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Core 2 Extreme 40% faster than Pentium EE 965?
Marc writes "As far as I know, this is the first time that Intel has talked about what we can expect from its new gaming CPU, Core 2 Extreme. For once, there is no word on power consumption on this new chip, but Intel talks about raw speed and a 40% gain over the current 3.73 GHz Extreme Edition 965 - which would be rather impressive and could indicate a problem for AMD. In this interview with TG Daily, Intel also claims that a Core 2 Extreme-based enthusiast PC will leave the pixel power of a Playstation 3 in the dust. Gamers, this appears to become the most exciting year for you in a long time!"
Because the ugly x86 instruction set acts as a form of compression, x86 code is more dense and fits more easily into the instruction cache than RISC code. The overhead of translating x86 to internal RISC is basically fixed and is therefore getting smaller each process shrink. It's already negligble. For this reason, the ugly x86 instruction encodings are now an advantage! x86 also gained an additional 8 registers and a cleanup with AMD64.
A tiny huffman module seems like it could do wonders for code compression and also take negligible silicon these days.
I remember some papers on that from the guys at Colussa (the guys that Microsoft bought to be their CLR) that seemed impractical at the time, but now.... hmmm... double your cache for free.
I used to think this, too, but Macintosh Universal Binaries regularly see the Intel side both have bigger code and use more RAM (gcc codegen for both sides). I don't know why this is, but I'm wondering if the suggested instruction ordering, alignment, and such to optimize for Intel's latest processors eliminates the old advantage.
E pluribus unum
The Core 2 Extreme is the Conroe Extreme Edition we previously saw truncing a FX-60 overclocked pretty high. I mean, it's not out yet, but there's enough demonstrations and information to say that it's gonna exist, probably in about 6-8 weeks. This isn't vaporware, it's very-very-dense-fog-ware.
I know you joke, but the 40% are possibly even real. Conroe aka Core 2 is _seriously_ kicking ass. Check overclocking forums where people are pushing non-EE engineering samples beyond 3GHz on air cooling and break world records in most benchmarks, which were previously held by insane nitro-cooled P4 or Opteron setups.
Conroe will be fun.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
Hm. I knew it was one of those.
Incidentally, the 386 DX 40 was the one AMD made. Intel was rather peeved at them for licensing the design and then making it run faster than the fastest Intel chip.
I'll bet you drive a nice big gas guzzling SUV, leave your windows open with the A/C on and never ever turn off lights in your house. Just because you do all that doesn't mean the rest of us don't think its stupid and certainly huge companies that buy thousands of CPU's care about power consumption.
Now, when you build such a high-end system you probably wouldn't skimp on the case ($200), motherboard ($200 & up), memory ($300 & up), power supply ($100 & up) and peripherals, either, so let's allow another grand for these things and you wind up with a $4000 PC.
You're about half off on that price estimate there. If you're talking about not skimping, you'd be building on a server board that's SLI capable. This means 2 processors, quite possibly 4, if Asus gets off their ass. So add on another $1k just for the extra proc (3K if it's a 4 proc board), throw in the 12-24Gb worth of high-quality registered RAM, $1,800-$2,600. Then there's cooling, you have to go liquid cooled to maintain the heat all those watts are going to put out; figure another &400-$800 worth of water blocks, pumps, hoses, reservoirs, radiators and coolant. And last but not least, we can't forget optical drives, sound card and speakers, mic, camera, media card reader and a fan controller for the fans in your radiator, figure about $600 there.
All this, and you still have to buy a monitor. Don't bother skimping on the 19", go for something with the native resolution you just paid $7-$12K to be able to handle, a 25" TFT with 8ms response time, $2500.
You think home pc's are expensive? You haven't seen anything til you make a corporate workstation meant for research, CAD/CAM or compile heave applications. I've made workstations capable of 4.86 teraflops, sucking all 1000 watts out of the wall, handling a minimum of 85 fps or so playing F.E.A.R.
"Not Skimping" are two words few people know about
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
Ok so the clock speed rocks. But does the rest of the system keep up? The big advantage I see with AMD is Hyper Transport and the newly ratified Hyper Transport 3.0. You can have a THz CPU but if you can't feed it data/instructions it's just going to waste most of it's potential.
I'm not familiar with any possible new bus technology coming out with the new Intel CPU's, but based on my current experience with the latest Dell boxes (Intel) and our new Penguin Computing and HP AMD boxes Intel has a lot of catchup to do to outperform AMD and their whole architecture.
We are using these boxes as MySQL database servers with each server containing 100+ 500 MB to 50 GB databases attached to fiber channel disk arrays. These boxes are mostly doing I/O, but a fair amount of CPU is used for sorting/math done at the database level. The AMD boxes smoke the Intel ones.
Unless Intel also releases a whole new architecture that can compete with Hyper Transport the extra speed will most likely be wasted.
This silly -Os conspiracy is starting to annoy me. -Os is actually quite a lot faster in most cases. For the total borderline cases where -O3 is faster, you're supposed to profile and change it manually. -Os has all the optimisations of O3, except for those which bloat the code unnecessarily, such as 16-byte alignment of loop headers. This type of "optimisation" bloats the code and makes it _slower_ in most cases.
The idea that Apple uses Os to make IBM look bad is totally ridiculous.
Ok I've been keeping abreast of the whole new Intel chip, but readin the article does anyone else get a de'javou feeling? I seem to remember AMD bringing out their AMD 1700-2200xp chips with their low clock rates, and telling us performance mattered not clock speed. Intel then got carried away upto 3.7Ghz, telling us we needed faster and faster chips that cost 3 or 4 times the AMD ones.
AMD is finally ahead and while I don't do any network service work or place my PC understrain I've found the AMD64 3700+ does everything I would want, it doesn't slow down it runs everything very quickly and every game I own runs maxed out wiuth a decent frame rate. The one bottle neck in my system now seems to be windows itself (xp64 is an awful OS) and the hard drive access times.
Has Intel got lost in the 'MHz = l33t' attitude again? Or have they come up with something that competes with Hypertransport yet?
Well outside the MAC, Servers and your elite gamer can anyone see this chip selling? Its unlikely your average joe is interested eith the price tag being so high. The elite gamer seems to be a dieing breed, and does anyone know its performance against a AMDFX 62??
As for the 'who will buy a Sony?' comment, I will be, once the top notch one drops to around £200. My PS2 cost that and the years of enjoyment its brought me, coupled with the out of box games like singstar,buzz off etc show sony are thinking about me and my mates. It comes with Blu-ray since the 360 seems to be trying to pass itself off as a entertainment hub its lack of next gen drive is very very poor. Sonys Blu-ray, and general 'hype' seem to sugegst it can be a true entertainment hub that happens to play fantastic games. No i don't have a HDTV nor do I plan to buy one, but I'm pretty certain that the Movie industry is going to force this on us so would rather save the cash now and get it in my console.
I'm so glad that AMD became a powerful player in the desktop PC and server market... not because I love AMD but because now we are really seeing some earnest competition and innovation. Before, we were happy with Moore's law, but then AMD beat Intel to 1GHz and the ensuing struggle for mind and market share has brought about some truly phenominal changes.
Keep up the excellent competition... maybe we can have a third player jump in with some new ideas? IBM? Sun? Let's see you what you have...