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Intel Unveils 6-Core Xeon 7400
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."
I'm betting new Mac Pros will be launched today.
I think they're really making 8-core chips but their factories are primitive so normally only about six of them work.
These chips are all defective. I wouldn't buy one and neither should you.
No sig today...
There wasn't much in terms of technical specs in TFA. 6 cores, 16MB cache, anything else? Clock speed? 16MB of L2? L3? FSB? DDR(n)? (Though this is probably more up to the MB manufacturer) Why are they moving the memory controller off silicon? That in itself seems like a step backwards.
I would like to see them pushing consumer multi-core computing more personally. Get MS and other application manufacturers to support more cores. Servers have been doing it for ages and with pretty much all consumer level chips being dual core they should be pushing this angle more.
Though, them incorporating all of the cores on a single piece of silicon is definitely a step forward; the lack of additional specs and the notion of moving the memory controller make this seem like not as big of an announcement...
-SaNo
6 = 8 - 2 broken cores ?
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Hey, 6 is a power of 2. It's 2^2.585, to be inexact.
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.
i might finally be able to play crysis on my vista ultimate machine? i mean, granted, my pc will look more like a LHC when im through with it...but a few black holes are worth it
Good people go to bed earlier.
No, it just matters that you have more than one.
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.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
2^(log2(6)) to be exact.
Pentium 1 user, aren't you?
... and each one will have it's own processor core.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
6 = 8 - 2 broken cores ?
You joke but that's already the case with PS3's Cell (7 SPU = 8 - 1 broken), with tripple core Phenom (3 = 4 - 1 broken), and with a very high number of graphic cards (The range segment {pro/mid/low-cost} on which a GPU is used = the number of functional cores they managed to salvage)
A separate reason may be the number of {quickpath/hypertransport/etc.} interconnects (6 cores require 15 interconnect to communicate, 8 cores require 28 interconnects). 6 to 8 cores isn't such a big increase but keeps the number of inter connect reasonnable.
(Other processors types like Tilera end up only interconnecting adjacing cores on their 64x chips and you have a strongly *Non*-Uniform Architecture, with not all core able to reach and talk to others at the same speed)
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64 cores should be enough for anybody.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
I'm holding out for a 12 core processor.
I'm also holding out for a razor blade with 6 blades, screw those wimpy 5 blade razors that Tiger is pitching right now. (F*ck, I have a beard, why do I want a razor blade? Screw it, I'm still waiting for 6 blades.)
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
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.
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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.
What's wrong with that. Intel has sold defective processors for years, either binning them at a lower clock speed or trimming out chunks of cache and selling them as Celerons. If it can serve a purpose, does the job you need to get done, and it's available cheap... I don't see a problem here.