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Intel Unveils 6-Core Xeon 7400

Posted by kdawson on from the not-cheaper-by-the-half-dozen dept.

JagsLive recommends CNet coverage that begins "Intel officially unveiled its six-core 'Dunnington' Xeon 7400 processor Monday ... As expected, Intel launched the Dunnington chip for high-end servers ... The Xeon 7400 is also one of the first Intel chips to have a monolithic design. In other words, all six cores will be on one piece of silicon. To date, for any processor having more than two cores, Intel has put two separate pieces of silicon ... inside one chip package."

9 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Base 2 by daveime · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is it just me, or does 6 seem like a counter intuitive number of cores ?

    2,4,8,16 ... we've been using binary since the start, now we have to start in trinary ?

    1. Re:Base 2 by dubbreak · · Score: 3, Interesting

      AMD once said there was a greater efficiency in interconnecting 3 cores, compared to 4.

      Anyone with simple graph theory can see that. 3 nodes only need 3 edges(or interconnects in this case) so that they are only one hop away from each other. With 4 nodes you need 6 edges for a complete graph / clique (each node is adjacent). Now whether that is applicable to the amd chip is a whole other question. I don't have the time (nor do I care to) look up the implementation of the chips.

      --
      "If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
  2. Wattage by locster · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think server builders these days are less interested in the number of cores per CPU and more interested in improvements in the performance/wattage ratio.

  3. Re:With a catch.... by ShadowRangerRIT · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Windows optimizes for the low core case. I believe they use a bit field to keep track of the cores, so the 32 bit flavors of Windows are limited to 32 cores, while the 64 bit versions are limited to 64 cores. There may be a high end server SKU that bypasses that limitation, but I don't know of it.

    --
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  4. Re:And we're now tuesday by sgbett · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://www.apple.com/uk/imac/

    Hmm, the page you're looking for can't be found.

    interesting.

    --
    Invaders must die
  5. Re:I really want to know... by Cornwallis · · Score: 1, Interesting

    But I've got users who are upset they *aren't* getting a dual-core "because I need it". Doesn't matter that they are working on Access databases!

  6. Yay, more cycles we can't utilize by cbreaker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Until Intel unveils their version of HyperTransport, this will be more of the same.

    You put a quad-core Xeon against a quad-core Opteron and under most conditions (besides CPU-only work) the Opteron will kill the Xeon.

    Now, we'll have even more cycles we can't utilize, because of the old design of the system.

    If you're going to do anything that uses both RAM and CPU (aka VMware hosts, which is what most big servers are used for these days) you'd better off with an Opteron.

    I'd rather use a dual or quad socket Dual-Core Opteron than a dual or quad socket Quad-core Xeon.

    --
    - It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
  7. Anyone doing heavy-duty OCR would by PeeAitchPee · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Gads, who on earth would run a 64-core Windows box?

    The ABBYY OCR engine (Windows only) in any of its latest versions (either direct from ABBYY or OEM'd into someone else's product) will multithread during recognition -- one thread for each core. We currently use a dual quad-core Xeon Windows Server box and I wish I had more cores -- when you get a project to OCR 2.1 million docs in a timeframe of less than a few years, you will too. ;-)

    ABBYY's own server-level product (Recognition Server) will span multiple boxes and use any designated cores available on those boxes -- and it scales linerally with the number of cores available (distributed or local). So yeah, there are still some Windows-only applications where a truly monster box would be great.

    OCR is one of those apps where you can absolutely NEVER have enough resources for big jobs.

  8. Re:Yes! It should totally be a power of two. by daedae · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The AMD point is true (useless side note: I actually just got a machine with a Phenom tri-core a few weeks ago), but if you look at the die photo you can see that there's nowhere for a pair of disabled cores. It's possible that they're just making native 6-core dies until they get the manufacturing process stable enough to make 8s though. /me is okay with the fact he's probably just feeding trolls