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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.
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
http://supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon133 3/5000X/X7DAL-E+.cfm
How hard was that?
indeed! in my job (I work at a small OEM in the Netherlands), I already sold several dual quad-core systems the last couple of months, build to order. This week I sold a similar system (with this exact same motherboard) but with 16GB of memory instead of 4. Luckily it's not going to run Vista ;-)
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.
Microsoft Windows licenses are restricted to the number of CPU sockets not the number of cores.
Kinda like the Vega 2 processor, which has 48 cores? Now if I could only find a specification manual to learn it's instruction set.
In Soviet Russia, I, for one, welcome the eight core overlords who imagine running beowulf clusters of these running Linux which review YOU!
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)
Fxck everything, we're doing five cores! And two aloe strips!!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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?
Do I seriously have to do all the work around here? http://supermicro.com/products/system/4U/7045/SYS- 7045A-T.cfm?PID=TWR
It takes Slashdot to think of "SuperMicro" when thinking of a hum under the desk.
C//
And Quake2 STILL stutters every three seconds.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
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
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?
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me
Do I seriously have to do all the work around here?
Yeah, Jeffrey...I'm gonna have to ask you to go ahead and come in on Saturday...yeahhhh