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The Fastest Processor You Can't Run
auld_wyrm writes "Intel is trying to push the news of AMD's Barcelona launch out of the headlines with the release of the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770, a 3.20 GHz CPU that runs on a 1600 MHz front-side bus. It is the fastest consumer level processor that has come out, but don't plan on running it anytime soon. The ~$1200 price tag, and the lack of any motherboards that support a 1600MHz FSB will stop this unneeded answer to Barcelona from appearing in enthusiast's PCs for Christmas. Still, the benchmarks from this powerful CPU are something awesome to behold."
Good thing technology is making big leaps as you are going to need this, a solid state 1 TB hard drive and around 20 gigs of RAM to make Windows 7 to run at even a Vista level!
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
How do you benchmark a processor when there are no motherboards that support it?
where are these benchmarks you speak of and why did they create this processor without a motherboard that is available for actual use?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Reminds me of all that stuff I read for years in Pop Science and Pop Mechanics -- ultra cool stuff you'll never lay your hands on. Well, this will be available, but probably not for 6 months. Meanwhile, I'm not about to upgrade my mobo for it anyway. I work in Photoshop on an Athlon 64, the cheapest one available about a year ago, and it's still no issue of speed, memory is the problem, having enough of it. Need mobos which can hold 16 GB of memory, not faster CPUs.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Boxx has anounced machines using this chip so I'm guessing there are boards just the first run aren't available to the home builder.
FTA:
"...The Intel X48 chipset is a refresh of the X38 chipset aimed at the high end desktop market. It will be the first chipset to support 1600 MHz FSB parts (though current boards do as well in some cases) and will have unlocked bus ratios for improved overclocking ability. So there really isn't much change from the X38 chipset -- and in fact most X38 motherboards aimed at the enthusiast will probably support 1600 MHz FSB processors anyway. For my testing I used the Asus P5E3 Deluxe motherboard based on the X38 chipset to run the QX9770 and it ran without an issue.... http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=484
Sounds like many existing Intel X38 chipset mainboards will work with the QX9770, and I'd bet Intel's DX38BT can run it, (but probably at FSB 1,333MHz) http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/DX38BT/index.htm
Indeed. There is no "overkill"; there is only "open fire" and "I need to reload." ((Thanks to Schlock Mercenary.))
Outside of giant clusters, is anybody running Barcelona yet either? I have been unable to find any systems available for purchase. Word on the street is January before they are available in quantity to the general public.
All is Number -Pythagoras.
You know bloody well it'll take 24 GB of memory to actually run an office app!
It'll also demand a 4GB videocard with a GPU strong enough to process all SETI requests ever in about 20 minutes
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yes. In fact, Linux on this CPU can run infinite loops in five seconds.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE5 It's like 46 base instructions. I don't even know why they call it "SSE".
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
an extra 2GHz?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Lonestar: It's Intel 1. Barf: They've gone to PLAID!
It puts the lotion on it's skin, or else it gets the hose again.
Of course it is unavailable. It will be available when it hits the $999 price tag. Or is Intels highest desktop price susceptible to inflation as well? In that case, lets hope that they don't do a 20% increase every 2-3 years. It seems technically we are now at the P4 GHz range again, but now with well performing and full featured CPU's. Maybe we should call this a green paper launch.
Do you make your own shoes and clothes or do you go out and buy them from "other" people outside of your household? Do you milk your own cow in your backyard or do you buy your milk at the grocery store? My guess is that you do what you do best in exchange for money and trade it for things that other make more efficiently. That way the total amount of production is greater because you and others are specializing in what you make. For the same reason it would be stupid to make all your own goods inside your own household it would be stupid for a country to make all of its goods inside of its borders. Comparative advantage increases division of labor which increases total production(AKA you become more wealthy). Making everything yourself is a good way to make yourself extremely poor.
Creative Demolition
The Core line of processors is based on the Pentium M, which was developed in Isreal.
If it's so secret, then how come I've never heard of it?
Perhaps, in a brilliant marketing move, AMD will call it 3D NOW!.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
For instance The Asus Maximus Extreme, or Abit carries one too.
Faster Gentoo installs. And a longer penis.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
"I wonder why no other country, even those technologically [more] advanced, have produced anything remotely comparable to Intel and AMD processors yet."
Well, let's just say, in Soviet Russia, CPU processes you!
ARM is british designed. SH4 is Japanese designed. Nobody else has produced anything remotely comparable to x86 because x86 sucks. There's a lot of smart people polishing that turd, but it's still a turd.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Anandtech had a good insight about this release. I'll just quote it directly instead of trying to paraphrase:
"Almost as soon as we had Phenom samples, Intel made the decision to sample a CPU requiring a FSB that wasn't officially supported by any chipset at the time. No, 1600MHz FSB support won't come until next year with the X48 chipset, but it didn't matter to Intel; we were getting chips now.
Take a moment to understand the gravity of what I just said; Intel, the company that would hardly acknowledge overclocking, was now sampling a CPU that required overclocking to run at stock speeds. Even more telling is that Intel got the approval of upper management to sample these unreleased processors, requiring an unreleased chipset, in a matter of weeks. This is Intel we're talking about here, the larger of the two companies, the Titanic, performing maneuvers with the urgency of a speed boat.
It's scary enough for AMD that Intel has the faster processor, but these days Intel is also the more agile company."
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3153&p=2
Conversely, it allows developers to write programs that are easier to debug, faster to develop, and easier to add features to (that yes, take up more CPU cycles than an obfuscated, buggy "optimized" application).
Jeremy
Raw CPU speed is nice but when are we going to make the busses fatter. Most of the bottle necks are in the memory and hard drive subsystems. My Sun Ultra 2 for instance, it has two 64 bit 400 MHz processors, a 576 bit wide memory buss and a reasonably fast SCSI interface. Even though this thing is a dinosaur by todays standards it easily kept up with an old dual 1GHz PIII.
Besides, just how much unwarranted computing performance does Jane and Joe user really need to surf the net, do e-mail, instant message, play music and do home office chores.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
FTA at HotHardware.com: http://www.hothardware.com/articles/Intel_Core_2_Extreme_QX9770_Performance_Preview/
"Cinebench is perhaps our most favorite "quick and dirty" test for gauging how fast a new CPU core is. If you're looking for a general quick-take view of system performance and CPU power, Cinebench consistently gives results that we rely on here in our labs. In the multi-threaded version of our this test, the QX9770 is 63% faster than the Phenom 9700. And with only a 33% clock speed advantage over the new Phenom, obviously the new Intel core is significantly more efficient clock-for-clock with a higher IPC (instructions per clock cycle) throughput."
"The fastest single processor for gaming from the AMD side of the house, generally speaking according to these two tests, is the Athlon 64 X2 6400+. Again, that's according to the game engines at work in Crysis and F.E.A.R. The fastest processor of Intel's offering is obviously the QX9770, which looks to be 6 - 8% faster than its 3GHz counterpart, the QX9650. In general though, the AMD systems are easily outperformed by the Intel-based setups, in some cases by a large margin."
Still, the benchmarks from this powerful CPU are something awesome to behold.
Does that mean it can run Vista?
Hm... my $600 Mac Mini runs Leopard just fine and I fully expect it will run 10.6 as well. It's got as much processor power as the MBP I use routinely for heavy duty medical image processing development. The only thing it's lacking in, sort of, is 3D video performance, but it's more than enough to run all the eye candy in Leopard with some left over for a few image pro algorithms that run on the GPU.
It doesn't spend a core running antivirus or even half a core running DRM.