside from you SETI@Home people).
When you put all that together, it makes little sense to buy a dual-core CPU for your desktop PC.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
Basically, it all comes down to what you need. Personally, for anything and everything I do at this time, Opteron based systems are the best solution for me. In the past, Sun systems have figured prominently in solutions I worked on, because they were the best fit dollarwise for the requirements.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
We were talking about CPUs, not the overall systems, let's see what SPEC tells us:
CINT 2000 (single CPU, single Core):
Best overall: AMD: 1854
[...]
Best UltraSPARC IIIi: 845 (submitted Jan-2005!)
CFP2000 (single CPU, single Core):
Best overall: IBM POWER5 (SMT off): 2796
[...]
Best UltraSPARC IIIi: 1353 (submitted Jan-2005!)
nough said
so you choose different specs than I pointed out. And who the heck compres 7 year old tech with brand new tech anyways like it is a valid comparison. Granted, it was submitted in 2005, but who cares? What if I were to submit a PII's performance in 2005?
UltraSPARCIV's have been out a while now.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Yes, I chose different specs, because they are CPU benchmarks, and we were talking about CPUs - reread the first post you replied to. And yes, UltraSPARC IVs have been out for a while. But that just proves my point. It's all Sun has to offer at present (besides Opterons) - they are not able to withstand AMD, IBM and Intel in the area of high performance CPU Core technology. Even if Niagara is a full success, it will be countered by similiar CPU designs from these, just that each core is more than 2 times as fast as each Niagara core. Heck, I bet at least one of them has the designs already in their drawer.