4 Cores? 6 Cores? Do You Care?

An anonymous reader writes "Intel has updated its processor price list earlier today. Common sense suggests that Intel may not care that much anymore whether its customers know what they are actually buying. One new six-core processor slides in between six-core and quad-core processors – and its sequence number offers no clues about cores, clock speed, and manufacturing process. If we remember the gigahertz race just a decade ago, it is truly stunning to see how the CPU landscape has changed. Today, processors carry sequence numbers that are largely meaningless."

Comments

Ideally the best metric would be

[snooo53]

Some combination that measures both how many operations per second, and how much power it's going to take to do said operations (i.e. Watts/computing unit). I don't know if even FLOPS is sufficient anymore to describe current computing tasks. Heck, I'd be happy with any sort of standardization.

Re:It's in their best interests

[pclminion]

What benefit is there in confusing your customers as to which product they should purchase? When I, as a consumer, feel overwhelmed or confused about a product choice, I usually respond by simply purchasing nothing at all. And I'm sure I'm not alone in that.

Lies, damn lies, and CPU speed numbers

[Locke2005]

If the chip can't run all the cores at full speed due to heat/power considerations and therefore either throttles back each core's speed or disables some cores under heavy load, than core counts are really just a deceptive pissing contest, aren't they?

One guess why

[Locke2005]

Have you considered that the reason the processor numbers tell you nothing is that ALL the chips are fabbed with 6 cores and the ones that have one or two bad cores in testing have 2 cores disabled and are sold as quads?

Re:It's in their best interests

[Pharmboy]

The problem now is that you have to do a tremendous amount of research before you buy now. It used to be much simpler: Pentium 60, 66, 75 or 100, pick one. Later it was still simple with Celeron or P2/P3/P4, as you are picking bigger cache and faster bus speed. Now to get the highest return on partially defective silicon, they offer too many models, many that overlap each other, and can be very confusing, with some dual core models that outperform quad core, etc. A year ago I finally settled on a Q9550 but it took reading 50 articles to figure out that it was, at the time, the best bang for the upper middle buck. So yes, the average consumer will get boned.