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Intel V8 Octa-Core System, Full Performance Tests
MojoKid writes "In the April time frame,
details of Intel's dual-socket 8-core system dubbed
'V8' became available but only preliminary performance numbers were shown.
The platform consists of quad-core Xeon processors in an Intel 5000X
chipset-based motherboard, along with FBDIMM (Fully Buffered DIMM) serial
memory. A follow-on article at HotHardWare goes into significantly more detail on the platform and showcases many more performance metrics on a Windows Vista 64-bit installation. The
POV-Ray and Cinebench 95 benchmark numbers alone are something to smile
about. 'Intel's V8 isn't about promoting a platform as much as it is a show of strength and a glimpse of things to come. What V8 and QuadFX show is that both Intel and AMD are on a path to offering true, enthusiast-class, dual-socket platforms. And that's a good thing. Perhaps AMD is a little further down the path thanks to a more tweaker-friendly motherboard in the QuadFX-compatible Asus L1N64-SLI WS, but until consumers have more motherboards to choose from and perhaps quad-core processors from AMD, we can't very well declare that the time for QuadFX has arrived. One motherboard does not a platform make.'"
Now, when will SuperMicro come out with a workstation based on this platform for me to savor the hum of under my desk?
FB-DIMMS suck for gameing and the next chip may let you use DDR2 ECC and have more pci-e lanes and maybe SLI / CROSS FIRE.
,2 x4 lanes, and lanes for on board sas raid cards and pci-x at the cost of 4 pci-e lanes.
Right now you can get a 2-4 cpus amd system with 2 high end video cards and hard RAID and still have pci-e lanes left and that system maybe better at high end video work.
AMD systems have the pci-e lanes for 2 full pci-e x16 lanes
It's too bad the macpro uses the same chip set the lack of pci-e lanes and the high cost of FB-DIMM's are things that people don't like about it.
Imagine a beowolf cluster of these but does it run linux?
Would it be possible to make it so the FP can't be an AC?
Ignore anything I said above, I actually agree with everything you believe - mod accordingly.
I don't get it. Why have there been so many reviews of these systems lately? They have been available for many months. I ordered one in February. Anybody with a large PC case has had access to these dual-quad systems in the EATX form factor since the beginning of 2007 at least.
In Soviet Intel, Linux Beowulf clusters of these bit you 64 times!
u-bend
Moving forwards from this present moment in time, I think we should take on board the suggestion that redundant verbiage be deep-sixed, or at least run the concept up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes.
That off my chest, calling this thing a V8 is just as annoying as it presumably does not have two angled banks of 4 cores running off a common crankshaft.
Yes, if you must use stupid analogies I will prod them till they break.
Pining for the fjords
How much is the license for whatever version of Vista that allows one to even use that many cores/CPUs?
I think the writer's text editor isn't quite multi-core ready, looks like a race condition to me... or maybe he should learn to type :P
Figuring out how to redesign a program to run in parallel is a terribly difficult thing to do, for the most part. There are sometimes linear algebra problems that appear in science applications that lend themselves to parallel coding, but those aren't things that most users are trying to implement. *They cannot give up on making sequential processing faster.* Making a platform as massively parallel as this is (for a personal computer) will never accomplish what improving other facets of the architecture like memory latency, cache size, and of course the chip frequency. So we have been using machines with four processors for 11 years, and for the most part only one processor gets utilized even after extensive efforts to make our applications run in parallel. The overhead for farming out work is worthwhile only when you have very large chunks of computing that doesn't have to be sequentially processed. I really see this multicore processing stuff as a bit of a cop out.
Of course it does, but this is Slashdot.....
I smell a lawsuit from a juice company. :)
The all new 'V8 Octa-Core'!
However, as much as I'm drawn to this, I'm prompted to hold out for the 'V32 Duo Quintuple-Core' System - now that sounds like a real hair-on-your-back piece of technology - whoa!
From a recent article:
r osoft-exec-next-version-of-windows-to-be-fundament ally-redesigned.html
Microsoft executive Ty Carlson spoke about the future of Windows recently during a panel discussion at the Future in Review 2007 conference held in San Diego, California. Carlson said that future versions of Windows would have to be "fundamentally different" in order to take full advantage of future CPUs that will contain many processing cores.
"You're going to see in excess of eight, 16, 64 and beyond processors on your client computer," said Carlson, whose job title is director of technical strategy at Microsoft. Windows Vista, he said, was "designed to run on one, two, maybe four processors."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070529-mic
So, if Windows is only designed for two or four processors, why even consider eight?
Of course, that's Microsoft... How does OSX and Linux handle eight processors?
From the Home Office in Bangalore India!
Top Ten Uses For Your New Processor Cores:
10. Vista (Starter, Ultimate Turbo Champion, etc). If this applies to you, stop reading list here, all your new cores are belong to Microsoft.
9. Time to install Web 2.1, baby!!
8. Full-screen full-motion porn on all three of your 30-inch computer monitors while running global warming computer model in background
7. Terrorism.
6. Receiving chocolate cake over the Internet.
5. As a tool to help you personally become a more productive worker, engaged citizen and attentive spouse and parent, rather than as a weird techno-fetishistic ends unto itself. Ha ha, just kidding!! LOLzzz.
4. Dedicated core for Safari installs/updates.
3. Department Homeland Security monitoring/spyware (federal statutory requirement)
2. AT&T Broadband/RIAA monitoring/spyware (in EULA)
1. Wife's monitoring/spyware (in the vows)
Just fine, thank you.
Of course it depends on what you are using it for, though. If you are using it to compile software, run web apps, batch-encode music and/or run software written in Erlang you can easily max out more cores than that. If you use it to play games or rip one DVD at a time it won't be much faster than if you had only one or two cores.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Thanks for answering your own first question.
Partial answer to the second question: Nobody knows how OSX runs on more than four processors, because so far you can only run it on four.
Half-made-up answer to the rest: From what I have heard, Linux will handle up to 8 (some say 16) quite well, but tends to taper off after that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Fxck everything, we're doing five cores! And two aloe strips!!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Really? Explain my dual quad core MacPro then, with 16 Gigs of RAM running OS X.
All 8 cores and 16 Gigs of RAM fully accessible by the OS, unlike say Win XP.
8-core or quad-core Mac Pro workstation
Meet the latest addition to the Mac Pro family: The world's first 3.0GHz, 8-core Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro. Consider the bar officially raised.
Quad-core Intel Xeon "Clovertown" processor Performance standard
No matter which Mac Pro model you choose -- 8-core or quad-core Intel Xeon -- each delivers advanced performance, workstation graphics, and unparalleled expansion in so many possible configurations, your imagination has finally met its match.
From: http://www.apple.com/macpro/
Info here: http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/0,1000000193,39284700,0 0.htm
There's also lots of info (much of it from Apple itself) saying flat-out that Apple will prolly have an 8-core rig pretty soon (relatively):
http://www.macintouch.com/reviews/macpro/r eveals-8-core-mac-pro/
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/31484/135/
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/03/12/apple-store-error-
HTH a bit... (and yeah, I'd kinda like to have one too)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Didn't Mulder and Scully recover that "octium" chip for these guys?
FTFA:
Our testing showed the V8 ssytem consumping much more power than anything else while idling at the Windows desktop; almost 50W more than QuadFX and over 100W more than the QX6800. With the processors operating under full load, however, the tables turned somewhat.
Yeah, the tables did turn. Under full load, the QX6800 - which is already power-hungry - uses 319W. The V8 and the QuadFX are at 474W and 498W, respectively. That's an extra 155-179W... For what?!
Is this a continuation of the P4 Prescotts, which used 130W+, IIRC? These beasts use *even more* juice.
Yeah, such CPUs have their place, but if this is an indication of the future of desktop computers, fu*k it. The V8 uses more power over a QX6800 (50W) while idling than what my CPU (E4300) uses at full load. Are we going to be able to buy 50W CPUs in five years, or are we going to have to deal with insane cooling solutions for 200W CPU monsters?
"One motherboard does not a platform make."
This is the type of remark that makes me want to smash the teeth in on your average power user / paid review writer.
Ok, the Commodore came with a single motherboard design for years. Is that not a platform?
The 2600 was not a platform either?
See sir, when you use extra words in a vain attempt to sound witty, you end up making the whole article something I'd rather just skip than risk being bamboozled by more, equally stupid remarks, which tend to only be equalized by the mass of popup attempts and java script ads on the sites that host such poor quality articles.
By the way, why am I looking at a nearly 6 month old 8 core system on the floor in front of me? Did I miss the exciting re-release of quad core processors?
Oh, it came out. Well, my bad. I guess someone will come in with benchmarks now and my soul will be consigned to spin in the darkness for ever.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is so not true. Have you ever heard of OpenMP? It lets you trivially parallelize any for loops in your program (i.e. let each CPU handle a point in the loops. It is embarrassingly easy to implement. How would it benefit the user? Umm, how about searching your terabytes of images with face recognition software that will soon become available? How about all your photoshop processing, or for finance nuts, or updating your gigabytes of spreadsheet data? Those all run on for loops, you can bet.
Sorry? You don't use C or C++? Everything you've written is in Java/.NET and takes 2 seconds just to bring up a window on a modern CPU? Then maybe it's time to stop dissing lower level languages.
This is also a huge reason for GNOME to stay written in C like it sensibly is and stop talking to the devil/courting Mono.
You should probably go to the real source for you info, not the bs sites:
A ppleStore.woa/wa/RSLID?nnmm=browse&mco=56DA9A19&no de=home/desktop/mac_pro
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/
Apple already has an 8-core MacPro on the market.
No matter where you go... there you are.
Here is why Intel is going in this direction now.
http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T1/index
disclaimer: I work for Sun.
But that's just because the software isn't written to take advantage of more cores yet. Video transcoding can be parallelized pretty well, and games definitely can use all the processing power they can get.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Linux probably scales a bit better than that now, but it's not crazy like some systems.
On the other hand, Solaris is a free-software operating system that you could use on your desktop (it's a little rougher than Linux, but not too bad), and it'll handle 100+ cores no problem.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
All 8 cores and 16 Gigs of RAM fully accessible by the OS, unlike say Win XP.
Windows XP 64-bit will "access" your 8 cores and 16 gigs of RAM just fine, and to boot will do a better job of utilising them than OS X does.
So, if Windows is only designed for two or four processors, why even consider eight?
Best not to listen to marketing dweebs for technical information. Windows NT ("Vista") is - and always has been - designed from the ground up to work very well with multiple CPUs. It's heavily multithreaded, fully re-entrant, kernel locking is very fine-grained, etc, etc.
I have no idea what this person thinks they're saying, but Windows NT4 was available for machines with 8 CPUs a decade ago and Windows 2000 has been running on 64-CPU machines for years. It's possibly some sort of incredibly poorly communicated misunderstanding about how modern machines are more likely to find multiple cores on a single package, rather than discrete CPUs, but even that would only require scheduler tweaking and certainly nothing "fundamentally different". It may also be a reference to Singularity.
What is clear, is that "Microsoft executive Ty Wilson" has NFI what he's talking about and needs to be whacked with a clue-by-four (and probably was). There's nothing at all wrong with Windows' SMP support, especially in the context of the hardware it typically runs on.
Of course, that's Microsoft... How does OSX and Linux handle eight processors?
OSX, not very well. They've only moved away from a single big kernel lock relatively recently - although Leopard is supposed to have some significant improvements in this area - and there's lots of work that needs to be done. Linux's SMP support is excellent (almost certainly better than Windows') and it's been running on machines with quite large CPU counts for years.
...+1 (Virgin)
-1 (TMI)
Ah, you missed the crankshaft. No wonder it is very small
He's right. OS X threading SUCKS, so your 8 core CPU is spending far more time in low level locking code than Windows or, especially, Linux ever will. For heavy multithreading, OS X sucks.
Excepting some tech demos I've yet to see a GUI app written in .net that I'd consider "very fast". Hell, write me a .net app that can read in a 20MB BMP file faster than IrfanView can have it saved back as a jpeg and I'll applaud you. It must be possible, but I suspect one have to resort to unsafe code.
.net (Windows.Forms call out into native code). It might even have more of a future in our multiprocessing tomorrow thanks to Sun's push into that area, them having 16 core CPU's out right now.
Java have somewhat of a bad rep, but it's every bit as fast as managed
Would it be possible to make it so you aren't a whimpering faggot?
will still not get any geeks laid.
May I recommend this setup. Its very stable, the Xeon class server and workstation boards are very solid (using a Supermicro X7DAL-E), and the performance for software development is simply unmatched. Everything on a good Intel 5000X based board is supported by Linux as well. Run a 64-bit distribution and pack it full of RAM (FB-DIMMs are interesting beasts - various ways to deal with ranked memory and exploit the parallel nature of the serial memory bus and trading latency for bandwidth and vice versa)
The market segment is very different. There are no clock tuning widgets in the BIOS (but you can do serial BIOS redirection), no splashy other stuff. Its designed as a very boring very well performing workstation. If LED light fans and overclocking excite you, you're better off with a Core2 Duo/Quad system.
So are these things close to making ultra expensive proprieatary nix/mainframe hardware obsolete.