Slashdot Mirror
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."
The great hardware war heats up once again. Right now, the biggest advantage Intel has is that their chips are scheduled for an earlier release. If they wait on the Core 2s, they're screwed. They need to get the Core 2 Duos out before AMD gets out their 4x4s so that people have less of a reason to upgrade when AMD releases their chips.
Consumers really come out on top. Better processors at cheaper prices.
Cores - the more the merrier.
The owls are not what they seem
So I'm pricing a new mobo+CPU combo for a friend. I bought an AMD64 about 14 months ago for $350. Now I see I can't even get that model anymore unless I buy the parts separately as "replacements" A few steps up from what I run is now $150. It's a good thing.
Maybe in a couple years I'll consider a Conroe or AMD 4x4 type system if I need any heavy rendering done, but for now It's astounding the bang for buck we get.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
in consulting. One of our clients wants to have at least 4-way SMP on each new box. With virtualization becoming so popular, those additional cores are going to help.
I wonder if AMD is going to focus on 4+ cores to maximize its hypertransport bus - and focus less on 2 core and less systems.
If the war is for who can make up the worst name. What stupid names, and not just AMD or Intel, Microsoft, Ubuntu, etc. Some execs with 8 year old daughters are naming these things. Why can't we get good names, like Project:Doom, or Omega Solution?
I can't even afford a high-clocked AMD X2. How am I (as a fairly high-spending gamer who builds his own computers) supposed to afford TWO of them? And if *I* can't, who exactly are they targetting with this 4 core nonsense?
I may still buy AMD on principal (yes, some of us do that still) but I really think Intel has AMD beat for the next year or two.
AMD apparantly cannot multiply. 4x4 = 16. The 4x4 architecture is two dual-core CPUs on a single motherboard (2x2=4 cores). This is pretty damn annoying and I wish they would rename it to something a little more accurate to whats going on... If you have a Dual 7950's (which are each just two 7900's), you wouldnt call it 4x4.
-Bill
Let's also not forget that the NUMA properties of the AMD solution, with less advanced prefetching, can actually be a more significant latency problem in latency-sensitive applications. The bandwidth, on the other hand, will absolutely be there.
In other words, the Kentsfield is two Core 2 Duo dice sandwiched into a single package, and likewise with the Xeon-based Clovertown part.
How long before we have a Core 2 duo meltdown and Core 2 core breach??
One Kentsfield sandwich please, extra hot! I'll take that to go in my 4x4.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Are you a gamer? Are you someone who does intense multimedia work? If not, then a single-core chip is fine, much less a 4-core chip. For the vast majority of home and business desktops, chips that are considered old right now offer plenty of computing power. The Apartment Hunters across the street from the UF campus still use G3 iMacs at the front desk. These 4-core beasts will be niche things for a while, I think, unless a lot of weasely salesmen can (continue to?) convince people to buy more computer than they need.
Now that intel is finally throwing research and marketing on 64 bit x86 to compete with AMD, is its intel's other 64 bit chip itanium officially dead?
Intel knows this very well, they've been having trouble with bandwidth for years while stuck at 800 MHz FSB. The only dual-core Pentium 4 processors to show efficient use of the second core are the EE-series, with 1066 MHz bus.
Even if Intel can successfuly crank the FSB up to 1333 MHz bus, that's still significantly less than they need to feed twice as many processors as Conroe. If this were AMD, they'd just add more memory controllers and more HT links...but for Intel this is not an option.
Intel does offer a Dual-Independent Bus architecture, but this is designed for Woodcrest, and is extremely expensive to implement. DIP does allow Woodcreast to scale effortlessly to 4 cores, and that is why we've seen Intel encourage reviews of their 4-core (2 processor) Woodcrest platforms. Unfortunately, even this DIB architecture will not scale well into 8 cores (4 cores per bus), and Intel's cheaper-to-implement quad-core processors will really feel the squeeze.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
hell yeah it makes sense under the desktop. windows desktop for testing , linux desktop for development, linux dev server, linux DB server all on the same desktop.
it'll be great for developers
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
This reminds me of the time I wanted to try the Gillette Mach 100 razor and then had to have a skin graft to fix my face. More isn't always better, but in this case I think there may be an exception.
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?
All this talk about bridges and cores makes my head hurt. What I really want to know is if there finally is a processor that can handle Vista. [ducks]
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Name just one really killer, gosh I just can't live without it, my life depends on this etc etc application at *HOME* that an average person whose hobby is *not* computers actually needs this kind of computing power for RIGHT NOW!
I did a head count - it's ZERO! Worse still - that's the core market right there - ZERO!
Sure, we can all see a day when our computers are able to intelligently discuss life issues at length with a voice interface (Hello, Dave) but we're not there yet. And there are the enthusiasts who are always willing to pay for a little more 'go' in their machine to get one extra fps in the latest, errr, FPS. Then there are server configurations that are actually more bogged down by storage transfer rates than CPU usage.
There I said it, the Emperor is naked - let's all have a good laugh at him and think about something more important.
I see two problems with this. First, most cpu-intensive tasks are single-threaded, and Conroe beats AMD on those. Second, even if it turns out that two Athlon64 X2s scale better than a single quad-core Conroe, the Conroe is a single-chip solution in a single-socket motherboard. AMD will have to price its X2s at less than half the cost of a quad-core Conroe. "Less than half" since they'll also need to absorb the extra cost of the dual-socket motherboard 4x4 requires. I suspect they won't be able to achieve that price point. So, given an AMD 4x4 system and a comparably-performing Intel quad-core Conroe system, the AMD system will cost more and be less attractive to consumers.
That being said, undoubtedly Kentsfield will be at least incrementally faster than Conroe, so that helps with bragging rights. And small, cache-based code (think Cell processor SPEs) could run well on it. But unless it is priced exceptionally close to Conroe prices, would not be my first choice.
AMD is likely to do 4-cores the right way the first time around, rather than ship a Marketing Solution.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."