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: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.

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.