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Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 Quad-Core Benchmarks
Slimpickin writes "Intel gave access to quad-core Kentsfield-based systems to select members of the press at IDF. The embargo has been lifted on a preview of performance numbers with the new 2.66GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processor. HotHardware showcases Intel quad-core performance from a few different angles, from digital video processing and encoding, to 3D modeling and rendering, along with a few of the more standard benchmarks. the new Intel quad-core puts up performance numbers, depending on the application, at nearly double the performance of a 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo processor based system. Core 2 Quad will also drop right into existing motherboards that are compatible with the Core 2 processor line."
With one really big exception: memory intensive processes. It looks like the shared l2 cache (amoung other things) is starting to hurt performance. Though this was expected, I am curious to see what the first AMD x4 will show.
I seem to remember a particular article in which everyone seemed to decry the chip before it came out, citing "wait for the independant reviews". True, do that, but this time maybe people will think of Intel with a little more credibility? But then again, this is slashdot!
2.66GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6700??
So now, now only have they gone back to pointing out the clock speed, they add the NVidia product name at the end? Surely there's got to be a simpler way to do this, without even taking into account AMD. I mean you have:
- Dual Processor Pentium
- Dual Core Pentium D
- Core 2 Solo
- Core 2 Duo
- Core 2 Quad
- Dual Processor Core 2 Quad
Seriously, that's some major word jumble and you haven't even specified anything like clock speed (I know it's not all about clock speed, but uniform naming to differentiate would help).
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
If an employee isn't smart enough to manage the differences between MS Word and OOo Writer by himself, show him the fucking door, because he's clearly so goddamn stupid he'll generate problems in other areas. Seriously.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
You've got a better imagination than I do, then. I can't see applications forking off copies of themselves and jockeying for position! If you meant "I can see running other, more memory-intensive apps in tandem" then duh, you'll use more memory. Exactly the same as you would on a single-core system. If you've got an app that scales well, it'll still take the same amount of memory no matter how hard it's exercising however many CPUs. Input set sizes are pretty much fixed, whether they're hard-coded or dynamically configured based on system size: your app will allocate the same amount of memory either because it always grabs 32M or because it always grabs 1/16th of total system memory. Number of CPUs has nothing to do with it. Unless there's some software that allocates one thread per CPU, and allocates some fixed buffer size per thread, which now that I mention it actually sounds reasonable for some classes of software, but I've never heard of it actually being done.
Just junk food for thought...
What the hell is with this Core2 Quad crap? It should be Core2 and Core4. You would have thought Intel would have learned from the nightmare Sun/Java went through with the whole "Java2 1.4" branding nightmare. Sun finally wized up and started calling everything Java 4, Java 5, and Java 6. Why would Intel start such a fiasco?
I get that they are trying to say "Hey look, it is a totally different architecture!" But calling it Core2 isn't going to do that. People will just end up calling them Dual Core or Quad Core anyways, not Dual Core2 and Quad Core2. It's just going to detract from their branding, not help it.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
You don't void your warranty for upgrading a Mac or any other computer. Your "friends" are wrong about this, at least in the US, because it would violate the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.
My interpretation of Magnuson-Moss is that it prohibits bundling, like say, Apple requiring you purchase Apple-branded CPU's to upgrade. Pulling out your own CPU is probably still a warranty killer. They just can't automatically call it void if the problem is obviously unrelated and a defect in the merchandise, like oh, the paint starts yellowing after you open it up (that's about the only thing I can think of that's TOTALLY implausible to connect to a cause of opening up the case).
However, I bet you anything Apple's warranty says Limited Warranty. At that point they're largely off the hook. State laws may still apply.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
But yeah, it's got to be one of the stupidest naming schemes from a major vendor of anything that I've seen in a long time. I was looking forward to a Pentium V. Sure it would have seemed a bit redundant, but so is the Core 2 Duo chip that's in the new laptop I've been eyeing...
However, just running everything across HyperTransport is an obviously worse approach for core-to-core communication than shared L2.
The real question is how important is core-to-core communication versus core-to-memory for "regular" workloads?
My gut says that for consumer-level workloads, memory is more important than inter-core communication because most consumer-level parallel processing is of the "embarassingly parallel" type - specifically codec processing - video, audio and "photoshop plugin" types.
My imagination may be lacking, but I can't think of any consumer-level compute-intensive workloads that are also fine-grained enough where inter-core communication is critical. Perhaps some of the distributed-processing/seti-at-home type jobs could make use of fine-grained parallelism within each "chunk" of processing, I don't know.
So, it is entirely possible that the downsides of shared-cache, like bus contention and false cache-line sharing, could be a hindrence in comparison to the sort-of "shared-nothing" approach that AMD has taken with their designs.