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.
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'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.
. . . until next year. : )
harmonious design
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?
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?
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.