Quad Core Chips From Intel and AMD

lubricated writes "According to the San Fransisco Chronicle, in an effort to one-up AMD, Intel will be coming out with 4 core cpu's in 2007." From the article: "Chips with two cores have been the latest rage, with both Intel and AMD selling those microprocessors as their high-end offering. Apple Computer Inc.'s new iMac, which started selling last month, uses the dual-core chip ... Not to be outdone, Randy Allen, AMD's corporate vice president of server and workstation division, said Friday that his firm is working its own quad-core processor for release next year."

Comments

The new race

[4D6963]

Say bye to the race to the Gigahertz. Say hello to the race to the core count

Re:The new race

[Wyatt Earp]

Not sure that with gigahertz we got to enjoy the benefits. Word on my 233MHz G3 worked as well as it did on 800MHz G4 as it does on my 2x2GHz G5 and as well as it does on my 3.2GHz P4.

I really think in the "megahertz" race we didn't really enjoy the benefits in all areas of software. vi, emacs, text editor x don't really benifit from 3GHz over 333MHz. Someone who just pops open Word or Word Perfect and an email client doesn't benifit from something zoom zoom high GHz.

On that note, quite a few things on OS X work better for CPU/usage on a pair of slower CPUs than on one fast CPU.

Re:The new race

[luvirini]

Even if you did not need a fast computer you were able to enjoy gigahertz race, just buy the slowest computer there is, and enjoy the other side of it.. slower things became cheaper.

Re:The new race

[timeOday]

With multiple cores, you need software able to use these cores, am I wrong

The transition from single-threaded to multi-threaded is fundamental, and will require a permanant increase in code complexity that we'll all have to learn to live with. However, the transition from 2 to 4 to more should be little or no trouble. At this point only a foolish programmer would think in terms of exactly 2 cores instead of N cores.

The main mistake I think people are making is the idea of having each thread do something different, e.g. one thread for graphics and one for AI. To harness a large number of cores equally, we need libaries which divide up big repetitive tasks (say, collision detection or matrix multiplication) into a large number of chunks. Of course you can't write heavily procedural logic that way, (say, a word processor), but for the most part that stuff runs fast enough on one core anyways.

When will Microsoft change its license?

[TSHTF]

Currently Microsoft charges per CPU, not core http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/highlights/mult icore.mspx. As we begin to see 4-core and 8-core CPUs, how long will it be until Microsoft begins charging per core?

Re:Good for SGI and Sun.

[cyberjessy]

Are you saying that people just woke up to this "trend"? The industry decided years ago that Mhz war will stop, and everyone will try to put more cores in. Its not like no-one else knew it was coming.

IRIX and Solaris are known to scale far beyond 4 processors.
So does almost every other OS. Linux scales to 1000s of processors, in IBMs supercomputers. Windows 2003 Datacenter supports 64 processors (Which is more than enough for a regular commercial application. In case you want more, instead of scaling up, you should be scaling OUT.) AIX, HP-UX etc also have great support.

If they can come out with a system that appeals to developers and business users, then they could take on Apple, Sun, Dell and others again
SGI competing with APPLE and DELL???? In what segment, but in the figment of your imagination?

SGI?? They lost $100m in 2004, $72m in 2005. They are nearly _dead_ and looking for a sell-out. In many ways they deserve it, I still remember their CD drive being priced 10 times higher than the ones in the market if you wanted to replace one. And of course, being totally proprietary nothing else would fit in. Who is buying IRIX now? And SGI now focuses on Linux.

I don't know who modded you interesting. And I did not know SGI still had fans!