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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 applications will make use of it, some won't. More cores is pretty much the same as more CPUs.
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.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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
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.
how many FPS can I get in quakeworld? With the +1000 FPS it would give, i'm sure I would be able to bunnyhop all the way across the 2fort5 outdoors area!
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 OpenMP0 1.shtmlh tml
"Multithreaded Game Engine Architectures "
http://gamasutra.com/features/20060906/monkkonen_
"Multi-Threaded Terrain Smoothing"
http://gamasutra.com/features/20060531/gruen_02.s
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
Kent's Farm is where Superboy grew up before he became Superman. It was a rights issue.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
260 Watts! We've been looking at the wrong factors - it appears that global warming is related to Moore's law.
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
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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?
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
There's an ad for PC World or Currys or something where the salesguy explains to some students that having an Intel (bing-bong-bing-bong) dual core processor means it can do two things at once - like sending an email and downloading music!
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.
As a sofware developer, I can't help but think the move to multiple cores is a good thing. In my mind, anything that makes software development MORE complex can only improve my employability.
Surely it's not necessary to sacrifice openoffice.org, can't it just be tuned a bit to keep its processor useage down? Maybe it will be the bottleneck for a few more years to come, but eventually it will make better use of system resources, I'm sure. Or are you just a Microsoft Office fanboy?
Four core and seven years ago chipzilla brought forth on this on this die, a new processor, conceived in vanity, and dedicated to the proposition that all CPUs shall require a nuclear power plant to function.
Guess they should have called the platform Gettysburg.
They should have made the FSB 4 Mhz faster. That'd just be too cool. Fight back AMD! Don't take that shit!
Is Linux Kernel compilation. It should rock there, that's an inherently parallelizable task.
:)
As a programmer, I want one. No, I want two
"Well, they've had twin-core - let's give them FOUR cores! And an extra one on the back!"
"It's... it's brilliant!"
Yes, Intel are the new Gillette. ;-)
Meta will eat itself
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.
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.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
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/
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.
The problem with threads:
i tem.5d61c1d591162e4b0ef1bd108bcd45f3/index.jsp?&pN ame=computer_level1_article&TheCat=1005&path=compu ter/homepage/0506&file=cover.xml&xsl=article.xsl
http://www.computer.org/portal/site/computer/menu
Basically, even the simplest tasks require significant armor plating to run correctly.
OTOH: Multi-PROCESS programming is far simpler than multi-THREADED programming.
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