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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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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/
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
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
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
You are wasting your time, the answer will always be 42....
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.
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.