Intel Launches Low Cost Chips

schliz writes "Intel has announced a new quad core and dual-core processor at the bottom end of its price and specification range and a new Celeron chip. The Q8200 is a 2.33-GHz quad-core chip with 4Mb of level-2 cache, the lowest of any quad-core processor."

Comments

Low cache

[XanC]

This means that the speed of the chip is reduced as it canâ(TM)t handle as many processes as processors with a larger cache.

hmm, pretty technical stuff...

Re:Low cache

[Z00L00K]

Actually - the number of processes that a processor can handle doesn't only depend on the cache. It is also a question of the amount of memory a process needs.

For some solutions a large cache is just a waste of resources. Of course - these are usually special solutions, but anyway.

Cheap doesn't begin to describe what TFA says

[snl2587]

The new dual-core processor is E5200, which has a core clock speed of 2.5GHz, 2MB of cache memory, and an 800MHz front-side bus. It costs US$84 per thousand.

Am I reading this price right? These can't possibly be 5 cents each...

Re:Cheap doesn't begin to describe what TFA says

[snl2587]

Err... 8.4 each. I was looking at the other price.

Re:Cheap doesn't begin to describe what TFA says

[JMZero]

I assume what they mean is it's $84 each, when purchased in a lot of 1000.

Re:Cheap doesn't begin to describe what TFA says

[Anonymous Coward]

Whiy not ? That might be their response to China's threat :) http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/03/1437254

Re:Cheap doesn't begin to describe what TFA says

[badran]

They did say Low Cost...

Re:Cheap doesn't begin to describe what TFA says

[ByOhTek]

Same price. Fewer birth defects!

Re:Cheap doesn't begin to describe what TFA says

[dgatwood]

It probably means they cost US $84 when purchased in quantities of at least 1000.

Re:Cheap doesn't begin to describe what TFA says

[dgatwood]

Sheesh. And I even singled out that comment individually to see whether anyone had replied only a few seconds before I posted that reply. Now I reload the main page and see a half dozen replies from half an hour earlier. Has anybody else noticed that Slashdot's comment nesting handling seems to be massively broken lately?

Re:Cheap doesn't begin to describe what TFA says

[Anonymous Coward]

Today?

Re:Cheap doesn't begin to describe what TFA says

[Hal_Porter]

Whiy not ? That might be their response to China's threat :)

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/03/1437254

Quite possibly. Intel have put up a page on being lead free too

http://www.intel.com/technology/silicon/leadfree.htm

This tech site sucks.

[CyberBill]

The new processor is the second cheapest in Intelâ(TM)s quad core range and is priced at US$224 per thousand.

Thats supposed to be "US$224 each in quantities of one thousand", not $224 per thousand, implying they each cost 22.4 cents.

Re:This tech site sucks.

[everphilski]

Well shoot, I mean, I know the dollar is making a recovery, but damn! :)

Bulk Pricing

[RingDev]

$84 each, when purchased in lots of 1000.

You pay $84,000 and you get 1000 processors.

-Rick

Re:Bulk Pricing

[snl2587]

I figured, of course, but they really need to work on phrasing it correctly.

Re:Bulk Pricing

[Anonymous Coward]

Better buy them via a France distributor then. That's going to end up costing only 8.4 cents per CPU.

hint: they use the comma for decimals.

Re:Bulk Pricing

[gEvil (beta)]

Can you point me to a motherboard to put those thousand processors in? And a case that's big enough, too?

How well the does that dual dual-core work with on

[Joe The Dragon]

How well the does that dual dual-core work with only 2meg l2 on each dual core + the FSB link over head + 800MHz FSB vs a low end amd dual, 3 core, or quad core with a lower cost MB?

Re:How well the does that dual dual-core work with

[LWATCDR]

Who knows?
They are not shipping yet as far as I know and Slashdot isn't a review site.

Right now if you want to build a good low end machine AMD gives you the best bang for the buck.
The X2s are cheap and the 780G chip set really is very good for onboard graphics.

Unless you are into gaming, video editing, or heavy transcoding the low end is really good enough for most people.
Heck even for light video work the low end is probably good enough.

Re:How well the does that dual dual-core work with

[Yvan256]

Is the CPU+motherboard cheaper than an Intel D945GCLF? (i.e. 81.00 $USD).

4mb cache == 1mb cache per core(?) = sucky?

[log0n]

You youngins are spoiled.. back in my day, we took our BP6s and dual celerons with 512KB cache (per) and we were grateful!

Re:4mb cache == 1mb cache per core(?) = sucky?

[hawk]

And I figured I was young, having been impressed by those Z80s--you could hand-pick them to find units that were stable at a whopping 4 MHZ, . . .

Oh, and 128k of memory means that someone did some cute bank-switching scheme to change which 64k was addressed at any given moment . . .

hawk

Re:4mb cache == 1mb cache per core(?) = sucky?

[Macman408]

Unfortunately, more cache is becoming a necessity. Throughput (of the CPU and memory) increases much faster than latency decreases. These days, it's not uncommon to have a latency of a thousand clock cycles if the CPU has to go all the way to memory to fetch something. Back then, the latency might've been tens of clock cycles. So yeah, it's way more than we used to have, but without it, your computer would feel like molasses.

Re:4mb cache == 1mb cache per core(?) = sucky?

[ceoyoyo]

Cache? What is this cache you speak of? Wait, that was the bandaid solution when those wacky new souped up 486s got clocked faster than the memory could keep up, right?

Re:4mb cache == 1mb cache per core(?) = sucky?

[Z00L00K]

Spoiled?

There was a time when there was no cache on the CPU.

And if you want maximum performance you really don't want a cache, but that solution is horribly expensive. A cache is a way to save on bandwidth for average situations, and in some cases the cache is useless.

Re:How well the does that dual dual-core work with

[Anonymous Coward]

That is an awful, unstable board. Bought it, was unstable with 3 types of memory. No BIOS options to work with either. Stay far away!!!

Re:How well the does that dual dual-core work with

[LWATCDR]

No but probably only 20-30 more and
It will support 1080P playback,
Has more SATA ports.
Supports more RAM.
Supports DX-10. Not that you would want to use it.
Is a lot faster. It will play some two year old games pretty well.
That little atom board is fine for websurfing with XP. The problem with Intel solutions on the low end is that the graphics suck.

Re:How well the does that dual dual-core work with

[Endo13]

Sure is. http://www.directron.com/am2vcomb34s.html

No way man

[XanC]

Those Celery 300As (GREAT chips) had 128KB L2 cache. But it was nice and fast since it was on-die, a novelty at the time.

Re:No way man

[vux984]

Those Celery 300As (GREAT chips) had 128KB L2 cache. But it was nice and fast since it was on-die, a novelty at the time

And overclocked from 300MHz to 450MHz without blinking, and were actually faster than a PII450 as I recall, due to the cache being overclocked too on the 300A, but not on a real PII.

Re:No way man

[SmittyTheBold]

Yeah, I was going to comment - it was the branded Pentium IIIs that had such large caches, but the Celerons made up for it by keeping their lesser caches so close to the core.

Re:No way man

[Jeff DeMaagd]

And overclocked from 300MHz to 450MHz without blinking, and were actually faster than a PII450 as I recall, due to the cache being overclocked too on the 300A, but not on a real PII.

I really don't understand that, given that the Xeons had full clock caches and weren't much faster, if at any faster, than the Pentium branded version of the same chip. The Pentium version had half-clock caches.

Re:No way man

[vux984]

I really don't understand that, given that the Xeons had full clock caches and weren't much faster, if at any faster, than the Pentium branded version of the same chip. The Pentium version had half-clock caches.

It wasn't that the 300A overclocked to 450MHz was much faster; it was only marginally faster. But at the time the PII450 was the 'top of line' desktop cpu, and the PII Xeon 450s were the 'top of line' period.

And a $110 Celeron 300A overclocked (by simply changing the FSB from 66 to 100MHz by moving a jumper on the motherboard) was in the same performance league, required no special heat sinks or anything.

And it wasn't just the same league, it actually eked out better scores vs a Pentium II 450 on some benchmarks... where the full speed small cache was a better fit to the benchmark than the larger but slower PII caches. And even the Xeon's were (barely) out matched in some cases... again, due to the L2 being on-die instead of off die.

But seeing a $5000 CPU beat out by a $110 'budget' CPU on -anything- even if only by a hair, was pretty nuts. (And an overclocked 300A could wipe the floor with a still-ridiculously-expensive Pentium II Xeon 400)

Typically at that time you could move a CPU one, maybe two 'models' up by over clocking it... take a Pentium 350 and get it up to 400 sort of thing... no big deal really, and not always entirely stable. Enthusiasts were the only people who took the effort and risked the damage and stability.

But now we had a case of intel's absolute cheapest CPUs rivalling its most expensive CPUs. Everyone got in on it... Mom&Pop whiteboxes were selling 300A based system explaining how to overclock them, some of them even did it for you...

It was the golden age of overclocking.

Re:No way man

[rhyder128k]

A famous chip in its day. I seem to remember that it could even be modified to work in a dual CPU config with a simple hardware hack.

Re:How well the does that dual dual-core work with

[Endo13]

Well no, not cheaper with the particular chipset specified. But it's easy to get an AMD+motherboard combo cheaper than $81 that will blow the socks off the atom bundle you linked.

This is the stupidest launch ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at this:
http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=22211&vpn=BX80562Q6600&manufacture=Intel

The Q6600, a 2.4Ghz quad-core CPU from Intel, one which has 8mb of L2 cache, sells for $225 Canadian if you don't buy it on-sale for $199 (which is pretty regular).

This "new" Q8200 is 70 Mhz slower, 4mb less cache and costs ... more.

This is why AMD is still alive: because Intel can't bring itself to be price competitive below $400.

Re:This is the stupidest launch ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a big deal, but don't forget the Q8200 has a faster FSB, support for SSE4.1, lower power consumption, etc.

Re:This is the stupidest launch ever.

[yeremein]

Q8200 is a 45nm chip vs. the 65nm Q6600, so it comes with lower power consumption and allegedly slightly better IPC than the older core--so it should perform about the same.

The real complaint about the Q8200 is that it's missing the virtualization technology that's present in the Q6600 and the Q9000-series.

Re:This is the stupidest launch ever.

[Joe The Dragon]

and the AMD Phenom X4 9950 is under $200 and it is unlocked with a true quad core better bus and built in ram controller 512 L2 per core + 2 meg l3.
The AMD Phenom X3 8750 is under $140 with true 3 core better bus and built in ram controller 512 L2 per core + 2 meg l3.

good MB for intel start at about $100 - $200 VS low end amd boards at 740g at about $60 780g about $70 780g + side port ram 128MB DDR3 $100 790gx about $100 64 meg side port 128+ meg $125 - $150 and there is even a board with 1gb side port at $160 and the 790gx boards are full atx with the sb750. There are a few 780g board that are matx but they still have the sb700.
s
Most of the intel boards with on boards video are cut down ones that are matx and some don't even have a HDMI / DVI port with no side port ram and weaker video then the ati 780g boards that have no side ram as well.

Re:This is the stupidest launch ever.

[lmnfrs]

That's pretty much all you need to look at. If you need bus speed get the Q8200. If you need cache and VT get the Q6600. They are configured for entirely different uses.

Re:This is the stupidest launch ever.

[corychristison]

I agree.

Which is why I have stuck with AMD since the Socket A days...

Sure, I don't get as quite as good performance but I use it for programming and web servers (development and live). When I order dedicated hosting, it has to be AMD... I _do not_ want to see them flop. I think they are doing an awesome job but every 16-year-old seems to think that spending $900 on a processor for that 4 FPS gain is worth it.... I don't understand it.

The only Intel parts in my home is the girlfriends Mac mini.

Re:This is the stupidest launch ever.

[MojoStan]

Q8200 is a 45nm chip vs. the 65nm Q6600, so it comes with lower power consumption and allegedly slightly better IPC than the older core--so it should perform about the same.

and the AMD Phenom X4 9950 is under $200 and it is unlocked with a true quad core better bus and built in ram controller 512 L2 per core + 2 meg l3.

... and the AMD Phenom X4 9950 has a TDP of 140 Watts. Also, superior technology like "true quad core" and integrated memory controller haven't helped AMD compete with Intel's high-end desktop offerings (although they have helped in MP servers). On the desktop, AMD Phenom can only compete in price/performance with Intel's low-mid range chips (and they compete quite well). Benchmarks (including power consumption) are much more useful than tech specs.

1.., 2.., ????

[newr00tic]

And if you call and tell them you buy zero, as in none, they'll send you $84 instead. Profit!

Re:How well the does that dual dual-core work with

[Joe The Dragon]

and for about $150-$250 you can get a 790 gx board with a 128mb of side port video ram + a x2 cpu.

Oh yes

[XanC]

The best was the Abit BP6. 2x300MHz Celerys at 450. Server-class power for the masses!

In my day we had 256 bytes of cache

[Anonymous Coward]

and 4MB of RAM. Or was it 256 bytes of RAM? No wait, In MY DAY, we were lucky enough to see the price of core memory drop to $1 per bit! Oh just imagine what I'll be able to do when I install a few more words of memory!

You had 512 KB cache? Decadence!

[Moraelin]

Bah, you had 512 KB cache and you thought _you_ had it bad? Bah, in my day we had 8 bits for the whole family, and they had to last us a whole week! And we had to load the programs into it with a wheelbarrow, and it was uphill both ways through the snow! And we _liked_ it.

Well, more seriously, if you started at the 512 KB cache Celerons, you're hardly in a position to call anyone a "youngin". Even the age of Celerons without any cache at all is less than a decade ago.

If you want a more proper "back in my days" story, catch this: I started on my parents ZX-81 computer with 1 KB RAM. Yes, RAM, not cache. You could upgrade it to IIRC 16 KB, but that was an extra module you have to buy, and dad hadn't.

It did have an 8KB ROM with BASIC, but the Sinclair BASIC was infamously slow. It also didn't help that the CPU was a 3.25 MHz (yes, M, not G) 8 bit affair. But the machine "cleverly" used some of the CPU signals for screen refresh. (We were not quite in the age of GPUs yet.) So you could either have the full 3.25 MHz or have it only during the blank bands below and under the image, or about 20% of the time. That latter mode was aptly called the "SLOW" mode. Effectively it was like working on a 0.65 MHz Z80.

Here I must also add that we're talking Zilog MHz, not 6510 ones. Those of you who had a C64, you might remember that it only had 1MHz, so no big deal. Well, it was because a Z80 did less per clock (but normally had more of them per second) than the 6510. If I remember the timings right, you could pretty much translate four Z80 cycles to one 6510 cycle, though the Z80 did have a few more tricks up its sleeve to make it run slightly faster than that. E.g., a lot more registers. At any rate, trust me, an effective 0.65 MHz worth of Z80 CPU was quite aptly called "SLOW" mode.

I got interested pretty quickly in how I can write something that runs faster, and my dad dumped a bunch of Intel and Zilog manuals on me and told me to try assembly. Except that machine didn't have enough RAM to actually run an assembler.

Welcome to the the world of writing those programs on paper and manually converting to hex. I had made my own neatly organized notebook, so I could quickly find the hex codes for any given opcode and operand combination. And if you wanted to write the equivalent of a loop or an "if"? Count the bytes and use a relative jump, boy.

Of course, there was no such thing as a debugger or protected mode on that thing. If you had counted the bytes wrong and took a jump off a cliff instead of to your intended destination, the machine would typically just lock up.

Oh yes, and it also had a very slow cassette interface, not hard drives like your Celerons, or even a floppy like those C64s.

Mind you, I don't feel much nostalgia about those days. But just saying, if you want "back in my day" willy waving, that's what a real "back in my day" story sounds like ;)

And actually I'm sure someone out there has a better story, possibly along the lines of, "you had cassettes and a whole 3.25 MHz CPU? You don't know how good you had it! Well I got to program an ENIAC by manually rewiring a switchboard!" Heck, both my parents got to enter programs via front panel switches occasionally, which makes even my entering hex by keyboard and with some minimal editing capabilities, seem actually pretty comfortable.

Slightly Delayed?

[Cyanara]

Awesome. I was worried my computer was going too fast.

Re:How well the does that dual dual-core work with

[Anonymous Coward]

Has more SATA ports.

But flaky AHCI support, making "IDE compatibility mode" (no NCQ) necessary for motherboards with 780G chipsets.

It will support 1080P playback,

Supports DX-10. Not that you would want to use it. Is a lot faster. It will play some two year old games pretty well. That little atom board is fine for websurfing with XP. The problem with Intel solutions on the low end is that the graphics suck.

Motherboards with Intel's new G45 chipset are now in stock and WinDVD has fixed the initial bugs in Blu-Ray playback. Sure, 780G is a bit more mature (except for the AHCI thing), but Intel DOES now have a DX10 integrated solution with full acceleration of Blu-Ray video (including H.264).