Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
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.
Not to mention running something like World Community Grid. I love using my idle processor time to tackle AIDS, Cancer, Muscular Dystrophy, Dengue, etc.
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
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?
I'm not intimately familiar with the specifics in this case, but starting with a server chip and "adding desktop processor attributes" would typically entail:
adding the inability to use ECC.
adding a reduction in cache.
adding a lack of fault tolerance or error checking capabilities.
adding the feature of being impossible to use with > 2 sockets.
adding a whizzy new marketing name.
And, the enthusiast desktop parts are often easy to overclock, while server parts assume you'll just buy a faster CPU instead of wasting time fiddling with something that may catch fire.
BTW, hey, I remember you from alt.movies.visual-effects "back in the day" before the death of Usenet. good to see you haven't fallen off the face of the planet. I'm not in the process of working on a compositing demo reel so I can try to jump from straight IT to visual effects in the near future. I blame this career change in part on all your interesting and informative posts getting stuck in my head.
This sounds a lot like a '640k' quote to me.
A properly functioning word processor can already do pretty much everything 99.99% of what a user asks of it as fast as the user can tell it to do something, even on the bottom line processor.
Today's video games, sure, aren't going to benefit much from multicore. But I disagree that the benefits for future games will top out at 2. I mean - you could have 1 core handling user input and processing, 1 core handling the physics enviroment, 1 core for unit AI, 1 core for graphics information. There's a quad core right there.
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
Then they can start worrying about beefing up memory bandwidth - I've read about some technologies in the pipe that will help with this. And the scientific community can always use more bandwidth - they are one of the larger users of supercomputers, and this might take a project from 'Need to rent 24hrs on the supercomputer for $$$' to 'I can run this on my work computer for a month/week to get the same results for $'.
I don't read AC A human right
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Fewer faster cores will always be more flexible than more slower ones. The reason we go with more slower ones is that slower cores use less power (power scales much worse than linearly with speed, so two 1GHz cores will use a lot less power than one 2GHz one). Some workloads are intrinsically parallel (e.g. web serving) and so having lots of cores using less power is a big win. Others are not and so extra cores are just a waste (although you can often consolidate multiple serial tasks onto one machine with lots of cores).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What king-matic didn't tell you is all that extra power is dissipated via X-Rays. It is called Skulltrail after all.
My third party observation is that 99% girls will look at the comfortable and stable guys, wonder why THEY can't find a guy like that, and then hop in the M3 with the asshole.
Confucius say, a small dick is still better than an unused one.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
So it's as fast as MS-Office. :=p
The AMD Skullfucker-64 5300+ will 0wn this.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I'm skeptical about that.
I'd be fairly certain that the NSA uses some kind of off-the-shelf processors, whether that be Power, Itanium, or X86.
What the NSA does different, most likely, is scale. You put 1,000 of these in a supercomputer? They'll put 100,000.
Chip fabs are expensive, as is chip design. There's no reason not to leave that to the experts (AMD/Intel). It's a commodity process, and they'll do it better than the government ever can.
Supercomputer design is something else. That's not commodity; and it's a simple scaling problem. More $$ = 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
You are wasting your time, the answer will always be 42....