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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!"
What sort of applications are they concerned about?
I'm not sure. But if I get a richer, more responsive mine sweeper then I'm all for it..
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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.
More multi-core functionality in Xcode and related tools would be pretty cool.
What else would you like it to do? It already distributes compiles very effectively across all the processors & cores you have. OS X itself does a fine job distributing load where possible. Of course, if people write single threaded CPU intensive apps, there's not a lot the compiler or the OS can do about that.
Are you looking for some way to have the compiler extract parallelism from the code implicitly without the developer having to write multithreaded code? That would be nice I'll admit.
Lets also not forget about those of us that do any kind of multi-tier development. I run the following while doing my development: 1) Eclipse 2) WebLogic 3) Apache 4) MQ 5) Outlook 6) Trillian 7) Music Match 8) FireFox I would love to run more. Like Oracle. I can't however because my 3 GHz machine just can't handle the load. Joe
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It's a no-brainer for any server. That's a pretty big market!
Servers are not desktops. Buying the fastest machine doesn't get you the fastest experience.
Google grew up buy chaining thousands of cheapo second hand caseless PC-s in a cluster. If they decided to spend their money on bleeding edge technology they'd probably have 3x faster servers, but twice less total computing power.
Especially since a huge bottleneck in servers are RAM and HDD IO (considering we don't put bandwidth in the equation which curiously is the first bottleneck a common server hits).
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"
Exactly. As computers get faster people will just move on to higher level languages that may not be as efficient. 5 years ago I don't think it was realistic to expect consumers to pay for a GUI based python program. Today, as long as there is an icon on their desktop, it's no problem. Faster hardware means the ability to use higher level languages and spend more time solving real world problems rather than specifics of the language.
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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.
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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).
Languages like Erlang and Haskell extract parallelism from the code without the developer having to write multithreaded code.
Because once they are, the duals I want will become the cheap alternative.
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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).
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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.
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.
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