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Intel's Quad Core CPU Reviewed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the core-buzzword-bingo dept.

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."

20 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. Same old dilemma, new format. by sdaemon · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Same old dilemma, new format. by fm6 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Gosh darn, you ended the flame war before it had a chance to start. Shame on you!

    2. Re:Same old dilemma, new format. by sdaemon · · Score: 4, Funny

      My apologies. The jury will disregard my previous comment. Proceed with flames...

    3. Re:Same old dilemma, new format. by SharpFang · · Score: 5, Funny

      One core dedicated to enemy AI.
      One core for physics calculations
      One core for the game itself.
      One core for OS, daemons and to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

      Sure nothing for any -current- game.

      --
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  2. Experts? by Angst+Badger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Experts? by steveha · · Score: 4, Informative

      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

      --
      lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
  3. Re:It's the bandwidth stupid! by osho_gg · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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

  4. Props for Intel for being early by elh_inny · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    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 :D) gaming platform is now multi-core.

    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.

  5. but the real question is by Rooked_One · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!

  6. 260 Watts! by dbIII · · Score: 4, Funny

    260 Watts! We've been looking at the wrong factors - it appears that global warming is related to Moore's law.

  7. Re:One other thing by Jeremi · · Score: 4, Funny
    Core Duo, Core Solo. What are we going to call this one?


    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

    --


    I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  8. Re:One other thing by evilviper · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.
    --
    Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
  9. With four cores... by Bazman · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!

  10. Bring on the more complicated architectures! by Rodyland · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  11. FSB by Dersaidin · · Score: 4, Funny

    They should have made the FSB 4 Mhz faster. That'd just be too cool. Fight back AMD! Don't take that shit!

  12. One thing they didn't benchmark on it.... by gsasha · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Is Linux Kernel compilation. It should rock there, that's an inherently parallelizable task.

    As a programmer, I want one. No, I want two :)

  13. Re:One other thing by tygerstripes · · Score: 4, Funny
    "How can we make our CPUs more attractive without actually improving their performance?"
    "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
  14. Re:Us coders are delaying the Singularity! by joto · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  15. Re:Us coders are delaying the Singularity! by ardor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  16. Exactly by joss · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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/