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8-Core Dual Xeon "V8" Test Rig Performance
MojoKid writes "Back in January at this year's CES show, Intel was giving the press glimpses
of a rig in their booth dubbed the
V8. It was essentially a dual-socket workstation platform outfitted
with a pair of quad-core Xeon processors for a total of eight cores — hence the
"V8". The enterprise platform that this box was built around is based on Intel's
5000X chipset, aka Blackford, and it supports up to 32GB of FBDIMM serial
memory. HotHardware has
a component build-up of a more current Intel V8 machine here, with
preliminary benchmarks, pictures and more details on this 8-core dual Xeon
powerhouse."
Yeah, they stuff photos of wafer disks but tease everyone by talking about booth babes. Pfffff.
and this system only has the pci-e lanes for 1 x16 video card.
AMD's 4x4 system uses cheaper ddr2 DIMMS that have a lot less lag.
Even the a dual AMD Opteron with ecc drr2 is better for games and it has a lot more pci-e lanes.
Amd quad-cores will blow this a way.
Imagine a beowolf clu-
oh, sod it.
Living With a Nerd
But then, who knows? Maybe the SME market might put some pressure on Dell and HP, pointing at the Mac while doing it. (I know, I know... but seriously - rEFIt for booting, a solid Linux distro like CentOS, and a couple of PCI-X cards, and you've got a full on server for most small/medium biz needs. Chuck in AppleCare for (most) warranty stuff, and a small business can do the same computing horsepower for a whole hell of a lot less than they otherwise could afford, IIRC).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Sounds a lot like a high-end Mac Pro (shipping for months) with a nicer graphics card. Dell Precision 690s are a bit pricier, but they do the same thing (admittedly, I envy the SAS built-in). I assume HP has a similar model, but I didn't check.
How is this news? Intel attached a marketing name to a product that has existed for months and is the logical extension of having dual-socket boards and quad-core chips. I mean, it's basically (2*2)*2 - dual-core processors (2) on MCM (*2) in a two-socket (*2) board. There's exactly no advancement going on here.
Fubar already. Anyone have a coral cache link?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
... dell has been selling 1U PowerEdge 1950 servers with two quad-core processors for a while now.
The better question is with this many cores & cpus, which software has annoying licence requirements.
All that, the bag of chips, and a glass of lemonade and I STILL can't run Oblivion with max settings and get a decent FPS...
One step closer to running Vista! Baby steps.
As always with this type of hardware, just bring money. No big deal, right?
but V8? this isn't a car and I doubt that there's anything in the shape of a "V". What's next the AMD Hemi?
Well, kinda affordable. Been out of the loop since new expenses have frozen my multi-CPU fetish at a dual Athlon MP. Nice to know that when I get some cash I can still put together a multi-chip system without paying $2000 for a mobo.
Blar.
I bet apple could give they systems away for free and you PC Nicks will still find a way to show that macs are more expensive then PCs
It's the TCO, man! The purchase price hardly matter! Everyone knows that....
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You all got a hemi in that Rig?
The V8 is so pity and obsolete at the same time! V10 is truly modern and V12 has the all prestiege, you know the prancing horse thing. V8 is for american SUVsters who will always be village idiots no matter how big their penis substitutes grow! Italians should release V12s and german manufacturers should release V10s to humiliate the yankee!
*slaps forehead* I could have had a V8!
It sounds more like a boxer configuration.
...the silicon space heater! This sucker can probably heat a room.
It has been a while since I've heard anything about the Itanic. About a year back, Microsoft, Intel and HP had been talking about serious long term plans for the high-end Itanium, while AMD64 will be mostly among the mid-range offerings.
But looking at the way the Core architecture processors are scaling (in number of cores), where does that leave the Itanium? If the future is n^x core processors and parallelism, the Itanium is really dead.
Long live the Itanic!
Life is a conviction.
Nobody really needs a V8 on their workstation. Maybe you can connect to a shared computing grid to do the actual CPU-intensive task. But while you are playing Solitaire, entering parameters for the CPU-intensive task and so on, well you are wasting electricity for no good reason. Hopefully they at least reuse the heat for cooking or something.
Is it just me, or is this like having a 6 bladed razor. Next they will be telling us they are adding an aloe strip on the spacebar!
7 cores in the front and 1 in the back for really precise computing!
Most of the x86 world runs some version of Windows and it will be many years before there are any significant improvements to the most 'advanced' versions so I'm having a hard time imagining Windows and Microsoft doing much with the V8. I think the field is wide open for others for the first time in 20 years if the V8-configuration machines gain traction.
So, the processors are arranged in "V Formation" layout on the board?
:-/
That seems... inefficient.
another case of genius marketing, because I8, P8, S8 or R8 (inline, parallel, staggered, random) wouldn't look as *crunchy* as "V8" does in the magazines...
-jre
-jre
HP has the XW8400 series workstations, you can configure one with dual quad core chips and 32GB of FB memory.
2 2_na/12522_na.HTML
here's the link to the specs
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/125
Not sure why this is news?
No sig here...
Shouldn't it be VV8? Cause last time I checked the quad cores were actually dual dual cores.
Kind of old news. A friend of mine built one of these using the 1.6 ghz
h p?hostid=3131492
chips and is using it for doing all kinds of things but is currently using
it to run Seti @ Home.
Here's his url:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.p
When one of the high-tech fanboy aerodynamics researchers around here (a university town) buys one, it will be entertaining to remind him that my $2000 Sun E10000 is still faster.
with only 6gb of ram
:]
and 6 500gb seagate drives
dual x5355
runs debian
raid1 + raid6 / lvm on the raid6
and of course it's my xen host and my baby
and ish at me hole in the unsaid datacenter
and ya it goes like a bat outta hell
Except the shared bus the Xeons sit on is a seriously limiting factor, no-one in HPC is using Xeons because of it.
Thats funny, because according to the current Nov 2006 Top 500 Supercomputer list, there are about 220 Xeon systems (EM64T and IA32) on it.
I guess nobody told all those HPC professionals that nobody is using Xeons...
would be to build your own. I just built one using a nice asus dual xeon mobo, 8800gts vid card, and a single xeon 1.86ghz for about 1800$. Adding the second xeon would bump it up to 2300$. That's with only 2g ram and a 400g hd. I have a feeling the mac won't be priced anywhere close to that. I didn't get the second xeon because it seems like the quad is overkill for most apps, although I'm interested in parallelism and would like the second processor when prices come down. Another possibility would be the xilinx FPGA that goes in the extra xeon socket.
we have two of these where i work (video production co) and i personally hate it. not only does it sound like a jet taking off, but it isnt very useful... none of the appswe use can come close to eficiently using all the cores, watching them, 1 and 5 are maxed out while the rest are practically idle. there pretty much useless.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,105963-page,1/ar ticle.html
s px?docid=154189
r .aspx?docid=284783
http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/webcast.a
http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/whitepape
Sounds like Intel had been planning to scale Itanium to more than one core for a long time.
Do you have some information that says these Itanium 2 chips were never made?
Intel's site seems to say they do exist.
http://www.intel.com/products/processor/itanium2/
I have my 8-Core Quad Xeon 3.0GHz Mac Pro with 8GB of ram and four (300GB/sec) 500-GB hard drives striped. I can tell you it is the machine of my dreams. I am in multi-core heaven dreaming about parallel software algorithms and how to apply this horsepower to real world problems. I just decided that I was unwilling to throw any more hardware money at Windows. The Mac Pro is sweet. Booting in a few seconds was only the first joy. I have no doubt that this machine is capable of great things. I look forward to the Leopard release when it occurs, but Tiger is a fine operating system for the time being. I recently purchased the Quad Mac Pro, and returned it on the last day to upgrade to 8-core. I am so glad I did. I would have been kicking myself for quite some time. I reviewed various vendors' offerings of workstation class equipment, and even Sun's 25 Year Anniversary Sale had nothing to top this machine. Dual 1.8 GHz Sparc IIIis with 4GB or Ram didn't stand up. I have four 2GB ram strips with four empty slots available. When the day actually comes that I need more memory, I can go to 16GB. Beyond all that, the Mac Pro is a maintenance delight with the pull out hard drive drawers. After my recent debacle with Dell, dealing with Apple was a no brainer. I did buy Apple Care because the machine cost real money and I want assurance of problem resolution. No doubt about it, this machine is a "Workstation". When 16-cores come around, I don't think I will pine for that because for me, 8-cores is enough headroom for development. If my clients need 16 for production, cool!
It doesn't perform very well on data intensive applications. It seems like the front end bus is locking and performance drops after the fourth thread gets running. On computational intensive calculations I get the performance I would expect.
Two dual cores have been available from Apple for a long time. Currently their cheapest (2GHz, four cores) is at $2,200. They recently brought out their two quad core machines, which can be had for $3997 (3GHz, 8 cores).
So, yes I think the mac is a a reasonably good price/performance comparison.
Anybody seen the Apexx product over at www.boxtech.comr view.asp
http://www.boxxtech.com/Products/APEXX/apexx8_ove