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

Same old dilemma, new format.

[sdaemon]

Some applications will make use of it, some won't. More cores is pretty much the same as more CPUs.

Experts?

[Angst Badger]

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?

These are obviously experts who have never heard of servers.

I'm perfectly content with my 1.2GHz single-core single-processor laptop, but I'd sure as shit like to have more muscle in the database cluster I'm responsible for maintaining at work. Whether these chips are a good solution remains to be seen, but that's a separate question.

Re:Experts?

[Aadain2001]

Both AMD and Intel know they can't focus soley on the server or desktop market, but on both. While these chips are great for servers (what high powered chip isn't??), they will also be targeted at desktop machines (and may laptops in the future). With the performance of single core CPUs reaching their limit (thank you leakage current and high temps), multicore and multiproc systems will be the future of computing. Yes you can quote me on that.

Re:It's the bandwidth stupid!

[osho_gg]

You are only saying this because the current state of the art is bandwith limited. It is much too trivialized generalization to say it "it is bandwith stupid!". Computer architecture and preformance is all about compromises, bottlenecks and parameter tuning. Not so far in future, there will be more bandwidth and then the limiting factor could be the speed/size of the memory. Or, it could be the power envelop of the entire system, Or, it could be back to the raw performance of CPUs. Or, it could be limiting opportunities for parallelization in most common workload for a typical office/home user. A little further out in future, there will be integrated GPUs, maybe even memory etc. and then it could be dinosaur hard-drive technology that may be limiting factors of overall system performance.

At any point of time in the history of computer performance, to say that, "it is stupid *anything*!" is much too simplistic point of view IMHO.

Osho

Re:One other thing

[evilviper]

Based on Intel's recent naming conventions, I think they'll call it the "Core 2 Duo Duo", so as to generate as much confusion as possible :^P

No, that's much to straight forward for Intel.

I expect something along the lines of: "Core 2 Tre Quad Pentium 405".

And AMD's AM3 5235+ 3.1G X4 Thunderon is faster and cheaper, anyhow.

from intel's point of view

[Anonymous Coward]

it should be spelled the quad core due owe, they think it is their due for you to owe them a lot of money for something you really don't need.

The last couple of years I am finding it extremely hard justifying upgrades. I can surf fast, web pages render fast, can already watch a nice dvd movie or listen to fairly good sound, etc, and other multitasking things-all with a barely past 1 ghz cpu and half a gig of old slow RAM and a 45 dollar vid card. If I need some "upgrade", well, I still have two empty RAM slots, and that's cheap and probably a lot more cost effective in real world use than having to upgrade to some new chip that takes a brand new mobo as well. I am trying to see where having some webpage open 5 milliseconds faster or something like that is any sort of huge advantage that I should pay hundreds of dollars for. I's not like I would kick if it was only 20 bucks or something, but....not seeing it, computers hit a "good enough" level a few years ago now it seems, and I have heard that from any number of people in meatspace as well.

  I like a variety of gadgets, not just computers, and I'd say for the bulk of humanity out there, what they have right now (I am just generally speaking now) for computing power is actually filling the bill quite well. I realise that companies have to keep selling to stay in business, but this arms race is also creating a lot of planetary waste and over production of honestly unneeded stuff when it comes to computers. And cellphones are even more stupid is it REALLY necessary to get a new one and throw the old one away every few months? I would rather see this silicon (and peoples extra money they would have blown on an unneeded new computer) go to stuff like solar panels for the next few years ahead, that industry needs it a lot more and will help to drop prices there and help society as well.. I like consuming electricity and what it does, but I would like to step up to the plate and *produce* a little of it as well, especially with something that will come with a 30 year warranty like most PV panels do now.

Anyway, just a thought on this subject, I think it would be better if they told these chip places to just go into idle from a flat out race for a spell, give people a chance to really *use* what they already have, do some more R&D, and skip to every third generation or so to mass produce and sell.

Re:from intel's point of view

[keesh]

Speaking as a software developer, I need the extra cores. Not for customers to run the software. For me, to compile things.

My previous development box was an Athlon XP 1700+. It did a full compile and test run of my current project in about sixteen minutes. I've just been upgraded to a Core Duo 2, which does it in three (make has a parallelise option, so it can use both cores). Give me a box that's twice as fast (which twice as many cores is, for compiling) and the compiler will finally be able to keep up with the coding, which means no time wasted sitting around.

Is it worth the money? For some people, yes. For others, clearly not. I couldn't justify getting a super expensive IBM pSeries box as a development system, but a cheapo x86 desktop doesn't even show up on the budget...

Re:Us coders are delaying the Singularity!

[joto]

Why is it so hard to get developers to write decent multi-threaded code? It's not that hard,

Let me put it this way. If all the developers in the world were as smart as you think you are, it would not be that hard. As it is, however, coming up with scalable, manageable, efficient ways of writing multi-threaded code, in a way that is future-proof, as opposed to simply optimized for todays generation of hardware, is hard. Very hard. Not as in research-subject hard, but as in continuing-research-for decades-has-still-not-brought-us-much-closer-to-a- solution hard!

, and using threads properly can almost always improve performance and/or responsiveness on single proc/core machines to boot.

Let me rephrase part of the above sentence: "using threads properly can...". Did you notice which word I emphasized? Can you guess why?

Any idiot can use threads. The difficulty is to find the right granularity of threads (which is related to what kind of hardware you've got), which tasks are parallelizable, which parallelizable tasks should (or should not) get parallelized because of communication overhead and other factors (which is also related to what kind of hardware you've got), and so on.

It is also important to note, that few existing programs are designed from scratch today. In fact, almost all existing programs were designed in the past! In the past they didn't have affordable multicore (or multi-CPU) computers. And thus, those old designs didn't take that into account.

Re:Us coders are delaying the Singularity!

[ardor]

Why is it so hard to get developers to write decent multi-threaded code? It's not that hard, and using threads properly can almost always improve performance and/or responsiveness on single proc/core machines to boot.

Because it IS harder. It introduces new pitfalls (deadlocks, livelocks, race conditions), debugging is harder (gdb with multithreaded programs.. brrr), old paradigma have to be thrown overboard (and new ones introduced, such as task- or stream-based processing). Also, threads NEVER improve performance on a single-core machine. They do help with responsiveness, however. If you want performance boosts, use a multicore machine.

Re:Us coders are delaying the Singularity!

[Sebastopol]

The problem with threads:

http://www.computer.org/portal/site/computer/menui tem.5d61c1d591162e4b0ef1bd108bcd45f3/index.jsp?&pN ame=computer_level1_article&TheCat=1005&path=compu ter/homepage/0506&file=cover.xml&xsl=article.xsl

Basically, even the simplest tasks require significant armor plating to run correctly.

OTOH: Multi-PROCESS programming is far simpler than multi-THREADED programming.