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

First Post!

[Anonymous Coward]

>_>

Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

All your base are belong to Intel!

I'm not sure it's a good path.

[jd]

It would seem to make more sense to have 4 virtual cores, where all have access to all computing elements. That way, you don't put such tight limits on the hyperthreading (where that would be beneficial). It would also be much easier to add more virtual cores, as it would not require any additional physical computing elements, so massive parallelization in cases where very different behind-the-scenes work would be needed would benefit further.

(Here, I'm using the term "virtual core" to mean a complete physical set of internal registers for each "core", but with no directly attached computing elements. Hence it is not a physical CPU, as it doesn't process, it's not central and it's distributed rather than being a unit. If you had a memory pool for such a purpose, where what was left was available as L1 cache, you could dynamically change the number of cores to suit the work you were doing. That would seem to be the "ultimate" design.)

new imac owner

[DarkClown]

posting this from the 2 ghz imac bought a couple weeks ago - i haven't had hardly problem at all since getting this (except for wish more apps were universal binaries).
the 'rosetta' apps actually do run faster than they did on my old 733 mhz g4, but when i found a new firefox build (beta) and replaced it and got tot a/b the difference it was really shocking - this system shines bright.

Re:The new race

[4D6963]

Say hello to fearful anonymous cowards who won't assume their flaming.

And look whether my post is modded insightful or whoring as well.

Re:The new race

[4D6963]

What.. are.. you.. talking.. about?

Also OT...

[David Rolfe]

Hi! Warning, mini-rant!

I hate to be a pedant, but CPU is an initialism, while SCSI is an acronym. We don't pronounce CPU as a word, we just say "sea-pee-you" (or at least I don't know of any population that says "suh-poo" when they are talking about central processing units). I just figured that while we were nit-picking people, I'd throw in that fun-fact.

There's more at the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initialism

However, I will grant that the same argument for insisting that "begging the question" means raising the question can be used to dismiss the difference between acronyms and initialisms. Does that make it right? Well I guess that depends on if you are one of those proscriptivists (who insist that supposably is a word as long as enough people use it) or a descriptivist (who insist that words mean something, and ivory tower dictionaries contain those absolute meanings).

As someone that dodged an English degree, descriptivism has some sway over me, but I can understand why some people just want to say whatever the fuck they want and insist that I misunderstand their meaning through no fault of their own. Haha, maybe using language that other people understand has some roots in personal responsibility. It's my responsibility to make sure that others understand me. /rant :-)