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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.'"
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.
Microsoft Windows licenses are restricted to the number of CPU sockets not the number of cores.
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.
Sure. You can even get a 1W CPU today if you want. There's just an energy / performance tradeoff, and the V8 goes for all-performance. "Normal" desktop processors today have design power usages of either 65 or 90 watts. Low power 45W desktop processors are available, and you can go to notebook / specialty processors below that.
-- 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.
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