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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."
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."
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.
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.
Cores only help so much- if your problem is not paralelizable, or if it is only minimally so, a billion cores won't help. A word processor is not going to work any faster on a 1000 core machine than on a 1 core machine. Video games might see a small speed up from a multicore, but not that much of one- it doesn't break down into equally weighted threads. For the vast majority of users, 2 cores aren't even really utalized (email and web browsing doesn't use 2 cores). I doubt any home user will see much improvement beyond 2 cores, and absolutely none after 4 even for hardcore multitaskers. Business and scientific apps will see some beyond that, but memory tends to be the bottleneck there- we'd be better off increasing memory bandwidth and latency than clock speed.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
My third party observation is that 99% girls will look at the comfortable and stable guys, wonder why THEY can't find a guy like that, and then hop in the M3 with the asshole.
Confucius say, a small dick is still better than an unused one.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.