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Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 Reviews
An anonymous reader writes, "The first reviews of Intel's new quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6700 have emerged this morning and opinion is mixed. TrustedReviews were blunt: 'There is nothing new on display here. Very few people will need quad cores...' while Tech Report think 'many owners of this beast may be stuck waiting for new applications to arrive that use it to its fullest ability.' The boys at bit-tech managed to overclock to 3.47GHz and found the first killer application: quad-core support in the Source Engine! Nice!"
Nothing New. I wish there would be some real inovation in CPUs so that we could take over the world from home, and not have to use the damn main frame at work!
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2866
What sort of applications are they concerned about? Wouldn't any program with multiple threads, or even four separate applications, make full use of the four cores?
If they can point out what other consumer-level processors can do this, I'd be happy to pick some old hardware at reduced prices.
Given articles like this on the difficulty of using said multi cores it seems like we could use more tools to improve the utility of these chips. More multi-core functionality in Xcode and related tools would be pretty cool.
I thought it was a good idea
But it's nice to have.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Yeah, people don't need quad cores, nor do they need more than 640 KB of memory!
The applications will come soon enough for those.
'many owners of this beast may be stuck waiting for new applications to arrive that use it to its fullest ability.'
Am I the only one who sees nothing wrong with this? Of course there are few application that make full use of quad cores. Before now there weren't any widespread quad core systems so why would programmers design software around it?
If chip makers waited for programers to write software and the programers waited for the chip makers there would be no innovation. Somebody has to make first move.
"If chip makers waited for programers to write software and the programers waited for the chip makers there would be no innovation. Somebody has to make first move."
Like open source?
...that many people won't need quad-core machines. They will be entry-level within five years. With the advent of hypervisor based virtualization, computing is going to make a huge change for all OSes. We will no longer be running on bare metal at the OS level and we'l see performance that actually can exceed running on bare metal thanks to hypervisors on the x86 platform. If I had the cash, I'd be getting one of these or whatever AMD releases in response as I'd really like to turn my 16 boxes at home into one or two giant boxes that provide the services of 16 boxes in isolated virtual machines. And if you don't think most people don't have 16 boxes at home, think again...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
So there are few applications that make use of four cores? Who cares? Everything uses at least one, and now I can use four of them at once - no more letting a background video transcode cause the one playing to stutter to a halt, for instance.
Don't these people have multiple things to do?
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
It's a no-brainer for any server. That's a pretty big market!
Sure, we could go to four cores next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let's play it safe. Let's make a larger cache and call it the AMD 64 X2Super. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why! You think it's crazy? It is crazy. But I don't give a shit. From now on, we're the ones who have the edge in the multi-core game. Are they the best a man can get? Fuck, no. AMD is the best a man can get. What part of this don't you understand? If two cores is good, and cores blades is better, obviously five cores would make us the best fucking processor that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the processor game by clinging to the two-core industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, five cores is the biggest chance of all.
Very few people will need quad cores
Please. Anyone working on a large C++ project might spend hours waiting for a compile after changing a header file. Compilation of multiple files can easily be done in parallel, cutting the time down by a factor of four.
Not to mention that commonplace multicore processors (especially like 8 cores and more, which can very rarely be saturated by single-thread application) will shift a lot of compiler-writing effort into autoparallelization, which will make the many cores useful, for at least some applications. Not to mention scientific application (big matrices, anyone?) and games (have UI, AI, rigid-body physics, and elastic deformation physics all on different cores).
Give us the 80 cores you promised. We'll figure out what to do with them.
It may be fast, but "Quad Core core 2" is just plain goofy! What's next "Quad Cores core 2 duo quad dually quadra core"
For those of you new to the dual-CPU game, there's a little trick I use to keep things moving on my systems. I set processor affinity for my virus scanner/ firewall to one CPU (core) and now it cannot saturate my system when doing a scan (imagecfg.exe from MS Admin Tools sets this permanently).
With four cores, you can set one core for virus scanning, one for firewall. Note this doesn't exclude the use of those cores with other apps, merely limits the set-affinity apps to however many cores you decide.
Four cores, eight cores, doesn't matter because the game is the same: wait a year and get in cheaper. As for virtualization being the future, well maybe, but not the near future. Licensing restrictions will keep it hampered for another few years.
-BA
How long until Intel releases a quad-core notebook CPU? And does anyone know what the codename is for that?
I want one of these but I need the portability of a notebook.
HotHardware also shows big gains for the the new quad-core and its power consumption and thermals are in check as well!
I had a chance to play with one of these bad boys at my last job as a QA engineer. With the tools I had available (games and basic Windows tools), I was not able to get the processor above 40% utilization. Any slow down was due to HDD access rather than the processor. So while I was able to play Ghost Recon at full res and run a virus scan while I ripped an audio CD, the only drop in game play came when the game had to access the HDD. There was no real performance boost over the Core2 Duo. So what we need is a much faster way access files to see any real performance gains. I'm holding out for affordable solid state HDD's.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Dude, when you spam, you're supposed to remember to include the link to your product.
Kids these days.
every time a new processor comes out, there is a debate over the usefullness. The the video editing guy comes out and puts the debate to rest. :-)
Why?
I work for a company that runs their application in a clustered windows shop. The cluster is active passive for highest availability. Microsoft and "high availability" is the greatest contradiction. Ever.
Every once in a while, we max the two dual-cores out on the server. So a quad core should help us avoid those maxed-out periods.
I don't know anything about windows cluster, is there a way to add more servers as processing power in this environment?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
the article was overall an interesting read. it points out the importance that new multicore-CPUs will bring to application developers, and their threading implications.
made me get interested in threading issues with cores, and how they have chosen a Hybrid Threading direction.
also, notice the focus on improved AI and realism this brings to games. i see here a shift from gpu based rendering, to more cpu based rendering with improved AI and particle systems (see the rain video in the article).
The folks at Boot Daily have also posted benchmarks from the upcoming RTS game, Supreme Commander which is multi-threaded and also have the new Source Engine benchmarks as well. It looks to me as if this chip will be quite popular among the enthusiast market.
Intel had the sheer gall to trademark "Core", so IBM simply lost the marketting advantage despite having a long history of multi-core CPUs.
Apple were left with no real choice at all if they wanted their Apples to have official Cores, officially.
This is a little off topic, but Intel has got be confused here. What is the difference other than the buzzwords:
- Intel(r) Core(r) 2 Duo(r) E6300 Processor
- Intel(r) Viiv(TM) Technology(TM) Core(r) 2 Duo(r) E6300 Processor
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The applications will come....
Compilation is rarely a CPU-bound task. Relatively little processing is done when compiling a C++ program, for instance. Most of the time is spent accessing memory, in order to build and manipulate the AST and other data structures. It's these near-constant memory accesses that congest the bus, and vastly reduce system performance.
You don't really need multiple processors or cores to enhance compilation speeds. What you need to do is vastly increase the system's bus speed and bandwidth. In effect you're looking back to a situation more akin to IBM's mainframes, where the IO throughput is phenomenal, even if the processing capabilities aren't great. The vastly increased IO capabilities will allow IO-intensive tasks to complete much quicker.
lol
(Note to self : replying to an idiot FP guarantees the post will be read among the first...)
/usr/bin/top or taskmgr.exe, and if it says more than 4 then you have a use for quad-core.
How's that "Nothing new"? Count the threads in your
It's because of idiots like that, always saying "but you dun'need that" that no-one bought SCSI and we've beeen (and still partly are) stuck with that crap IUDE interface, and that it's so f*ing expensive and hard to get a multi-CPU mobo, and so on forever.
Grrr.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
I only NEED vi and serial terminal, that does not mean I WANT to run that.....
:)
yes..I NEED quad cores
Because once they are, the duals I want will become the cheap alternative.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Or even Vista, and three weather-in-taskbar spywares/viruses/trojans/botnet client/spam senders threads running concurrently.
Heck, with what's common nowadays on Joe 6pack's computer, you may even need Niagra-grade ( 32x ) multithreading capability in the processor to be able run all the crap and still have some processing power left for the web browser (on which Joe is continuously trying to punch the monkey).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"if it says more than 4 then you have a use for quad-core"
.. well a zero core!
Odds are most of those threads are sleeping and a quad core will be no faster than
I'll probably pick it up for my next batch of servers and home machines both. I just recently upgraded to Core 2 Duo CPUs and I can see and feel a major difference. Maybe for the kids who use one app at a time and mostly stick to Windows it doesn't matter. I run dozens of apps at a time under both Windows and Linux and I do some heavy server work in Linux that can use every bit of power it can get. I love these new CPUs. I no longer have to shell out major bucks for a mobo that can handle four CPUs - now I can just throw in a quad core processor and get similar results.
:)
Sadly, I'd probably still buy a SMP mobo that could handle four of these processors because I could use the processing power. It'd better come with support for a lot of RAM though.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
'There is nothing new on display here. Very few people will need quad cores...'
Uh, hello? You must be a n00b tech journalist. They said the same thing about the 486 DX 66. And remember Bill Gates' quote from back in 1980? What was it again...?
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I do work on a 8 CPU Sun server at my place of employment. I can assure you there is a HUGE difference between make -j8 and make.
Hell, I have a dual core system at home and its the same way.
CPU power does make a big difference when compiling stuff, there is a lot of processing going on. You are turning high-level code into optimized low-level machine code, after all.
I wish they'd work on low-end 4- or more core processors.
For general computing, I'd rather have a quad-core 500 MHz processor than a single-core 2 GHz one. It'd run cooler and be more responsive, even though the peak performance would be lower.
Ideally I'd like a computer with a display engine running an OpenGL-based remote display server, and one or more compute engines... and maybe even a separate processor for the file system with its own battery-backed RAM. Not just a RAID controller, a NAS box inside the computer.
Count the threads in your /usr/bin/top or taskmgr.exe, and if it says more than 4 then you have a use for quad-core.
... I take it you never heard of sleeping processes then. Or you want to argue they sleep sooo much better on their own core.
... if you have the pockets to put something marketed for high-end servers into your desktop, go right ahead. Others, more price-conscious, will get a generously filled external eSATA RAID enclosure with less money than you'd pay for a decently-sized SCSI RAID setup (I see the 74GB drives are coming down in price; now remember to buy a good controller as well). And for desktop-type usage patterns one simply cannot do without the enterprise-class features of SCSI ... yes ... one's pron collection deserves the best, right? Uh, wait ...
Reeeeally
Unless you have 2+ (or 3+ for quad-core) processes/threads active and contending for CPU time you can do quite well with single core.
Homework question: why is make recommended to be run with the option -j (# of CPUs + 1) ?
As to your remark SCSI
Note to self: replying to an idiotic early post that will go down in mod flames guarantees that your post (if visible) will be among the last in the list - so post AC and don't worry about it.
Relic's new RTS Company of Heroes supports quad core too. Has anybody found game benchmarks with CoH or any other games that are designed to take advantage of 2+ cores? The little Half Life link provide was impressive.
C'mon, everything sleeps better with a quad core ;-). Seriously though, I want one... I just gave away my (really old) quad xeon, and I need something to heat my apartment in these cold Canadian winters.
There are two types of people in the world: those who divide people into two types and those who don't.
You might not need 4 CPUs, but people that run this kind of software do:
Cakewalk SONAR 6
This is the kind of software where even today's fastest systems can run out of steam. It needs huge amounts of RAM and as much CPU processing as you can possibly give it. And it already takes full advantage of 4 cores.
Some people do more than just browse the internet and write emails.
http://www.overclockers.com.au/article.php?id=5199 19
The site claims that "Intel's quad-core QX6700 CPU offers stunning computing power. At the same clockspeed it runs anywhere between 25% and 70% faster than the already lightning-fast dual-core E6700."
After reading this review and the other reviews posted on Slashdot, I think that Intel bombed this launch bigtime. Perhaps AMD's true quadcore chip will trounce Intel's new offering. Only time will tell.
Count the threads in your /usr/bin/top or taskmgr.exe, and if it says more than 4 then you have a use for quad-core.
As others have noted, most of these will not be active processes. Instead, look at "load average" numbers, which show the number of processes that are waiting for CPU time. Roughly speaking, if this number hovers around 4, you'll benefit from a quad-core.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Because of the idiots who stuck with IDE, we now have SATA. What I wish is that everyone had gone crazy for firewire, so that we could have native firewire storage devices. I want hard drives and optical drives with a IEEE1394 port in their ass. Firewire is fast and has low overhead, and in a lot of ways it's very similar to SCSI; it supports lots of devices (up to 127 by spec, but most host adapters only support 63 targets) and today you can get 400, 800, and 1000Mbps versions (though AFAIK the 1000Mbps stuff does not degrade to 800.) In theory there is supposed to be 1.6Gbps next, and later 3.2Gbps over fiber. But none of that may ever happen, because people are not all that enthusiastic about it - and I don't understand why.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Way to plagiarize, you even left in the word blades at one point.
At least post the source of your fake wit:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930
GotFrag Hardware overclocked it to 3.63 so I don't know what the big deal is about the 'bit-tech boys'. http://hardware.gotfrag.com/portal/story/35229/
the bee's knees
The Kentsfield release is all well and good, but I need those Quad-Core Xeons! Anyone know when we can expect them?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Whenever someone mentions higher level languages, I think Lisp, not C#.
What is high level when you don't have closures, first order functions, or macros?
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
linky
Has anyone spotted any benchmarks of kernel compile times (or any other gcc based compile time benchmarks for that matter) ?
I would like very much to own one of these processors, and fully intend on buying one for my RetailEdge bundle motherboard.
I run real-time hard crypto on all of my disks (except my boot disk, this is a Windows system after all) and I'm not talking about that wimpy EFS either. I'm severely CPU-bottlenecked right now, with a dual-core processor.
Having quad cores, I'd use an affinity manager to force the encryption/decryption processes to bind only to the second physical CPU, giving the crypto (and maybe some other background processes like my media servers and so forth) their own dual-core infrastructure, but keeping it from needing to talk on the Northbridge too much. For the rest of the system, bind it only to the first 2 physical CPUs.
For these types of situations, letting the computer manage the resources itself isn't necessarily the best way to do it, especially when the scheduler and infrastructure weren't really designed with what you're doing in mind. A little human intuition (let's keep things from needing to talk over the northbridge too much in the first place!) goes a long way...
Even if this yielded no performance gains at all, I should certainly think that having two modules/4 processors would allow for more scaling of single-threaded applications at one time, anyway.
640 Cores ought to be enough for anyone.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Even Joe Sixpack will benefit. His MSIE will have one browser and his minimum of three rootkits/spambots/spyware background processes will run on the other three cores without bringing his machine to a screeching halt.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Some applications will really benefit from this. Virtualization is one of them. I run as many VMware Virtual Machines as I can on my system for all kind of testing, and I've noticed that their products scale really well the more CPUs or cores you have, even the free VMware server.
Using fast memory, fast I/O cards and disks and XFS as a filesystem, the number of VMs per physical box will increase substantially with these new processors.
1) listening to music
2) your email is open
3) your web browser is open
4) your work is open (For me its dev tools, for my wife is video editing)
Thats 4 things already, working concurrently in separate apps. And to emphasize, most of the apps mentioned use at least 2 threads. So thats 8 things going on at least some of the time.
Further, Apple has announced for Leopard that OpenGL will use a thread for pumping data to the GPU. So that means for any App that uses GL (lots in Leopards modern hardware accelerated world) thats already 2 threads. I could go on, but you see my point, hopefully. With quad cores, you are going to have a smoother, faster experience.
Our user experience today is not just the app in front of our eyes, its the window to the side, the music in the background, the effects, the email, the web.
All at once.
Many streams of graphics (apps, effects...) ,
many streams of information from the web (email, chat, webpages, RSS...),
many streams of sound (Music, webpages, email alerts, incoming chat sounds....),.
All at once. All at once. All at once. I want more Cores!
It's really not for Windows users... it's for 3D rendering shops and iTV so that we can compress/decompress video on the fly, and play itunes.
Then we have two cores to spare to run a windows based game.
I guess all that threaded Code and OpenGL are finally paying off.
Yippee!
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
That is what RAID controllers are now - like the current 3ware ones with a powerpc processor. There are also file servers full of SATA drives that pretend to be a single big SCSI external disk.
I did not write anything resembling that - 1.8 GHz is not 33 MHz. Perhaps your reading comprehension replaced the word "A" with something like "every" instead from your imagination - in which case I suggest you actually read a post before replying to it.
High quality case??? Are you buying plastic ones for a couple farthings? All the ones I've seen are just a bunch of punched out sheet metal, even the lower priced ones. Some of the "high quality" cases seem to be transparent molded plastic (I don't buy flashy crap), but for all the extra cost, they are just more "cool" looking, not any more durable. Is there some titanium case made to withstand a nuclear war? What problems have you had with cases? I can beat up on all of my cases and they don't fall apart. I have a ten year old case on my 486. It has been through hell, yet the case is still flawless. The only thing wrong with the entire computer is the ancient video card died (and it is Vesa Local Bus--just try to find a card. I dare you. ;-) With some cleaning I could easily reuse the case. The emachine's case seems just as solid. I didn't pay a premium for any of my cases either.
High quality cases, fans and power supplies don't cost that much. Unless you are talking about flashy casemodder parts which are more for show than anything. In addition, why do you need to "upgrade" a case? ...and if the power supply indeed is high quality, it should last at least ten years.
Fans don't cost that much, so there is no excuse to pay hundreds of dollars just for them--maximum $50 for a more than ample supply. But who cares about fans? Unless you go for the ultra cheap crappiest ones you can find, the mechanical parts on the lower priced fans last about as long as the more expensive ones.
For a new computer, the cases, fans, and power supply shouldn't cost more than $200 for the highest quality. Any more and you are being ripped off or you have some very special needs (what, are you in the military and use it in a tank?). For an upgrade if you need a new case or power supply, they were most certainly not high quality. I have had one power supply fail, and I found it in a dumpster.
Unless you guys are talking about brand name computers (not parts), then well, you always get crap. If you don't have time to put a computer together yourself, then get some knowledgeable kid to do it for $20. It only takes about an hour.