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Intel in the GHz Game Again - Skulltrail Hits 5 GHz
An anonymous reader writes "Intel's Skulltrail dual-socket enthusiast platform has been making the rounds on the web for half a year or so, but we haven't seen many details yet. TG Daily got a close look at an almost complete prototype, which surely sounds almost like a production ready version, judging from the article. Everything that TG Daily describes sounds like Skulltrail PCs will be very limited in availability and insanely expensive. Intel also has said it has developed 'special' Xeon processors with desktop processor attributes just for Skulltrail. These chips are currently running at a stable 5 GHz."
I guess the skulls in it's trail are the heads of AMD execs.
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
Everything that TG Daily describes sounds like Skulltrail PCs will be very limited in availability and insanely expensive.
Obviously, it's the only architecture hand-designed by Dethklok.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
On the other hand...will this be out in time for Crysis?
~Vexed and loving it!
It will be 20% faster, 200% hotter, needs a 300% nosier fan, consumes 500% as much power.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Just won't have any cool processor extension support until 2010 when the technology is a bit more obsolete.
And will be obsolete in a year. Honestly, who spends thousands of dollars every year for the most advanced stuff? Even if you did have a Skulltrail, the rest of you system would bottleneck it. 3 8800GTX's would be the bottleneck, 8GB's of the fastest DDR3 ram would bottleneck, and your harddrive would bottleneck too. The only thing Skulltrail gives you is bragging rights.
Just imagine a Cluster of nerds waiting in line for Beowulf!
bomb the us up set someone
The silicon pathways are provided by Monster Cable.
Measuring computer performance in Hz is like buying a car based on red line RPMs. It only tells you one component that is meaningless by itself. Just like a car needs torque to give rpm's context, processors need how many instructions can be completed per cycle to be compared to the frequency. I've lost faith in the MHz race and generally look at benchmarks closest to the intended purpose of the processor.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Somehow, I'm pretty sure the NSA uses more than just "vanilla" x86/AMD64.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Could have sworn that's how it was spelled when I first looked at it.
What revision of the board I wonder... hmm And yes, these boards are geared for gamers and overclockers.
Clearly a publicity move to get the name out.. The systems will not be as fast as everyone thinks. I am pretty sure fasters systems already exist..
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Please, it's all about cores.
Look at the history of processors speed. We've been pretty flat, and will stay that way in all practical manner for a while.
Before someone throws the quote like they are smart, Moore's law refers to transistor not speed.
1) Faster chips require better fabs. Fabs are having difficulty producing better platters with a few enough flaws to produce mass quantities. Strides are being made, but know massive breakthroughs.
2) Multiples cores and real parallel processing development is just starting to become expected knowledge for the average application developer. Lets be honest, a lot of developers don't bother to understand multi-threading and avoid it like a plague. Fortunately there are some IDEs that make it easier for developers.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
its
I've seen this before, I've never understood it. What does it mean?
Thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Dude, you can run linux on a wristwatch. The question is, can it run Vista?
From an old K5 diary: -mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
You just made an almost-sensible car analogy. I didn't think that was allowed here.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
As long as you have an ample supply of liquid nitrogen.
This would be useless to intelligence. Try to use yours.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
To many people that's all they're looking for. It's like buying an F-350 when the most you use a car for is getting groceries, or getting the biggest house you can possibly afford even though you're a small family of three, and so on.
:)
Remember, it's not just the spammers that profit off of people with small penises. Auto manufacturers, TV manufacturers, home builders, and now Intel all profit off of them too.
single-slot graphics cards, FBDIMMS and you will need 4 of them to get the max system out of the memory system, SLI useing Nvidia nForce 100 chips over a pci-e x16 1.1 bus split to 2 x16 slots, dual eps power in, 3 chip sets chips that driver up cost and power use.
The dual amd system that this will be like this will use DESKTOP RAM, have 2 or more chipset choices. Also the amd setup lets you have 2 full Northbridge chipsets for even more i/o the nForce 680a uses this and nvidia will likey have a new chipset with pci-e 2.0. The old has a x16 x8 x8 x16 pci-e with a total of 56 PCI-E lanes.
The new amd chipet is also comeing and you may even see a board with 2 Northbridges = 82 pci-e lanes.
790FX
* Codenamed RD790, final name revealed to be "AMD 790FX chipset"
* Dual-socket (Quad FX, Dual Socket Direct Connect Architecture) or single AMD processor configuration
* Maximum four physical PCI-E x16 slots and discrete PCI-E x4 slot , the chipset provides a total of 52 PCI-E lanes, with 41 lanes in Northbridge
* HyperTransport 3.0 with support for HTX slots and PCI Express 2.0
* ATI CrossFire X, see below
* AutoXpress, see below
* Extreme overclocking, reported to have achieved about 420 MHz bus for overclocking an Athlon 64 FX FX-62 processor, from originally 200 MHz.
* Discrete chipset cache memory of at least 16 KB to reduce the latencies and increase the bandwidth
* Supports Dual Gigabit Ethernet, and teaming option
* Reference board codenamed "Wahoo" for dual-processor system reference design board with three physical PCI-E x16 slots, and "HammerHead" for single-socket system reference design board with four physical PCI-E x16 slots, also notable was the reference boards includes two ATA ports and only four SATA 3.0 Gbit/s ports (as being paired with SB600 southbridge), but the final product with SB700 or SB750 southbridge (see below) should support up to six SATA ports
* Northbridge made on 65 nm process, manufactured by TSMC, and runs at 3 W when idle, and maximum 10 W under load, nominal 8 W power consumption, the northbridge was seen on reference design with single passive cooling heatsink only instead of connecting to heat pipes which are frequently used on current mainstream motherboard offers, the combination of 790FX northbridge with SB600 southbridge consumes normally less than 15 W
* Enthusiast discrete multi-graphics segment
Even if the Intel system is faster the amd system with less costly MB and much cheaper ram will likely be a better buy.
Power6 does run at 5GHz and is in the market form some months already.
It might.
But you're going to need four of these plus a 1 terabyte hard drive plus 100 gigs of memory to run VISTA service pack 2.
Get used to it...
If I have a small penis, the best thing for me to do is buy an eMachines computer, drive a Corolla, and live in a studio apartment? Won't I then be assumed to completely LACK a penis?
You want an AI assistant? Thousands of small processors.
Deleted
Why would you waste the processing power running Vista on this beast?
You'd have about half of your system load working to prevent you from doing anything you actually want to do, a quarter running your software sound since DX is removing hardware sound support, and the rest would be used to make everything look "pretty". At that rate you could probably run solitaire with the remaining cpu cycles.
You can't take the sky from me.
Another huge technology gain for virgins living in their parents basements worried about their small penis.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Is that in celsius or kelvin?
LMAO. Such simple words could not be truer.
You managed to twist a story about overclocking of a new processor type into another 'the US government does evil' statement.
I have no need for a machine more powerful than mine. I would rather buy a silent one.
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
What king-matic didn't tell you is all that extra power is dissipated via X-Rays. It is called Skulltrail after all.
The article mentioned "Piednoel told us that one of these systems has been overclocked in his lab to 5.0 GHz stable, and 5.2 GHz nearly stable. The system uses vapor cooling.". The cooling system alone can easily cost more than a grand and it'll probably be a pain in the ass to maintain. I have a feeling that the CPUs will be more likely sold in the 4GHz range, without the vapor cooling system and that it was just a demonstration like how most car manufacturer's insane prototypes? The price performance ratio just plummets after that point with the inclusion of a thousand dollar cooling system that is most likely going to have higher maintenance fees and probability of failure. I just can't see any type of significant market for vapor cooled PCs, since the bottle neck is going to be the graphics cards rather than the CPUs at that high of a frequency for gaming, and computational intensive applications will probably be better off with cluster computing since it's more power and price efficient to have multiple machines, rather than squeeze every last drop of performance out of one.
The AMD Skullfucker-64 5300+ will 0wn this.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I'm skeptical about that.
I'd be fairly certain that the NSA uses some kind of off-the-shelf processors, whether that be Power, Itanium, or X86.
What the NSA does different, most likely, is scale. You put 1,000 of these in a supercomputer? They'll put 100,000.
Chip fabs are expensive, as is chip design. There's no reason not to leave that to the experts (AMD/Intel). It's a commodity process, and they'll do it better than the government ever can.
Supercomputer design is something else. That's not commodity; and it's a simple scaling problem. More $$ = Bigger computer.
Why should they bother reinventing the wheel?
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Cuz thats the only thing i can think of as a use for a 5 ghz computer in an average household.
Read radical news here
But can it run on Linux?
No. But Linux can run on it...
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
And it might not be Vista, or even Windows, but Microsoft is also getting into the wristwatch game.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
That is one of the most awesome names for computer hardware ever. Almost as sexy as a Blade server. Whoever thought violent themes and computers would co-exist? I'm looking at you Hans Reiser.
I'm going to wait till CPUs reach 640 GHz. That should be fast enough for anyone.
Speaking as a game developer... I just got upgraded from a quad-core 3.2ghz Pentium 4 to a *2.4ghz* Core2 Quad which appears to be around 50% faster, despite the lower clock rate.
.obj files, etc).
I spend all of my time waiting for disk thrashing (e.g. doing a build involves reading tens of thousands of little source files, writing and reading many thousands of
I would KILL for a decent solid-state hard drive of 64GB or more. I would put all my development stuff and temporary dirs on it and live happily ever after.
(I'm also tempted to just turn Windows swapping off completely, since this box has 4 GB of RAM and so for me swapping just means doing nothing, slowly.)
Yeah, this sound like a well balanced system. It's not the fastest memory around, and the CPU will probably be beat just a bit by the Intel counterpart, but it is at least affordable. It also seems to use a lot less power/generate heat. As this is the enthusiast market, Intel must have a clear winner here.
I am annoyed by references to general "bottlenecks", because it's not just Anonymous Coward who comes up with this.
It's just not that simple. A 5GHz CPU will be faster than a 3GHz CPU and 3 video cards will be faster than 1 video card almost regardless of other components. The only real bottlenecks you can talk about are the system busses and at the moment, that's not a problem either. HyperTransport 3.0 and intel's quad-pumped busses are still plenty wide enough for 5GHz processors, no sweat.
I completely understand what you're trying to say, it's just that you're wrong. PCs aren't cars and processors aren't jet engines. A faster CPU will do more CPU work every second, a faster video card will give you higher framerates and more RAM will fix most of your stutters. The slowest part of your computer is the hard disk, so do whatever you can to exclude it from time-critical operations. If the rest of your system is waiting for data from that ancient storage device, THAT would be a bottleneck.
/ Per
Measuring computer performance in Hz is like buying a car with good horsepower to attract woman. while you having succeeded to every woman with wrong Pron-ic vinyls all over your car that yells i am a frickest nerd in town. all i did was to buy a subaru and pu F1 engine that is awkwardly stickin out in your trunk.
You are wasting your time, the answer will always be 42....
Phase change and LN2 cooled quads are already running at over 5GHZ. This is just intel themselves overclocking as is mentioned in the article. Is this even news? It's not like Intel is actually going to be selling a phase change or LN2 cooler to go along with their new platform. And even if they were this doesn't sound like any sort of advance in silicon as is implied by the article summary.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
An addendum...
I think it's very possible to be a comfortable, stable, and secure person around your friends, family members, and co-workers and still be insecure around women. Each are a unique experience.
I, for one, welcome our gigahertz-wielding overlords.
--- Anon
I used to do this, until I realized that leaving my processor idle means less heat, less power usage, and a longer life.
Now, maybe if it wasn't my computer -- for example, Amazon EC2, Flexiscale, even just a cheap host that's neglected to include power requirements in their spec. On our EC2 machines, I can imagine that we'd want to always have a certain amount idle, and I see no problem pegging that with distributed.net, SETI, whatever. We'd also probably leave them on slightly longer than we need them, as they take longer to start than they do to kill.
But the essential difference there is: Amazon charges us the same rate per virtual machine whether or not we're actually using it. My power company absolutely does charge me more, so I won't be doing this in my own house. I'd rather just donate money to someone running this on a PS3.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Just curious would SLI video cards and popular games actually work well with 64 bit Windows?
Correct me if I'm wrong but if you're stuck with 32 bit windows there's no point having much more than 2GB RAM if you're doing SLI, given you have 4GB addressing space and the video cards would take a large chunk of that addressing space.
Not only that, but by buying commodity hardware and using their own software to make it scale, it'd be a helluva lot easier to make sure their purchases don't show up amongst the usual government spending. Their own custom chip-fab plant, plus all the associated requirements would be pretty noticeable if a foreign spy agency went looking, and from their it's only one step to studying the plant itself.
[clever sig]
Tom's Hardware just did a series of power-consumption tests on various overclocks of a Q9650, the first available 45nm processor.
At 3GHz, it uses 8.79W when doing nothing, and 73W when running all four cores flat-out
At 4GHz, it uses 16.83W to do nothing, and 135W with all four cores flat-out; on the other hand this required a voltage increase to 1.44V from the 1.25V that sufficed up to 3.33GHz.
Fitting curves suggests that you would be using something like 350W for four cores at 5GHz, which is quite impressive.
But a 5GHz Skulltrail would be a chip hand-picked by Intel to run at lower voltages in general, and would be running cryo-cooled which I think also allows a lower voltage to be used; probably 200W would be a better estimate for the chip power consumption, though the cooler will be using a comparable amount of power. This is, indeed, moderately crazy.
Just because their chips are made by AMD or Intel doesn't mean they're using off-the-shelf parts.
I mean, the government doesn't have factories that produce fighter jets either, but when was the last time you rode in an American Airlines B-2 Stealth Bomber?
There's no reason to believe that Intel or AMD isn't building a separate line of milspec chips. It might not be true, but it certainly wouldn't be anomalous.
When you overheat it something bad happens.
*shrug*
Perhaps, it could be true, but I'm not certain they would gain any benefit.
Let's say these milspec AMD/Intel chips are 4x as fast as consumer/commercial stuff. Let's say that AMD/Intel even sell them at a cheap price to the NSA (highly, highly, unlikely).
It wouldn't matter one bit; the NSA would gain nothing. All they might have to do is reduce the "chip count" of their supercomputer by a factor of 4. All the innovative stuff their doing isn't in the processors; its how they arrange them.
This would be different if AMD/Intel are producing milspec cryptograhpy chips which are 1-2+ orders of magnitude faster than commercial stuff, however, I think there would be more money in selling that stuff to the private sector; and given that they both have research/manufacturing facilities off-shore, I'd be very surprised if this escaped the notice of other governments (or, for that matter, other chipmakers).
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Microsoft is also getting into the wristwatch game
"What time is it?"
"Dunno, my watch has a virus"
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I'm not talking about CPU power, I'm talking about electricity.
If I had an eight-core system, and I had to leave it on for some reason -- BitTorrent, say -- it could easily drop to some 500 mhz per core, if it was properly designed, and still use even less power (electricity!) for each of those 500,000 cycles that were not used.
Try running SETI on a modern laptop for more than about two minutes, and you'll get a very real demonstration of how this works. SETI on means the machine is not idle, means it will be scorchingly hot, and no longer a "lap" top. Leave it idle, and it might give you an extra hour (or two, or three) of battery life, while actually being cool enough to hold in your lap.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Multicore systems need increased parallelism in the OS and applications too. So Windows is out of the picture too. I doubt most of the ubercool, overclocking. watercooling. case-window-sporting. human-game-bot "jocks" want to use Linux on their PC. But that's precisely who's willing to pay lots of money for the latest Intel Hz-driven monstrosity in their PC.
Otherwise the answer is medium to large businesses which don't have multithreaded/parallelized application workloads.