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Intel Stepping Up to Combat AMD's 4x4
Grooves writes "Intel has said that the company is stepping up the pace of its Core 2 architecture rollout to compete with
AMD's 4x4. Two "quad-core" parts originally slated for release in the first half of 2007, Kentsfield for the desktop and Clovertown for servers, will make their debut as early as
the end of this year. The Ars article warns that per-core bandwidth problems could end up giving a performance advantage to AMD's 4x4 approach."
Good news for you then - people are just speculating, but at the end of this month AMD is very strongly rumored to be dropping prices on the X2 line, almost in half. So, currently a $300 3800 X2 will soon cost $167 or around there. Just wait a few weeks and check back.
The Core 2 Duos aren't "alpha expensive" -- they're significantly cheaper than AMD's prices as of right now.
4x4 means 4 cores and 4 GPUs. I guess 4+4 just didn't sound as cool.
While I understand that 4x4 will be the desktop part, designed for single-socket systems, I expect it will arrive with similar Opteron-2xx series processors that have 4 cores.
No, 4x4 is two sockets with dual-core processors in them. Since you already have that, 4x4 won't benefit you. Basically 4x4 is a way to trick gamers into buying quad Opteron systems under a different name.
No, it's just pining for the Fjords.....
t ectio/
Seriously, this comment is trotted out every time Intel or AMD sneezes and some 64-bit multicore goodness leaks out.
The Itanic plays in the mainframe server space -ie. up to 64 CPU machines such as the HP Superdome.
Its competitors are the Power64 chip and Sun's latest and greatest -not some $300 chip you buy at Fry's.
Itanium has just released a dualcore version with up to 24MB of cache! I think you have to move up to Opteron or Xeon to get more than a couple MB of cache.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/18/intel_mon
You still need big-iron type CPUs for numbers crunching on the scale that simulations or Fortune500 business processes require and that will not be changing anytime soon.
-What's the speed of Dark?
a) Quake 3 uses multiple cores, IIRC
b) You're telling me gamers won't benefit if all the other system processes are constrained to core 1, while the game runs on core 2? Seems the game will get a slightly larger chunk of processing time to me, without having to deal with context switching
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Actually, if you did your homework, you'd see that the 4X4 platform consists of the following:
- two dual core CPUs (there's one four)
- two dual GPU graphics cards (there's the other four)
Thus, "four by four", not unlike, say, a truck which has, you know, four wheels (not sixteen).