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.'"

Comments

April is not a time frame

[Flying pig]

The original report came out in April, which is the name of a month and a time period, _not_ the "April time frame". Adding verbiage does not make your submission look more impressive or indeed add any meaning whatsoever.

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.

Naysayers R US

[andy314159pi]

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.

Re:Naysayers R US

[Jeffrey Baker]

How is it a "cop out"? The current crop of Xeons have 3.0GHz clock speeds, huge caches, and excellent per-clock performance including single-cycle 128-bit packed operations. They are by any measure the finest x86 processors ever offered on the market. The fact that you get four of them per socket is just a bonus.

Also, I can think of one general-purpose workload that is easy to parallelize: sorting. Tons of applications require fast sorting, from word processors to mail programs and web browsers all the way down to plain old sort(1).

But can a desktop OS actually use all these procs?

[tinrobot]

From a recent article:

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-micr osoft-exec-next-version-of-windows-to-be-fundament ally-redesigned.html

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?

Re:Windows Vista licensing?

[eharvill]

Microsoft Windows licenses are restricted to the number of CPU sockets not the number of cores. O RLY?

I guess all those VMWare datacenters running 30+ Windows VMs on a single physical server with 2 Quad cores shouldn't worry when Microsoft comes a knockin' looking for their money for 28 illegally licensed OSes?