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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."
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."
What revision of the board I wonder... hmm And yes, these boards are geared for gamers and overclockers.
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 is an in-order design so it better damn well run at 5GHz. OoO at 5 GHz is far more impressive - not that an overclocked Skulltrail truly counts.
You want an AI assistant? Thousands of small processors.
Deleted
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/
Actually - I got rid of my Corvette and bought a fuel efficient Scion. A female friend of mine quipped that a trade like that gained me 6" :D
Third party observation by the secretary was that guys who drive reasonable cars are more comfortable with themselves and more stable. Better material, etc.
Of course, I then bought an M3 and ruined it all!
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Why does OpenOffice.org need 5 GHz?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
LMAO. Such simple words could not be truer.
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.
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.
So it's as fast as MS-Office. :=p
That's nice, and tour friend is lying to herself.
I got more action, looks, and flirting when I had my sports car. Lots more.
Now it could be that the women I was seeing didn't want anything more then a quick weekend at the beach having sweaty sex.
So enjoy your M3.
Yes, I did post this to brag about my younger weekends. Considering I get paid the same to program computers as my colleagues who spent all their younger years constantly sitting in front of a computer, I win.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
I'm going to wait till CPUs reach 640 GHz. That should be fast enough for anyone.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Perhaps those women are right; that they really can't find a comfortable, stable guy.
Perhaps many of the comfortable, stable guys aren't interested in girls with the kind self confidence issues that put them in M3s with assholes.
I'm drastically simplifying relationships when I write this and I'm also grossly generalizing, so please take what I write with a grain of salt. I'd love to hear other people's experience.
Here's my dating experience, having gone through many stages of personal growth...
- I've been a 'nice guy' who waited on women hand and foot.
I ended up being friends with women who had self respect issues. In my opinion, that kind of woman enjoys being around people whom she sees as more pitiful than herself. She loves the attention, but the more attention she is given, the lower her opinion of the man due to her own self respect issues. She desires strength in a romantic partner. Unfortunately, she's often the only kind of woman a self confessed 'nice guy' will spend much time with. Most other women are put off by his clingy attitude. The nice guy then begins to believe that all women are like her.
- I've been 'the asshole.'
The asshole is the basic male equivalent of the women I spent time with when I was a 'nice guy.' I was more successful, but I wasn't happy. I could never respect the women I dated, because my false sense of self confidence did not allow me to respect myself. The relationships I had were frequently shallow, and subtly antagonistic.
- I'm currently learning to relax, and to be confident.
I'm not Casanova, but I've had some success. I'm learning when to be strong, and when to let things go. I'm learning when to express my feelings, and when to control them. It's not easy, and there aren't simple rules... But I have mutual respect, and I've had some great experiences. I believe I'd be more successful if I was less intimidated by social situations.
When I hear this, I usually think there is something deeply inexperienced about the guy saying it.
I've known a lot of 'nice guys' and I've met a few truly confident, stable guys. Few (if any) of the confident, stable guys have this attitude. They aren't bothered by unstable women, because they aren't interested in them. They are generally too busy spending time around the confident, stable girls.
My gonzo journalistic observation is that 99% of women want some guy who will listen to them and that instead 99% of guys THINK girls want the guy you describe and either (a) try to be him or (b) so flustered by the this fact that they are completely paralyzed by inaction or to lack confidence when they do act. Another result of people in (b) is to spend time place where the female % is like 5% (like /.) and then wonder why it's hard to find women. Confucius say "Man who wants fish should look in pond instead of mountain" and all that.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
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
Drive what you want to drive, women can think what they want as they are just insanely jealous that cars can demand as much or more attention/money/desire than they get.
If your neighbours roof is flying past your window, you know it's cyclone season.
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....
the only stable women are dead ones.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
It doesn't matter how 'nice' or confident you are if you've got the looks. That's the only value system that matters in the dating world. It will get you through the door (99% of the battle) and often times keep you in the pink for an awfully long time. Especially if you have the 'self-confidence' of knowing that most girls think you're hot. If you don't have the looks you can try to fake confidence all you want but chicks will know it's just a sham. Real confidence is based on past performance, not standing in front of a mirror reciting "I love myself" 10,000 times. The only exception to the 'looks is everything' rule is in a handful of very poor 3rd world countries where a small fraction of the women genuinely value money more than looks. But this only comes from living in a tin-roofed shack with 16 other family members and no shoes. True hunger and poverty is an excellent aphrodisiac, but you would be surprised at how seldom you can get anywhere without looks even in these countries. Usually they will just try to scam the ugly guys long enough to make their escape from poverty. Then they will find the good looking guy that they feel entitled to as a hot girl. They want someone they find physically attractive and perhaps even more importantly someone all of their friends will find attractive as well. Just reality 101. And common sense. I don't know why this is so hard for some people to accept.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
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.
What has happened in your life that you have come to this conclusion?
I know lots of stable women, including my wife of 14 years, my sister, my mother, my mother-in-law, a bunch of sisters-in-law and lots of friends. Perhaps you hang around the wrong kind of women.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
There's some truth in what you're saying, but I think that you are grossly simplifying things.
In my experience, physical attractiveness does play an important role in relationships. A friend put it well: "The difference between a close friend and a lover is attraction."
Just remember that attraction isn't only about looks.
A long time ago, I took up weightlifting and martial arts in order to improve my physique. I've been at both for years. But IMO, the biggest successes I've had have come from improving my attitude.
The absolute worst attitude problem is desperation. Until a geek conquers that, he is doomed to failure.
I've also learned how fragile relationships are. I've destroyed some great ones over the course of a 15 minute phone call.
I'd love it if a girl geek would be willing to chime in. : )
You can keep 99% of girls. It's the the great 1% I go for.
You're over-analyzing everything. All I was trying to say is that you can't take what women say about men's penises at face value.
Your treatise on the ups and downs of dating with multiple personality disorder was a fun read, however.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
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!
With a razor wit like that, it's no wonder you've had a lot of bad experiences with women. I'm glad you fully appreciated my comment though.
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.
tragically enough, not because of the M3, but rather because he's an asshole... ...if only comfortable, stable guys made women hot & sweaty... ...it'd be a different world.
thx e
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.
I know lots of stable women, including my wife of 14 years, my sister, my mother, my mother-in-law, a bunch of sisters-in-law and lots of friends.
Are you offering some sort of service?
I've destroyed some great ones over the course of a 15 minute phone call.
Holy shit! *slaps forehead* What did you do?!
Agreed, especially if the asshole is 6'5".
*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!
no, you've probably just become accustomed to their insanity.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs