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Intel Takes Quad Core To the Desktop
Rob writes to mention a Computer Business Review Online article about Intel's official launch of the Kentsfield chipset. Their Quad Core offering, Intel is claiming, is up to 80% faster than the dual-core Conroe released this past July. From the article: "Kentsfield, a 2.66GHz chip with a 1066MHz front-side bus, is more for computational-heavy usage, including digital content creation, engineering analysis, such as CAD, and actuarial and other financial applications. Steve Smith, director of operations for Intel digital enterprise group, claimed rendering is 58% faster for users building digital content creation systems, for video, photo editing or digital audio. In other words, Kentsfield is for high-end desktops or workstations only. For the average office worker who uses their PC for general productivity apps, such as communications and garden-variety computing, Smith recommended the Core 2 Duo from 'a price point and performance perspective.'"
"Core 2 Extreme quad-core QX6700" - There's a mouthful. It's funny that Intel is continually trying to downplay the importance of this chip for the average user. They say it's best for "more for computational-heavy usage, including digital content creation, engineering analysis, such as CAD" ... sounds like gamers would flock to this. Maybe they realize it's a rushed product (to beat AMD to the punch), and it will be in short supply?
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So how does Minesweeper run on it?
First off, I'm not criticizing only AMD or Intel, I think they're both guilty of concentrating on perceived performance on desktop CPUs. They don't care how much power the chip consumes or how much heat it dissipates, they only care about what the average consumer sees as immediate performance. To me, performance can be multiple things and considering that you could fry an egg on my P4 no matter how big the heat sink is
What's next is simply that which is cheapest to research and develop while giving the user a higher number in some category that Dell or the sales people are sporting as bigger/better/faster/stronger. This is alright but I don't think the average consumer ever stops and asks themselves what the power consumption will be for such a CPU or what its expected time to failure is. I really hope that at some point, the chips are fast enough to run your basic operating system and the manufacturers split into two lines where one is aimed for longevity and power consumption (like some laptop model processors) instead of just speed.
My work here is dung.
4 cores is great and all, but I know they are still working on support for games such as many Steam offerings with only 2 cores in terms of multi-threading, so I'd have to imagine that game support to really take advantage of a 4-core system would be a long way away. I was still psyched about the low voltage powerhouses for laptops, and I'm wondering how much extra heat 4 cores are going to put out as well. How many apps are really geared to take advantage of 4 cores atm, really?
Missing a marketing opportunity. ... now with Intel Foursome!
After Effects Rendering. Final Cut Pro HD Rendering. Maya Rendering. Video Compression [Rendering}. If you've ever done what they target this processor for, you'll COMPLETELY appreciate any time NOT spent watching the growbar work. Bring it on, I've been waiting to replace several G5s doing this all day, every day.
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From what I've read about Intel's quad-core; it is not native like AMD's will be. They are basically are going to have two dual core's and they will communicate via FSB. That sucks compare to AMD's offering which will be native._ frontpage&Itemid=1&limit=10&limitstart=20
http://xstremehardware.co.uk/index.php?option=com
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We were issued laptops at the start of the project. Typical laptop is a Thinkpad T42p. They average somewhere between 1.6Ghz and 1.8Ghz.
Some people were complaining about performance (java is a hog, and they were using stuff that makes java look 'light'). so they requested new machines.
They were issued Core 2 Duo systems that are 1.8Ghz, with 2 Gigs of ram. This machines are nice. They guy from IT Support comes up to replace the system and starts saying that he doesn't know why we would upgrade to the desktops, they are the same speed as the laptops.
Ok, I expect that from some guy off the street, but IT Support?
(Note: For this work there is a significant speed difference, it is obvious, and almost immediate.)
Never mind the differences between a single core from a Core 2 Duo, and the core used in a Thinkpad anyway...
.. since I am a journalist for a computer rag. Anyway, I would say it is a waste of money for most people at this time. Applications can barely use two cores properly, and games are still not as SMP aware as they should. On the other hand, if you run gentoo, THIS CPU IS KILLER :)
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What they need to do is make a Muti-Core NATIVE OS, so even single-thread apps can use more then 1 core
Other than jumping between cores to improve heat dissipation, how do you propose to make a highly serially-dependant algorithm run on more than one core at a time? Until computers can actually make programmers redundant by writing their own code given a high-level English description of the task (and even then, you'll still have some proveably-serial code), multithreading will remain at the whim of the programmers, not the scheduler.
also why dont they just make dual-core processors faster!
For the same reason they stopped the MHz-wars and moved to a core-war in the first place... Making each core faster has started to hit physical limits (power draw and heat dissipation, electron migration in progressively smaller transistors, clock speeds limited by the speed of light across the width of the chip, etc). Make no mistake, the speed will keep creeping up over time, but the end of 18-month speed doubling ended a few years ago. Major new improvements will either involve radical new technologies (and no, spintronics and diamond substrates will only yield incremental improvements) such as quantum, or what we see now, the move toward massive parallelism.
seems the only way we are going to get ahead in the field
Gaming, while interesting, does not drive research into the highest end of computing.
But seriously, as it gets harder and harder to make larger CPUs run faster the trend is going to be more, smaller processors per die. Each core is by itself slower than a huge monolithic one, but the sum is greater thanks to non-linear scaling. The trick is getting software to efficiently utilize them all.
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It's going like razorblades - the razorblade companies just try to outdo each other on how many blades that can be placed in a single razor. At this rate, expect as many processors as you can physically fit on, plus an extra processor for those tricky, hard to reach programs.
What? I thought EVERYONE used WinDVR to encode MPEG2 files of Battlestar Gallactica from their TIVO while playing F.E.A.R., and turn it into H262 for uploading as a a killer torrent while kicking but in Call of Duty 2? I suck the life out of an X2 4400 bitch, and I am NOT alone.
We cant all have a life, so I NEED that chip!
You insensitive clod!!!
Here's one from Toms Hardware.
Intel's right. On games it doesn't do any better. On video though, well, lets just say I know some architecture majors who would have loved these in their lab several years ago, when 1 frame took 10 minutes to render. And they had 300 frame videos to do.
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You want to know what consumers want?? cheaper.
They are happy with their new Dell 1.8ghz pentium M laptops and that horribly oudated and incredibly slow P4-1.8ghz processor they bought 3 years ago.
Consumers are happy now. computers have stagnated hard for the past 3-4 years and the performance gains offered by this new stuff is only marginal for them.
On video editing, I can see the advances IF your app can take advantage of it, problem is current apps cant take full advantage of that processor until a new build or version is made to take advantages of it.
The consumer yawns and happily uses their old 3 year old PC or that cheapie from dell that cost them $299 with flat panel and is as slow. They dont care about 64 bit, dual or quad core.
at least until they buy a new OS and discover that the added bloat requires more processing power to display menus and movethe mouse cursor.
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Faster, good... Wider, good... But why not parallel with dual-DMA? Right now, it seems you could have 10 cores, but if all the threads running on each core have to contend for 1 bus, it doesn't matter how fast the bus is. I want each core to be able to access its own memory so it is not blocked by the other core's if it is accessing memory. I want one core to be able to access my NIC while the other accesses the hard drive and the other access the video card. All this requires some sort of parallel bus setup. It is my understanding we have not done this sort of architecture yet, but if we keep increasing the number of processor cores, this would seem to be the next step. BUT, I am not a hardware guy. I am a software guy, and expect it all to just work! :)
They don't care how much power the chip consumes or how much heat it dissipates,
Oh really? Now I can't say as far as Intel, but AMD has been very focused on power consumption for a very long time now. All of their literature is filled with benchmarks of power-per-watt and total power savings in the data center, etc. If AMD doesn't care about power consumption, then why would they specifically go to pains to offer CPU versions that are even MORE aggressive in their power saving if you pay a bit more for them? And with all of their power saving innovation and dedication what do they get? Intel now outperforms them and everyone jumps the ship and goes over to the Intel side (despite the fact that the lower power versions of AMD's CPU still use less power when the final weight with the chipset is done).
You know why they care about what performance the average consumer sees? Because that's all consumers care about. If it were otherwise you wouldn't be seeing your lights dim when your graphics card goes into high gear. Where are the "power conscious" versions of these graphics cores?
I've got a lot of Athons, and Athlon XP's running where I work. Some burn out but that's often because of their environment and due to the fact that the fan that comes with the heatsink for the OEM version is garbage almost guaranteed to burn out after a year in high dust environments. The Pentium 4 is history, even Intel admits it was on the wrong track. If you want more longevity, then get a robust heatsink fan (undervolted) and underclock your CPU. You DO underclock your CPU right?
They still are, this isn't aimed at average desktop usage, RTFA.
For Minesweeper, you should have at least one processor core per game square.
It's the only way to play.
"I want each core to be able to access its own memory so it is not blocked by the other core's if it is accessing memory."
Say hello to AMD, HyperTransport and integrated memory-controllers. Each CPU has it's own bank of RAM, and Each CPU is directly (well, 8-socket system needs one intermediate jump) connected to the other CPU's, and they can access the RAM connected to the other CPU's as well. So if you have dual-socket system, each socket has it's own RAM-bank, with 128bit bus between the CPU and the RAM, and the CPU can access the RAM attached to the other CPU as well. So as the number of CPU's goes up, the memory-bandwidth goes up as well.
This tech has been used since 2003 in the AMD's x86-64 CPU's. In the future AMD will have systems where you can plug co-processors and vid-cards to HyperTransport-sockets, alloweing them to directly communicate with the CPU's.
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For the price, I'd rather have 2 dual Woodcrest 2.6 Mac Pros to get 8 cores...
Ahhh... if only EVERYTHING was Xgrid aware, then that would work... I'd get a pile of Minis or the Xgrid agent for Linux. Hell, After Effects can't even use all the RAM in one machine, much less Xgrid.
More processors in one box is the only thing the current incarnation of After Effects can take advantage of... with diminishing returns on the processor count as you pointed out. Our Quad G5 is not twice as fast as a Dual G5 rendering After Effects - maybe 1.6 times faster.
However, the same Dual G5 2GHz was still 2 or 3 times faster than the Dual 2.4GHz Xeon under Windows doing the same After Effects work... and that software is optimized for Windows.
(oh god, I've just opened the flood gates for pimple faced gamers to flame me)
Most of the stuff on
My understanding was that these chip makers have actually been forced by chip manufacturers to watch power consumption and heat dissipation--by purchasers of laptops. We don't like our battery dying an hour into a meeting, and we don't like our computers to burn our laps in the airport, but we do like our computers to be fast (time is money; I can't afford for my laptop to take five minutes to turn on). I think they first addressed this really with the Pentium M Centrino application.
Also, I could be wrong, and I don't have any numbers in front of me right now, but my understanding was that the dual core chips generally did run cooler and were less power hungry than the high end single core chips.
Yeah, that much faster on carefully selected software. And slower on some single thread applications that rely most of all on clock-speed and uncontested memory bus access.
Would be nice for once to have headlines read something more honest like:
Speed improvements range from -20% for 50% of your software, up to +80% for 10% of your software.
There could even be a nice graph of how much software is improved (or degraded) at each 5% bin of performance. Otherwise it's no more honest than saying that your new Ferrari is capable of speeds up to 220mph, without mentioning that this can only be utilized during .01% of your driving.
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1.8GHz ... is ... slow?!
*slaps you with his 40mhz sparc workstation*
It's not quite that good in it's current incarnation. Right now, high-end (4 and 8-way) Opteron chips have only three HyperTransport links.
Try connecting 4 of these chips together using only 3 HyperTransport links per core, with a single-hop memory latency, and allow for one link to external I/O. Can't be done. There are two hops required for the core that handles I/O, which is not a good thing when you consider how important I/O links are in a server.
Try connecting 8 sockets using only 3 HyperTransport links, and allow 2 connections minimum for external I/O - now most of your connections are two hops or more.
K8L attempts to solve these problems in two ways:
1. K8L adds a fourth HyperTransport link, which allows easy single-hop 4-socket systems (and allows all 4 sockets to interface with external I/O, if desired).
2. K8L allows the HyperTransport links on each socket to be split from 4 16-bit links to 8 8-bit links, to allow single-hop memory latency on 8-socket configurations. Combined with the faster bus speeds of HyperTransport 3.0, that's plenty of bandwidth to feed 32 cores. And of course, there's potential for 16-socket configurations (with only 2-hop memory latency, depending on whether AMD decides to support this gluelessly).
Meanwhile, even with the massive caches and Dual Independent Bus architecture, Intel's 4-core chips are going to reach saturation at 4 sockets.
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That page's primary purpose is to clarify their policy for server software (probably in response to Oracle defining a "processor" as a core), but they also mention Windows XP:
Windows XP Professional can support up to two processors regardless of the number of cores on the processor.
If Microsoft changed their definition of "a processor" for Windows Vista, believe me, we would have heard all about it by now. Slashdot would have been slashdotted by all the comments.
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