Slashdot Mirror
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!"
The demo system Intel is showing at E3 features a Core 2 Extreme processor, which, judging from past pricing strategy, will cost slightly over $1000, as well as a Quad-SLI graphics card (i.e. probably two dual Nvidia graphics cards at around $1000 each).
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.
Put in a Blue-Ray drive (expected to cost around $1000 initially) and you just hit 5 grand.
I'm not a Sony fanboy, not by a long shot, but comparing a 5 grand PC to a 1/2 grand PS/3 does seem a tad unfair, now doesn't it?
And yes, a quad-SLI system with a Core 2 Extreme *is* expected to blow the doors off a PS/3. No surprise here.
Dedicated Linux servers (root access) $45 p.M.
Although one must wonder why AMD would be scared of a 5.2 gHz rather than a 3.7 when CPUs that fast are never, ever the system's bottleneck. Seems like a lot of posturing.
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.
I've read over the article albeit briefly and I find myself thinking that the quote in the summary is total hype for a chip, sure a PS3 will cost about 600, but I seem to recall those EE chips being as much if not more and given that this chip is newer then the P4ee's no doubt it will cost even more. And that's not counting the cost of video cards etc.
I'm not impressed even by their marketing numbers. When I bought my 386 it was way more than 2x the speed of my 286. My 486 was at least twice as fast as the 386, ditto the Pentium, K6 and Athlon.
40% faster? Who cares. Especially for games.
2 is always smaller than 3 - even for larger values of 2.
. . . until next year. : )
harmonious design
It doesn't matter what Sony or intel come out with, neither company is likely to convert PC gamers to console gamers or console gamers to PC gamers.
Then again, what do I know? I fall into the "has too much money/buys them all" camp.
The article summary states:
"Intel also claims that a Core 2 Extreme-based enthusiast PC will leave the pixel power of a Playstation 3 in the dust.
but then I also see in the article:
"[I don't know off the top of my head] the number of polygons it can draw versus a Cell, but I think it's going to be higher, because there's a lot more bandwidth on the quad system than on the Cell system."
That doesn't sound like much of a claim to me.
I would expect in actuality we would be seeing something like a 60-70% increase in speed. A company like Intel would probably estimate conservatively so as to not over-hype a new product.
..that using the word extreme should be illegal?
x86 isn't less efficient. In some cases its even more efficient- you need less cache on common instructions. And some very complex things can be done in silicon with 1 instruction, saving overhead of multiple instuctions. FOr example, memcpy and memcmp are single instructions.
x86 is more complex. Its much harder to write a decoder for, and more difficult to debug the hardware. That adds cost (and a lot of extra transistors in the decode phase). But its a matter of complexity and cost, not efficiency.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
There's a bit more design elements going into a PS3 than just the raw pixel pushing. I still don't see many FPS games on a PC that can do let 4 players play on the same computer screen.
today is spelling optional day.
AMD's Athlon 64 is 36% faster than Pentium 965 EE in UT2004 http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&m odel1=238&chart=71&model2=329
Is Intel's new Core 2 Extreme only as fast as AMD's FX-57?
given the investment that anyone makes in a computer system designed for gaming, how it is a "most exciting year" to be faced with the possibility of yet another set of continuing reasons to spend more money on yet more gear? wouldn't a really exciting year in gaming have nothing to do with new hardware and everything to do with cool, inspired and inspiring new games?
You'd have to pry my mouse and keyboard out of my cold, dead hands.. but on the other hand, this Red Steel trailer does make the first person gameplay with the Wii controller look pretty damn fun. (Then again, having to freeze time to tag each location to shoot the pistol is a cool effect, but it just makes me think how with a mouse you'd have those 6 shots off before the Wii controller had even tagged one of those guys)
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.
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.
I'm glad I'll finally be able to play solitaire at 800 FPS.
"Gamers, this appears to become the most exciting year for you in a long time!" Games on the PC are for 99% of the time restricted by the video card, only in rare cases the CPU will actually be the bottleneck, if you run a game at higher details (AA/AF) and resolutions you will put more strain on the VGA card, and an increase in CPU power will not translate into a boost in performance worth mentioning.
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.
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...