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Intel Core 2 Updates, QX6850 and E6750
An anonymous reader writes "As AMD's Barcelona approaches, the price war between AMD and Intel continues. To spice things up a bit this week, Intel is throwing into the ring a number of new processors, refreshing the Core2 line-up. HEXUS reviews the high-end QX6850 and mid-range E6750: 'Now is a golden time for anyone looking to buy a new CPU, whether Intel or AMD. The latest round of price cuts means you can now get an incredible level of processing performance for little more than £100. But if your need to buy is not urgent, remember that Intel and its big rival are each promising new processors before the end of the year — AMD with K10 quad-core and Intel with 45nm Penryn-derived CPUs.'"
Have they fixed those bugs?
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2158619 ,00.asp
Just in case anyone is interested in buying a new QX6850 which features 3Ghz 8mb cache quad core processor with 1,333MHz FSB. It is going to cost you $999.
HotHardware also has a full review up right here. They were able to take the new quad-core up to over 3.7GHz and show power consumption numbers for all the high end chips as well.
"Now is a golden time for anyone looking to buy a new CPU, whether Intel or AMD."
Read as:
For the love of God, PLEASE buy these things. The warehouse is full, it's bursting, it's...oh, the humanities...
Just as a point of interest, when I was looking for new components around a fortnight ago, suppliers were were already listing high-end chips in the forthcoming E6x50 series at lower prices than even the mid-range chips from the older E6x00 range. The E6600 has been near the sweet spot on the price/performance curve for quite a while now, so if you're looking for a cheap upgrade, it looks like they'll be practically giving away E6600s and E6700s for as long as they last.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I'm in the market to build my own PC. I have always been an AMD fan (purely because of 64-bit support), but have been annoyed in the past at some software (such as codecs - this was before Automatix2 for my Ubuntu box) not being available. I'm thinking an Intel QuadCore or the AMD Athlon 64 6000+ (Dual Core), but am tempted to wait a little longer - especially if AMD open the ATI GPU drivers and now i'm tempted to wait for these new chips! Choice...choice...choice...
ilovegeorgebush
I think, that with all the "pushing another processor in the market", they are making people to wait longer before they buy another processor. I'm looking for a new laptop, but sincerely, I'm still waiting so I won't fall in the same Core Duo/ Core 2 Duo trick. I bet lots of people are thinking the same way. So I'll wait at least until the T7000 series get cheaper (and also those 2G DRAM).
I'm too lazy to look up the reference but I thought someone was working on this...possibly Intel.
Or maybe that was something else. I don't remember it being like a CPU that had a socket for another CPU on the top of it, I think it was more on the nano-scale....
Hmm, now I'm trying to think what they were using that technology for then...
If you're a big Japanese OEM, you can get some SH7785 (600MHz SH4a)
which apparently perform quite well for their low power consumption
(however outside of Japan it's apparently damn near impossible to get
newer SH chips. We've tried and failed to even get a roadmap from
Renesas Europe)
Renesas is refocussing on multi-core chips instead of higher clocks
(IIRC the SH-X3 is a quad-core design and already running linux)
Or is Itanium still trouncing their traditional x86 offerings in this regard?
Hexus PiFast Challenge! They stopped updating the scores a couple years back, but it's interesting to see the sheer speed increases through the years.
And yes, that is me near the bottom with an old laptop (that still runs).
Here is another by Tom's hardware, covers benchmarking the 6650 as well, and compares to all the current AMD and Intel chips in a whole wack of different benchmarks.
_ 2007/index.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/16/cpu_charts
Go scroll some text and stop bitching.
Seriously though, I don't get why people like to hate on new processor developments. Does everyone need them? No, surely not, but they allow for great things including pushing down the price of faster hardware. Do you like your nice high rez 2D interface? Like the fact that you can easily run 5+ different apps at the same time? Well then this is the kind of thing you have to thank for it. I remember a time not long ago, less than 2 decades, when you couldn't do that. I remember when computer video, to the extent it existed at all was best described as "postage stamp sized". I remember when playing MP3s was an activity that could take up an entire CPU's power. I remember when 1024x768 was something most monitors had to interlace to do.
I could go on, the point is because technology gets pushed at the high end, it trickles down to everyone. If you like what your system can do, and like that you can get it for a good price, you owe that to the fact that someone kept pushing what computers can do.
Also there are TONS of uses besides gaming for big CPUs. At work we can't get enough CPU power. The antenna design people especially are CPU hungry, but pretty much anyone who runs Matlab or HFSS or Cadence or Solidworks or anything like that has a virtually insatiable apatite for CPU power. The fact that we can get more power for less money in a desktop is nothing but good for us.
So if you enjoy what you do with a computer, great, but stop hating on those that have more to do, and recognise that the place cheap low end parts come from is expensive high end parts.
Real PC gamers know to throw their money on a mid-range CPU and high-end video card.
It's the photoshop, transcoders, and CAD junkies that really go after these high-end CPUs.
Life is not for the lazy.
Anandtech has a pretty good article about these releases and also about the price cuts. This is looking great for me when I build a new computer in a few months (on which I'm planning to spend $150 chip from two years ago look pathetic. Oh well.
Of course, I'll need to figure out AMD vs. Intel. I just wish Intel had a better bus design. AMD has a good bus (HT) and Intel has the best chips right now. Maybe if they merged...
So, the latest CPUs are great value for money... *but* if people wait for a few months, there will be new CPUs and those will be even better. Wow! I've never seen anything like this before!
Sure, not everyone cares about this. As a gamer with a PC on the high side of "affordable," I'm not even sure I care that much. But it is interesting. It's nice to know about the new developments, whether or not I'm going to use them anytime soon.
This is not a "race to the bottom" posting to brag about who is on the smallest / slowest machine.
I do all my day-to-day web surfing from an OpenBSD P IV 1.5 GHz box running the latest distro.
Flash works fine, acrobat works fine and no worries about the bajillion signed-but-have-root active x controls,
acrobat overflow conditions, gifs/jpgs/etc with spyware/backdoor payloads, etc. Really, there's
no compelling reason to upgrade. But assuming I did the quantum leap in power to a recent intel or AMD
proc would get me by for several more years. Recently I've been mulling the use of a Sun X2100
instead but mostly due to the fact I have one laying around more than anything.
Do I have a Windows game machine? Sure. My current Windows desktop is a P IV 3.06GHz Northwood machine,
i.e. one of the few socket 478 processors to support hyperthreading. It runs XP very well and Vista passably,
and is my HD timeshifting box with a HDHomeRun digital tuner attached. Despite the age of the box
it plays whatever games I need it to well enough under XP and otherwise can drive a Viewsonic 32"
flat-panel in native resolution with no stutter or pause.
Intel or AMD may eventually get my money for a new machine just because, but even then the not-at-all-sexy
and clunky-by-today's-standards Northwood box will just be recycled as a MythTV machine easily extending its life
for another year or two.
So although it's sexy and cool that Intel and AMD just keep coming out with faster and lower-power procs,
there's nothing driving a switch. I wish there were because whatever that would be, it would probably be hella fun.
That's irrelevant. The question to ask is, what percent of users on this forum are developers and/or die-hard gamers? This is, after all, "news for nerds", not "news for average users".
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
But, the AMD X2s in the office have got the unsync'ed TSC problem (which causes stuff like time appearing to go backwards aka nonmonotonic time, which can cause programs to have problems). Sure in theory you're not supposed to assume they're in sync. BUT in practice on consumer-grade motherboards there's not much choice - often you don't get stuff like HPET or it's broken. Plus if your TSCs are synced, they are a better choice - the other timing methods are actually quite crappy[1].
So the workaround I use at work is to never let the cores idle and always run them at full speed. Boot linux with idle=poll.
Ironically, the AMD X2s supposedly use less power than the Core 2 Duos while idle...
Apparently AMD say they're going to fix the TSC stuff, and though it's been quite a while since they said that, AFAIK I don't think it's been fixed. So if I had to buy a CPU today for a desktop computer, it'll be a Core 2 Duo. The alleged Core 2 Duo security bugs don't appear to be being exploited by hackers all the time, whereas this AMD X2 TSC problem is always there.
I believe there are Windows gamers who are having problems with their AMD X2s and end up running the game/app only on one core and it's probably due to this TSC problem. Yeah the programmers shouldn't use TSC etc etc. But really what are their choices? See [1]
[1] Why can't the CPU + hardware + OS people get together and come up with something good for something as basic as time keeping?
As Vojtech Pavlik summarizes:
RTC: 0.5 sec resolution, interrupts
PIT: takes ages to read, overflows at each timer interrupt
PMTMR: takes ages to read, overflows in approx 4 seconds, no interrupt
HPET: slow to read, overflows in 5 minutes. Nice, but usually not present.
TSC: fast, completely unreliable. Frequency changes, CPUs diverge over time.
LAPIC: reasonably fast, unreliable, per-cpu
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/11/18/261
I do some transcoding, but I went with the C2D E6320 anyway. It is still nearly four times as fast as my previous Athlon XP 2800+. :)
my main question before that they answered is if the core 2 quad processors are being choked due to insufficient bandwidth. they measured the difference between 1066 and 1333fsb and performance barely increased. this brings me back to the following observations:
1. the processor is not bandwidth limited and merging the 4 cores in a single die would not yield much performance benefit. this brings back to the argument who is better the native quad core vs 2 x dual core (though in an engineering standpoint, the native quad core will be better but in real world as long as performance is good, i really don't care.)
2. intel has made a good job with their branch prediction that required data is almost always in the cache reducing any performance hit via fsb.
3. on-die memory controller might not yield great performance improvement for current core2 processors (if intel would add them now.)
the main anticipation now is if amd will beat intel in their upcoming barcelona chips. the advantage right now with amd is their ability to increase sockets through hypertransport. but that advantage might disappear soon when intel integrates the memory controller.
anyway, as of now the consumers are winning. i hope that amd will be able to keep up with intel so we can have good competition. for the mean time, i will be buying a q6600 system. quite cheap cpu coupled with cheap memory now (good time to increase memory capacity to >=4gb.)
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
"Would have loved to see a G6 pwn Intel and AMD"
If you are thinking about floating point performance, it does. It's not called G6 - we call it Cell.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Add to that incredibly low memory prices and incredibly low HDD prices and you can piece together something fast and cheap with little cash.
Unfortunately, the mid-range graphics market for DX10 parts isn't up to par with the rest of the parts. There is a void between $125 and $260. The geforce 8600GT is the $125 part, which is ok, and the 8800GTS is in the $260 range. The 8600GTS is about the same speed as a 7900GT, give or take, and in the $150-$200 range. Being that previous generation midrange cards did very well against their high end predecessors, this is not the best generation of cards. The new AMD/ATI offerings are both worse than the nvidia ones, so thats no help at all.
Yeas, but the PPU is rather lame in performance when compared to the SPUs.
If Apple took it, it could be called G6
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Yeah, they never used the TPM against us, so let's sweat about something else. Face it; the backlash against Palladium was so great that it'll stay dead.
The GeForce 9 series/G92 chip should also come out near the end of the year. If Intel is not just blowing smoke about a new CPU design, then, not now, might be the time to upgrade.
Cell can run rings around Intel on floating point or integer [b]vector operations[/b]. Not on anything else. And, in practice, the development time is so disproportionate that it's not worth it except for hobbyists or supercomputing apps.
For everything else, it's a hyperthreaded (not even dual-core) 3.2GHz in-order PPC64. Bo-ring.
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