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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."

18 of 412 comments (clear)

  1. The new race by 4D6963 · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

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    You just got troll'd!
    1. Re:The new race by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:The new race by luvirini · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:The new race by timeOday · · Score: 4, Insightful
      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.

  2. Actually, they were outdone.. by deep44 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not to be outdone by AMD..? Bad news: AMD made this very same announcement in June/2005, indicating quad-core CPUs would be available 'sometime in 2007'.

  3. Re:Multi-cores by keyrat+rafa · · Score: 5, Funny
    I have an athlon 64 dual core 3800 using windows for my main ebay computer and it can pretty much handle anything i throw at it.

    wtf is an ebay computer and why would it need a fast processor?
  4. When will Microsoft change its license? by TSHTF · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:When will Microsoft change its license? by cyberjessy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This is silly. Microsoft made a conscious decision to license software per CPU (or per Slot) rather than core, and they had announced that they are doing so because multi-core looked like the natural way in which CPUs will improve, given that the Mhz war has ended. In fact they were the first major company to do so.

      Also, this does not really eat into MS bottom line compared to Oracle or IBM. Most of MS revenue comes from the the desktop, while they are just competing in servers. Sql Server suddenly becomes more attractive, given Oracles complicated multi-core policy. (Remember that Oracle earlier announced that every core is a CPU, its just recently that they realized it will be a disaster and modified their original plans.)

      Earlier CPU speeds doubled every 18 months. Multi-core will simply take another approach to achieving the same. I am not sure how this will hurt software companies any more than increasing cycles/sec.

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      Life is just a conviction.
  5. In othe news... by dcapel · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...scientists report global warming is predicted to increase four-fold by 2008.

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    DYWYPI?
  6. In other news by Burning1 · · Score: 5, Funny

    In other news:

    Not to be outdone by AMD, Gellete releases a 5 core Razor.

  7. Sun Microsystems is shipping 8 core CPUs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sun has been shipping 8 core T1 processors for a few months. T1000 and T2000 rack servers based on "CoolThreads" - whatever that is. See here: http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process= SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=141649. IBM has QuadCore Power5+ chips shipping any day now.

    Both Solaris and AIX scale over 100 CPUs already. Good luck AMD and Intel on getting Microsoft to create a standard OS (not their funny datacenter version) that is the same on 1 CPU or 124 CPU systems.

  8. A quad system bus of some kind would help more by CFD339 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Processing power is rarely the problem. Graphics processing is already handed off, and unless you're trying to crack encryption, most software isn't bound by processor speed anyway.

    Software performance is bound by I/O limitations. It FEELS like processor power because threads on hold for I/O block a core up like cheescake to a lactose intollerant grandparent.

    Until I can index on disk at about 100 times the current speed, these processors won't help what I'm doing.

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    The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
  9. Adapted from the Onion by amliebsch · · Score: 5, Funny
    Fuck Everything, We're Doing Four Cores

    By Craig Barrett
    CEO and President,
    Intel
    February 10, 2006

    Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of computing in this country. The Pentium 3 was the CPU to own. Then the other guy came out with a 64-bit x86 CPU. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Itanium. That's 64 bit and a new instruction set. For performance. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to two cores. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling 64 bits and a new instruction set. Floating point performance or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to four cores.

    Sure, we could go to two cores next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, one worked out pretty well, and two is the next number after one. So let's play it safe. Let's make a faster bus and call it the Pentium4SuperExtreme. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!

    You think it's crazy? It is crazy. But I don't give a shit. From now on, we're the ones who have the edge in the multi-core game. Are they what's inside? Fuck, no. Intel is what's inside.

    What part of this don't you understand? If one core is good, and two cores is better, obviously four cores would make us the best fucking CPU that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the processor game by clinging to the 64-bit industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, four cores is the biggest chance of all.

    Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don't tell me what to invent--I tell them. And I'm telling them to stick two more cores in there. I don't care how. Make the wafers so thin they're invisible. Put some on the bottom of the die. I don't care if they have to cram the fourth in perpendicular to the other three, just do it!

    You're taking the "point" part of "floating point" too literally, grandma. Cut the strings and soar. Let's hit it. Let's roll. This is our chance to make CPU history. Let's dream big. All you have to do is say that four cores can happen, and it will happen. If you aren't on board, then fuck you. And if you're on the board, then fuck you and your father. Hey, if I'm the only one who'll take risks, I'm sure as hell happy to hog all the glory when the four-core CPU becomes the computing tool for the U.S. of "this is how we compute now" A.

    People said we couldn't go to 64-bit. It'll cost a fortune to manufacture, they said. Well, we did it. Now some egghead in a lab is screaming "Four's crazy?" Well, perhaps he'd be more comfortable in the labs at AMD, working on fucking Turions. HyperTransport, my white ass!

    Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we should just ride in Motorola's wake and make embedded IC's. Ha! Not on your fucking life! The day I shadow a penny-ante outfit like Motorola is the day I leave the CPU game for good, and that won't happen until the day I die!

    The market? Listen, we make the market. All we have to do is put her out there with a little jingle. It's as easy as, "Hey, gaming with anything less than four blades is like playing at VGA resolution." Or "You'll be so l33t, I couldn't snipe you with an aimbot." Try "Your b0x is going to be so friggin' fast, someone's gonna walk up and put a goddamn spoiler on it."

    I know what you're thinking now: What'll people say? Mew mew mew. Oh, no, what will people say?! Grow the fuck up. When you're on top, people talk. That's the price you pay for being on top. Which Intel is, always has been, and forever shall be, Amen, four cores, sweet Jesus in heaven.

    Stop. I just had a stroke of genius. Are you ready? Open your mouth, baby birds, cause Mama's about to drop you one sweet, fat nightcrawler. Here she comes: Put another Level 2 cache on that fucker, too. That's right. Four cores, two caches, and make th

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    If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
  10. Re:Good for SGI and Sun. by cyberjessy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!

    --
    Life is just a conviction.
  11. Ars Technica has a better article... by Malor · · Score: 5, Informative

    As usual, if you want good CPU info, Ars Technica is the place to look. They have a blurb on Intel's 4-way core plans here.

    Basically, they point out that Intel's dual core processors are already starved on the FSB, and loading two more cores isn't going to do very much. He seems to expect that, until Intel gets their FSB in order(which won't happen until 2008), AMD is going to stomp all over them. He says that Intel's cores are excellent, but without CSI (their new FSB), it may not matter much.

    My own projection is that the extra contention may end up imposing a net speed _penalty_ for many workloads. That is, however, pure speculation from an amateur, based mostly on the dismal performance of the first dual-CPU G4 Macs.

  12. The 8-core Alpha by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just before the end of the Alpha line, DEC prototyped an 8-core Alpha. It's not clear that it was useful, but they did succeed in cramming eight CPUs on one die over five years ago.

  13. Re:Multi CPUs? Why not Cluster? by Jeremi · · Score: 4, Informative
    Why can't we take advantage of multi CPU software using networked PCs?


    Well, you can, for some things. The problem is that the speed of even gigabit Ethernet is so slow (compared to the speed of the interconnect between two CPUs on the same chip or motherboard) that in order for a program that runs well over a cluster, it often has to be designed completely differently from a program that will run well on a multi-CPU machine. In particular, things like shared memory are extremely difficult to simulate over a network, but trivial when you've got a single machine where the CPUs, well, share the memory.


    For a lot of problem types, the high latency and low bandwidth of the network interconnect lead to the situation where you've spent hours and hours getting your app to run across all the CPUs in your cluster, only to find out that it's actually running slower than the simple version of the app that does everything on a single CPU. That's really embarrassing...

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    I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  14. Re:Multi-cores by Daniel+Rutter · · Score: 5, Funny

    Either
    (a) he's running a truly awesome amount of auction management and/or sniping software for a whole bunch of auctions, or
    (b) he's running eBay.