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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."
Some nice example where more processing power (even in parralel) is nice is virtualisation, whether at home or on servers. Running multiple OSes in parallel will saturate all your processing power nicely. :D) gaming platform is now multi-core.
What's more quad-core surely gives more processing power per watt and per cubic meter which is a very important factor for big folks like Google or whereever hosting space is expensive.
Even John Carmack who used to be very much against multi-cores for gamins recently elaborated much on this area in his keynote. Practically any modern (lets call it nextgen
So I'd say overall it's nice that Intel is pushing this so fast, if developers start to realize that multi-cores are hitting mainstream, they will have to take that into account and by the time Intel and AMD launch 8-cores, there should be more software to take advantage of it.
Then who were they provided by, exactly?
TFA spends a little time describing that Intel doesn't have enough package area to use this iteration of the Core 2 Duo to make a 4 die, 8 core part. So, my question is: Ignoring likely heat and bandwith issues, is there a SMP architectural reason they can't put 3 dies in one package?
Until such time as MS/Oracle/VendorOfChoice decides to (re-)institute per-core (or even better - per-virtual-core) licencing...
You act like being raped by MS/Oracle/VendorOfChoice isn't a priviledge and an honour.
so does this mean that the parent is gonna be modded flamebait?
. o O ( TwO hEaDs ArE mOrE tHaN oNe... )
Some applications will make use of it, some won't. More cores is pretty much the same as more CPUs.
And it was quite obvious which, parallelizable processes like media encoding saw 80% improvement. Some of the rendering tests saw very impressive improvement as well, but that's not really new and that's why those people have been paying for SMP setups in the past too. The gaming improvements were at the moment none, unlike the Core Duo which spanked the PIVs. They're really stretching at straws saying "it's a must for HDTV editing" - indeed, but how many are editing/compressing HDTV on their media PC? HDV home video is still rare as hell, HD-DVD / Blu-Ray can't be recompressed because of DRM. So maybe the ones with MythTV and OTA HDTV (or the few HDTV channels in Europe), but that's pretty much it. For what it's worth, I think the recommendation is to use hardware compression (or direct stream rips) anyway, and I imagine it won't take that long to get hardware cards which'll put out HDTV in one of the better HD-DVD/Blu-Ray formats, either VC-1 or H.264. At that point, who needs it? Maybe if they get the power consumption down to 2x Core 2 Duo (was that confusing or what) it'll be a nice way to pack them even tighter in servers. Beyond that... what?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Damn, forgot the breaks, If you want to actualy Read my post, this might be more legible.
;)
Vista will hopefully solve that problem, and 'progress' can continue unabated.
But you have excellent points, I would have modded you up but I would rather respond.
Processor makers need to really work on energy efficiency of all their desktops, these speeds were achieved through sheer increases in heat and power consumption, and its really flatly unacceptable (My current desktop heats up my office to a toasty 89 degrees in the middle of winter if I close the door)
Truly computers have become terribly wasteful, Other than environmental impact (less lead and harmful metals) I doubt the $399 computer of today contributes less waste than the $2000 dollar computer of 1990, The only change is my 386 lasted for 7 years, and the 399 dollar computer, isn't very upgradable, comes crippled from the start, and gets thrown out when infested with spyware, because the price point makes it a disposable commodity.
The power saving features built into computers now are great, but its only so good if the processor is just short of having a nuclear powered core.
Not only that, but with your idea hopefully less money can be put into stopgap number increases down dead end roads and make processor manufacturers build their architectures with a little more forethought. Maybe if every 3-5 years there was a responsible and substantial leap in computing power people would upgrade in regular phases, without wasting so much energy, and without so many confusing acronyms and model numbers. Each generation would have a nice leap in power, and a new OS to match, each computer manufacturer would keep models to a minimum, and just slide the prices down during that generation until it hits everyone's sweet spot. Upgrades during the generation can focus on power consumption instead of computing power, programmers can aim and test for certain generations of computers, and system requirements will be simplified greatly, Less confusion, less waste, morestandardized component generations. "This software runs on generation 4 and 5 computing components"
Of course gaming is to blame for this constant demand, So I figure nothing will ever change until we hit that mythical peak in which everyone says "Good enough" and the race to real time photorealism is over.
(And yes, I too am very happy on my 6 year old system, I just wish I could give it a ram upgrade, The only problem being... I mistakenly thought RD-Ram was the future, Check the prices on a gig of that and have a laugh at my expense, In conclusion, sorry for the rambling, Slashdot is my outlet for insomnia)
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
Is Linux Kernel compilation. It should rock there, that's an inherently parallelizable task.
:)
As a programmer, I want one. No, I want two
I grew up programming transputer clusters cos I figured Moore's law wqould have to slow down sometime and then we would have to move to multiprocessor systems. Efficiently using more than a couple of cores is *not* easy.. and it opens up a whole realm of interesting algorithmic work where basic problems with established solutions suddenly become open again.
Its about fucking time...
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Here we see the problems with measuring performance and distinguishing it from responsiveness - sometimes it is very hard to do. The blocking IO almost always harms responsiveness, not performance. A file manager scanning thousands of files for thumbnails generation has responsiveness problems if this is done without multithreading.
In fact, I would see responsiveness as the bigger problem nowadays. It affects the user directly (for example, the file manager not reacting to any kind of input while scanning a large directory) and is ignored too often.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
before Microsoft starts charging more for multi-core installations? Seriously, if quad core means fewer boxes in the rack, it means fewer licenses.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
One core dedicated to enemy AI.
One core for physics calculations
That is NOT the way you design multi threaded aplications. No, what you do is to identify varius proceses that you need to do. Perhaps one of them is to read user inputs, read inputs comming in from the network (Internet). another to move the "camera" and then one process for each object to be simulated. So you might have 40 or 100 threads running. Then you would depend on the operating system to allocate physical "cores" to software threads. With this type if design performance can scale as you add cores. ASo in 5 to 10 years when we all are using 32 or 64 core machines it really will run 8 times faster How many threads is an enginerring decision. For example if you have four cars running on a raod do you use a thread for each car or one thread for all cars, another for all people. Thread per object is a radical design but thread per type of object is less radical
"As I recall, the 6510 in the C-64 didn't even have hardware multiplication!" :)
that is correct and also no floating point. But it had zero wait-state memory and was actually pretty fast for it's day
Also only 2 registers and a single accumulator. Oh and those where all 8 bit.
You kids multiply? It is nothing but a repetitive add anyway.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.