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Intel Skulltrail Benchmark and Analysis
Tom's Hardware has a detailed benchmark and analysis of Intel's new Skulltrail offering, taking a look at 8 vs 4 cores. The comparison uses games, A/V applications, office applications, and 3D rendering tools to help demonstrate benchmarks. "We were disappointed by the Skulltrail platform. Although we have tested and reviewed numerous Intel products, we have never had such a half-baked system such as this in our labs. If this sounds harsh, bear in mind that all we have to base this conclusion on is the Skulltrail system itself in its current state, which Intel provided as an official review platform. We do not know whether Intel plans to revise and improve the platform before the final versions ship to retail."
that is very important
Are these games and benchmarks actually making.. you know.. use of all the 8 cores? i.e. were they modified so that they can make use of multicores efficiently.
Multicore machines are useful when either you run multiple applications or if you want to run single app and make use of the cores, then the apps have to be updated so that they can make use of these multiple cores.
"Although disappointing in performance, bikers and goths will probably be enthusiatic about the 'Skulltrail' name, and get new, annoying tattoos."
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Guess what guys? We've run out of GHz (mainly a power/heat problem). Start writing parallel programs.
Here is what the article says:
To be fair, though, it is not Intel's hardware that is at fault here, but today's software. If a program only uses four of the eight processor cores, then the Skulltrail system is noticeably slower than a single-socket quad-core computer. Since there are practically no current games or desktop applications around that can utilize more than four cores (if that many), the Skulltrail system does not offer any benefit here.
Read The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View From Berkeley which has the description of why, this time, there is no getting around parallel programming.
Also examine NVIDIA's CUDA platform, which scales from a handful of processors on your PC's NVIDIA chip to the 128 processor NVIDIA Tesla card. Scalable parallel processing is the future.
I'm the kinda guy who pushes any computer he has to the limits, and when I recently upgraded my computer, I went with the AMD 5000+ Black edition, and decided to wait on going quad. I Can play Crysis, while watching a movie on my 2nd monitor, no prob. About the only time I wish I had a quad core, is when I'm converting video, and other then that, can't really see much of a need for a quad.. let alone. Don't get me wrong, as soon as AMD Cranks out a worthwhile 45NM Quad, I will upgrade right quick, but It will be several several years until I even think about 8.
what?!? an 8-core machine doesn't run single-threaded benchmarks any faster than a 1 core? that's crazy! what a revolution! what's next? we'll discover that 9 women can't create a baby in one month?!?
shocked, i tell you! shocked!
http://kered.org
At the bottom of the linked page I saw "Page 1 of 25" and I gave up. Bad submitter! Bad! Bad!
Sure beats the old name of "ZippityDoDah" or "CPUsonaplane".
I'm not familiar with writing games on a multi-core game system a la the PS3, but I have written multi-threaded apps in Windows and I can tell you that the answer is:
Maybe.
The problem is that your app might be multi-threaded up the wazoo, but you're at the mercy of the OS (Windows here) to actually put the threads on separate processors/cores. You can *request* a thread on a separate processor (SetProcessorAffinity(), if I recall..it's been awhile), but the docs state that this is merely a request, and the operating system is free to ignore it if it thinks it can do better. A lot of time I observed that Windows doled out threads to other processors very grudgingly, and I was told that it's because to Windows, the overhead of keeping track of what thread is on what processor was, under a lot of circumstances, more expensive (read: slower) than if it just kept them all on processor 0 and just context-switched (which it was going to be doing anyway)
Most games have been, as I've seen, multi-threaded for awhile now; the complexity of these games means they'd have an event loop that's a million lines long if they didn't (and probably do anyway), but your performance is always going to be only as good as the hardware, and the operating system, let you.
The only real test to show the benefit of Skulltrail was the 3D rendering section where the Skulltrail machines really did post decent results. Even for video encoding you reach a point where the problem becomes IO-bound (and you can't compress video frame n independently of video frame n+1 because of interframe compression). Of course, the next question is whether a Skulltrail machine is cost effective against slightly cheaper machines used in parallel for 3D rendering.
FB-DIMMS + a high number of chips on the MB = high power and high heat and it don't even have pci-e 2.0
The mac pro may end up costing less then this and it will likely use less power and give off less heat and it has pci-e 2.0.
If amd can just make some good quad cores then a amd based system with a AMD / ATI chip set or a nvidia one with PCI-E 2.0 in all slots with DESKTOP ram will blow this away.
Unfortunately the future costs, in a lot of different ways.
BTW I'm in the market for a new multi-core CPU. AMD or Intel and which?
At this point 2 cores is about all you'll really useful in a gaming rig. A lot of games are still single thread, especially old ones. However there are a good number of games out there that can make efficient use of 2 cores. Past that, it gets questionable. There are some games that claim quad core support, but in general it seems they don't make efficient use of it yet. Thus far, I've never seen any game that claims 8 core support, much less any benchmarks to back it up.
I think this is mostly targeted at the "My ePenis is bigger than yours," crowd. There are a non-trivial number of people out there who are willing to just drop obscene amounts of money on gaming rigs, and Intel wants to suck every dollar they can out of their pockets.
Same sort of deal with nVidia's new triple SLI boards. At this point even 2 card SLI isn't a great idea because it costs so much (literally twice what a single card does) and the benefits aren't that great. There isn't a lot of need for 3 card SLI. However, people will spend the money, so nVidia will happily make a product to take it from them.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Most video compression approaches use Keyframes which are uncompressed (across frames) in order to make sure the compression doesn't drift to far from the actual content. So doing Multi-core is actually pretty easy on video as you just dedicate a core as working on one key-frame to key-frame section. Given that key frames often occur as much as once a second (or on decent connections once every three seconds or so) then there is a huge amount of work that could be done in parallel and its not very difficult to make the encoders work in that way.
So video compression isn't one of the areas where it isn't an advantage to have multi-cores.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
For the informative TechReport Article on Intel's 'Skulltrail': http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14052
Personally, I'd prefer a Seaburg chipset server board as photographed by TR's user "Leor": http://www.techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=55937
Would like to see them run 8 virtual operating systems and play games on each one at the same time.
Well. I suppose you could have a shit load of annoying widgets spinning in the background, but really, most people simply don't need more than a single CPU. Most rarely use more than 5% of the one they already have.
What I find rather humorous is that we currently try to consume any excess CPU performance by using less efficient languages... We make 100 million people spend another $1,000 each in order to save $500,000 worth of cost in programmer time... Then justify it as cost efficiency.
To really make use of N CPUs, the whole idea we have about the way we communicate with computers has to change.
Deleted
Do people really wade through Tom's site anymore? Try Anandtech.
And guess what? My psychiatrist said my misanthropic tendencies were counter-productive to my welfare. So I'm even giving you the single page version!
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3216
Yes the Von Neumann architecture must die.
"We make 100 million people spend another $1,000 each in order to save $500,000 worth of cost in programmer time... Then justify it as cost efficiency."
It is if you divide that savings across your users, both present and future (old code never dies).
"Well. I suppose you could have a shit load of annoying widgets spinning in the background, but really, most people simply don't need more than a single CPU."
The crash and burn behavior of Windows has instilled this. For the rest of us we can have our computers do more than one thing, command-line and GUI without being penalized for it.
..but I think the article was saying that on single threaded apps, instead of the benchmarks being identical for the same processor in a single socket vs dual socket configuration, the dual socket one was slower. If you bothered to read the article, on multi-threaded applications there were indeed speed increases (40-50%, nowhere near the 80-90% gains you'd expect). They weren't expecting the single threaded performance to suffer.
My guess is that the memory controller is now becoming the bottleneck, since it has two sockets to feed instead of just one. In this application, the AMD chips with integrated memory controllers would seem to have an advantage (for now).
today is spelling optional day.
Where this processor truly shines, and this was unfortunately not reflected in their report, is in running 8 concurrent instances of the benchmark suite.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
Do you know how much it costs to REWRITE GAMES to work properly and efficiently on 8 cores? Those rewritten games will also run terribly on machines that have less than 8 cores (unless there's a separately programmed path for dual cores, and quad cores, and single cores)... so ignore the thousands of gamers with dual core systems that make up the majority of your enthusiast customer base and spend lots of money satisfying the 100 rich dudes that will buy the SkullTrail for gaming that really don't care as much about performance, than about bragging about what they bought. Since one of the typical users the SkullTrail platform is aimed at is an ULTRA-High End Gamer, why not benchmark the machine against current games? If no games can utilize the extra cores, then that should be presented.
So, how well does this run XP? Since I'm certainly not even considering
switching until at least Windows 7...
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
It should be "um-limited" - like the phone commercials.
I thought it was a good idea
I haven't been interested in anything Tom's has had to say in a long, long time. Their methodology is often shoddy at best, and their opinion is oft swayed by whatever company is giving them the most schwag in any given month.
There's a good chance they do make use of all cores, but it's also highly likely that the games are limited by the GPU speed, rather than the CPU. You'll note for example the Cinema 4D benchmark gets closer to 2:1 speed ratio than Serious Sam does.
;)
One of the problems with using games as a benchmark is that typically they are serial problems - i.e. physics need to be updated, then the animation, then the AI, then the rendering can occur. It's not simply a case of putting physics on one core, AI on another - that will just not work. Instead, at every stage along that serial computation, you will attempt to make it as parrallel as possible. So, the 8 cores will be used at max whilst computing the physics for example - But that's not going to help you at all if your rendering is taking up 95% of the update loop. Given that the game is going to have a baseline spec of a 1Ghz CPU, and that it's update will be about 5% of the total frame time, I'm not suprised that an 8 core system will have little impact. In my own tests, I can switch our codebase between a single thread vs 4, and i get about a ~200% frame rate increase - that's without actually rendering anything to screen mind you. If i turn rendering back on, it's about a 15% increase. If i switch to 2 cores with rendering on, it's still 15%. Something tells me there that the GPU has maxed out
Given that the Max and Cinema benchmarks give fairly close to a 2 x speed increase, i think it's fair to say that Skulltrail is probably not as bad as they make out. At the end of the day, if you want higher FPS in games, get an SLI/crossfire setup.
Are you multiboxing, playing 5 or 10 World of Warcraft accounts at the same time? My new quad-core flies with five instances of WOW running. My AMD dual-core was faster, but could only handle three sessions at a time before starting to get choppy.
..does it run Linux?
I think it may be worth asking the people at Bestofmedia if it runs Linux and what the compile, I/O, etc benchmarks are like with 8 cores.
2. Skulltrail lets you multitask at levels far beyond what has been available. No, it is not the best price/performer at running a game. But if you want to record a TV show and rip a DVD to iTunes while simultaneously getting decent frames rates while playing Crysis, then Skulltrail does that too.
3. Eventually, the ECC in Skulltrail will fix a memory error that normal DDR2/DDR3 desktops would miss. That's why important business applications that require accurate computing use ECC. The implication is Skulltrail can be left on 24x7 without fear a cosmic ray will blow a bit away in some OS table. Yes, the cost in electricity will be measurable, but the analogy is that Hummer buyers can't complain about gas prices.
4. Software, including games, will move towards quad-cores as these chips reach the mass-market price points over the next two years. That uses more of the capacity, but for typical users, Skulltrail is overkill.
5. Vista Ultimate is actually perky on a Skulltrail. No flame, please. But it's true. Vista will throw little tasks onto eight cores with alacrity, and as a result, things get done more quickly due to multi-tasking at the OS level. I can't prove this with benchmarks, but perception is reality
Skulltrail will not appeal to everybody, and for sure, it won't fit everybody's pocketbook. For cutting edge, multi-tasking computing, it has a lot of horsepower. That's a fact.
It's not clear to me why Tom's Hardware is so bent out of shape about the Skulltrail board they received. Intel got the boards out two or three weeks ago; that's about two months before retail shipments, and allows for plenty of time for the monthly PC press (yes, they are still around) to get to print at launch. Would the press rather review products after they ship? No, they want to lead the market. Is the BIOS still a beta? Yes. But a working BIOS. Is the system noisy? Yes, but it's drawing north of 600 watts and doing a prodigious amount of work. Skulltrail is not a living room box, OK?
If you have intense computing jobs or a server-like workload with lots of batch jobs where completion time is less important than throughput, then I think you should seriously look at Skulltrail. That would mean lots of programmers, engineers, and scientists as well as media developers. Most consumers will not benefit from Skulltrail's capacity nor afford it.
They should do a deal with schick. "8 cores, and 6 blades! for the best benchmarks and closest shave, honest!"
Once 64bit has been common in the business workplace for a few years, Spreadsheets will burst in size. There are large companies who are frustrated because their spreadsheet are limited by a limitation built into them bacause of the memory addressing space issue.
CFOs and other executives would love to have a real time update from their books to a spreadsheet and have that data sliced a hundred plus way. With Color, graphics and an embedded video on different sheets.
They don't want there SAP, or any enterprise system) to export to a spreadsheet, they want it to BE a spreadsheet.
Well, replace "a lot of applications" with "A lot of threads" I can see a comples program using different cores for diferent needs. I hae 2 procesor handling physics, another handling story and disk usage, and a forth being used for interface. None of them running at 100%.
Then the remaining four cores do background tasks. Virus checker, email, im, etc. . .
Maybe on dedicated to streaming movies. There are a lot of uses for large number of cores. I hope the release some good compilers.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Looks like AMD are keeping up on their ad budget this month over at Tom's, huh?
And me with no mod points
You might want to read your paper because the OS mentioned is nothing like Linux. Linux made obsolete because hardware changes underneath it.
Im sure if coders spent more time learning how a cpu works, they could achieve 16 cpu quality out of 4 cores, now if you stop writing crap in java and .net you can get
64 cpu quality out of c++ in 4 cores. Sure, I agree many solutions dont need it since they are crappy little tools that never use much cpu, but may use lots in doing
simple things like making thumbnails out of 24 images.
Im glad we've hit the wall on Ghz, it means these java/.net programmers cant assume in 3 years time their software will be faster, it will be slow-assed FOREVER!
Any one see a java/.net bytecode VM written in RAW AMD micro cpu code? Nahhhhhh! bad luck.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Um, has everyone forgotten about parity? I swear I see all these kids nowadays with striped raid setups and I have never seen one use parity. Raid 5 for the win.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
The new Mac Pro is an 8 core system. When Tom's Hardware says there is no competition, I think it left out the Mac Pro. Skulltrail gives PC enthusiasts an alternative to it. I wish there were a chip or a piece of software that could automatically allocated processes or parts of processes to multiple cores. Then something like Skulltrail would be very useful.
Many of the newest Operating Systems, applications, and games are multi-threaded. Multiple cpu cores just allow modern systems to take advantage of them, when available.
Can all of these be enjoyed on a single-core cpu? Absolutely.
I have a dual quad-core computer, similar to Intel Skulltrail system, that dual boots Windows Vista Ultimate, 64-bit, and Fedora 8 Linux, 64-bit. Many programs do take advantage of this system, including modern PC games, such as Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3. UT3 does use all 8 cpu cores during parts of the game.
So, even though multiple cores are not necessary, I find it helps in many ways, and many programs. The system seems to perform very smoothly for all the uses that I need.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein