Intel's Quad Core CPU Reviewed

Gr8Apes is one of many to let us know that Tom's Hardware Guide has posted a review of Intel's new Kentsfield quad core processor. From the article: "Even expert opinions are deeply divided, ranging from 'more cores are absolutely necessary' to 'why do I need something more than my five-year-old PC system?' Although the Core 2 quad-core processors are not expected to hit retail channels before October, Tom's Hardware Guide had the opportunity to examine several Core 2 Quadro models in the test labs. We would like to make it clear that these samples were not provided by Intel."

Comments

Games are going parallel

[savuporo]

Coincidentally, Gamasutra just two nice feature articles on rearchitecting the game engine flow to better parallelize the tasks so that multi-core can be taken advantage of, utilizing OpenMP
"Multithreaded Game Engine Architectures "
http://gamasutra.com/features/20060906/monkkonen_0 1.shtml
"Multi-Threaded Terrain Smoothing"
http://gamasutra.com/features/20060531/gruen_02.sh tml

Re:Experts?

[steveha]

The companies who are really serious about servers are particularly interested in CPU power compared to heat dissipation -- thermal density. This new Intel CPU is high performance with high heat--more of a gamer chip. At least so far it is; it's a very early sample and Intel hasn't had time to tune the power management features.

Intel's latest chips are fabbed at 65nm, while AMD is still only shipping chips fabbed at 90nm. This should give Intel a serious edge in the performance/heat ratio, but AMD's chips are so much more energy efficient that they are still competitive. (The current best performance/heat is the AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ ADD chip.) When AMD finally ships 65nm Opterons, those ought to be really great for dense server installations.

It's telling that even Dell is planning to ship servers with AMD chips. They announced a 4-core server; two dual-core Opterons. It wouldn't surprise me if they will be 65nm Opterons when they finally are released.

The article says that Intel is going to transition from 65nm to 45nm sometime in 2007, and to 34nm sometime in 2009. They beat AMD to 65nm big-time. They may well be at 34nm before AMD can make it to 45nm! Just imagine some sort of server chip with 16 cores... or more likely, 8 cores and a whole bunch of cache.

But we shouldn't count those chickens before they hatch. Right now Intel is at 65nm and AMD will be there soon.

steveha