Slashdot Mirror
Intel Launches Sandy Bridge-E Series Processors
MojoKid writes "Today marks the release of Intel's Sandy Bridge-E processor family and its companion X79 Express chipset. The first processor to arrive is the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition, a six-core chip manufactured using Intel's 32nm process node that features roughly 2.27 billion transistors. The initial batch of Sandy Bridge-E CPUs will feature 6 active execution cores that can each process two threads simultaneously via Intel Hyper-Threading technology. Although, the chip's die actually has eight cores on board (two inactive), due to power and yield constraints, only six are active at this time. These processors will support up to 15MB of shared L3 Intel Smart Cache and feature integrated quad-channel memory controllers with official support for DDR3 memory at speeds up to 1600MHz, as well as 40 integrated PCI Express 3.0 compatible lanes. Performance-wise, Sandy Bridge-E pretty much crushes anything on the desktop currently, including AMD's pseudo 8-core FX-8150 processor."
given Intel's near monopoly on the cpu market, i'm guessing over 9000 dollars. fuck you intel
But there's no ~$300 priced k version.
No mojo for you.
The i7-2700k will have a launch MSRP of $331.
I fully expect I'll be able to get one at Microcenter for $280 or so.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
So it's very heavy then?
They were supposedly releasing the i7-3820 at $294, with "limited unlock" whatever that means. I was wanting to get the newer socket 2011 motherboard to future proof as much as possible.
Holy shit, did they actually manage to unveil a new CPU without forcing a new socket down our throats? I don't believe it.
Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but they are bench-marking a $1000 processor against a $300 processor?
$1000 processor wins!
Honestly, with a $500+ entry tag plus cooler which is not included plus expensive, low volume motherboard you might want to compare to a dual processor Xeon machine rather than other desktops for some alleged server/workstation stability too. Performance was as expected, 6 cores to 4 so it's faster in well-threaded workstation applications, not that different otherwise.
What's disappointing is the platform, no USB 3.0, two SATA 6 Gbps ports, no SAS support, it seems like PCI express 3.0 made it in but no cards support it yet so there's nothing besides the processor that really screams high end. Well that and 8 memory slots if you feel 4x4GB isn't enough but there's alternatives like the old high end it replaces with 6 slots or 8 GB sticks that have been showing up lately - pricey but you can get 4x8GB for less than one of these CPUs. Don't get me wrong, it's the undisputed performance king but it's like the same car with a souped up engine and fuel system yet none of the features that say this is a $100k Ferrari.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That's nice and everything, but I'll wait for Ivy Bridge, which is due March 2012.
According to Wikipedia:
Ivy Bridge feature improvements from Sandy Bridge were expected to include:
Tri-gate transistor technology (up to 50% less power consumption)
PCI Express 3.0 support
Max CPU multiplier of 63 (57 for Sandy Bridge)
RAM support up to 2800MT/s in 200MHz increments
Next Generation Intel HD Graphics with DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1, and OpenCL 1.1 support
The built-in GPU is believed to have up to 16 execution units (EUs), compared to Sandy Bridge's maximum of 12.
The new random number generator and the RdRand instruction, which is codenamed Bull Mountain.
Next Generation Intel Quick Sync Video
DDR3 low voltage for mobile processors
Multiple 4k video playback
So yeah, just hang on for the die shrink if you care about performance and power consumption. My next system will definitely be Ivy Bridge based.
Trying to future proof an Intel based motherboard is pointless. Considering this new socket replaces the LGA 1155, which is less than a year old, in an ever decreasing release interval, I would estimate this socket will be obsolete by next spring, summer at the latest.
As someone with a decent investment in LGA1366 stuff, I'd rather play it smart and keep everything on the "mainstream" LGA1155 for anything but the six core CPUs. The motherboards are harder to find and substantially more expensive for the dubious value of having some extra PCIe lanes and a couple extra DIMM slots.
I'm in the process now of selling off my LGA1366 machines while they still have value and replacing them with Xeon E-series equipment.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
It doesn't replace LGA1155 it replaces LGA1366, which is 3 years old. These chips are server and workstation level chips.
Intel's next desktop architecture is called Ivy Bridge, will be released in the first 3 months of next year, and will be using LGA1155. Ivy Bridge E will use LGA 2011. Only in about 20 months time (by which point LGA1155 will be 3 years old) will Haswell come out on a newer socket.
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Intel-Sandy-Bridge-E-Review-Core-i7-3960X-and-X79-Chipset-Tested
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/11/14/intel_core_i73960x_sandy_bridge_e_processor_review
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1773/1/
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5091/intel-core-i7-3960x-sandy-bridge-e-review-keeping-the-high-end-alive
(I've always wanted to start a conspiracy theory.)
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
All the new generation, ALL that high price, and it still comes up close with amd's new cpus in multithreaded performance ?
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/11/14/intel_core_i73960x_sandy_bridge_e_processor_review/6
no wonder there have been 3 opteron (bulldozer) supercomputer orders in the last 3 weeks.
Read radical news here
Could this be the processor for a new Mac Pro? Or will Apple wait for Ivy Bridge.
I've had a Mac Pro (or its predecessor) under my desk for over 10 years now; upgrading regularly. Even if its not the top selling Apple Product, its still the machine that Pros are looking for.
Reality has a liberal bias
This is all nice and well, but are there any sites that actually benchmark this CPU under Linux, running some stuff not compiled with intel compiler? AFAIK most of the benchmark software is running on windows is compiled with ICC, and ICC cheats- it disables most optimizations on non-intel CPUs.
How about some linux developer workload? Compile times? IDE performance? Java performance? PHP, Apache, PostgreSQL, MySQL performance? KDE/Gnome performance? CAD/CAM? Matlab or Octave? Bzip2/gzip/SSL/zip under Linux? I know some of these workloads depend on IO/graphics more than on CPU, but I'd like to see results anyway. And I'm sick and tired of reviews that run some Intel compiled synthetic benchmarks and then some games that primarily use GPU anyway. Phoronix is guilty of that as well- they should have more WORK workloads and less FPS counts for games. But at least they are trying- and Bulldozer performance under Linux/GCC isn't that bad compared to Intel CPUs as it is under Windows/ICC.
--Coder
When buying hardware, trying to future proof is dumb. You could try to "future proof" now and buy a $1500 system. In 3 years it'll be shit though.
Alternatively, you could buy a $600 mediocre system now, and another $600 system in 2 years that'll be faster than the above $1500 one. The result will be that you've spent $300 less, you've got machines that are reasonably current for 4 years, and the system you get out at the end is faster.
http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/13/amd-introduces-worlds-first-16-core-pc-microprocessor/
no it doesnt. not when it comes only close with amd's 8 cores in multithreaded apps. 16 cores , becomes unmatchable.
Read radical news here
These are Intel's "enthusiast" parts which generally means "people with too much money". Some people want the highest end performance, price is no issue. Intel is happy to stick a hose in their pockets and siphon out the cash.
That's also why these came after the regular SB parts. Intel full and well knows that for 99.99% of people a standard SB is more than plenty and they'd like to have something economical.
In terms of the other things you'd like to see, USB3 and more SATA 3 will probably be coming but Intel is going to need to replace their DMI interconnect with something faster. They'll just run out of bandwidth between chipset and CPU otherwise. Remember that things like that take time to properly design.
SAS is probably never coming to consumer boards. Too much additional expense for not enough gain. Remember that SAS is actually more complex from a logic standpoint (hence why SAS controllers can handle SATA drives but not vice versa). There just aren't many SAS drives out there in use in consumer systems, and there'll only be less as SSDs take off. After all, what do you really want for a high performance desktop: A 300GB 15k SAS drive for $400 that you have to deal with the noise and cooling, or a 250ishGB SSD for around $400, knowing that the SSD beats the 15k cold in transfer rate, IOPS, seek time and so on?
Only thing I could really see this being useful for, maybe, is GPU compute systems. Reason is that as stated the regular SB only has 16 lanes of PCIe for graphics, the E series has twice that (the others are for other slots). If you knock 4 cards in a system, that means that you'd be splitting the bandwidth down to 4x per card. While chips like the NF200 can help by providing 16x to each card, they still have only 16x to the CPU and thus only a single card can get full bandwidth at any one time. Presuming you had problem sets that required a lot of swapping to system RAM, this could help. However, I find that to be a rather outside possibility, as to use GPUs to their full processing efficiency, you need shit to fit in the RAM on the card.
At any rate, stick with Intel's consumer shit unless you have a real reason.
As that is where AMD wins as you can get lower end cpu and use the chipset with a lot of PCI-e lanes.
Intels other CPU have to few pci-e lanes just X16 + the chipset link is to few. When 1 video card can take up X8-16 pci-e lanes.
As things like sata 6, usb 3.0, PCI-e based SSD cards, cable card tuners, Thunderbolt, need the pci-e lanes as well.
Intel pushes the X1 slots, networking, sound, usb, sata, all over that X4 based chipset link.
At least have 20 pci-e + chipset link so you can have 1X16 or 2X8 + a X4 slot or have Thunderbolt in place of the lanes for the X4 slot.
The Z68 isn't likely to go down in price any, it is the chipset for the IB. The IBs are drop-in replacements for SB processors, same board, same chipset, and all that. In terms of RAM, same deal. They'll still use DDR3. Now that doesn't mean you'll pay much for it, DDR3 is dirt cheap, like $100 or less for 16GB of high quality RAM, but it won't be any cheaper on account of new RAM coming out (RAM is also cheapest when it is in the most production, not because of new tech).
In terms of the CPU... Maybe. Thing is Intel doesn't tend to reduce prices on older parts. A Q9550 is still $300 from Amazon. For that price, you can get an i7-2600. this will probably continue and you'll find that the IB chips will be no more or less than the SB chips they replace. If you buy used you can get one cheaper, of course, but not new.
What I see is the 2600k, the 4 core $300 chip, matching or beating the Bulldozer, and the 3960X beating everything by a decent margin.
You are correct in that the Bulldozer doesn't have much to worry about from the new E series as they are much higher priced and compete in a different market. What it does have to worry about is the regular SB chips, which are killing it. Even when things are stacked in what should be its favour: Heavily threaded tasks, the SB does as good or better. Then if you take many other tasks that are not as multithreaded, the SB pulls way ahead.
THAT is the BD's big problem... Well that and the fact that the Ivy Bridge comes out in a few months. The E series is just for people with too much money. In the consumer market, the regular SB is an amazing performer.
There are only three things that you can bench it against usefully:
1) The 2500/2600k CPUs that are the high end for the consumer boards. The question there is "What do I get moving up to the much more expensive E series?"
2) The top of the line AMD Bulldozer. The question there is "How much faster is Intel's high end than AMD's high end?"
3) The previous Intel high end, the i7-990X. The question there is "How much faster would it be if I upgraded?"
In all cases, you are talking a very high priced, over spec'd part. There are no other chips in its category really. It is for people who demand the max performance and aren't concerned with the stiff price premium to have it.
So you can have more chipset choice like AMD?
Apple uses workstation class components for their Mac Pros. In terms of Xeon CPUs, I'm not sure how Intel is going to handle it. They've had SB Xeons for awhile now, the E7-8830 is an example. They have some features you see in the new SB-E chips, some that you see in the normal SB chips. They are also a different socket from either. I don't know if they plan a separate Xeon line or not.
At any rate, Apple is likely to stick with Xeons, that is just how they do things for better or worse. When will they do it? Who knows? Could be soon, could be never. They seem less and less interested in the pro market all the time.
The result will be that you've spent $300 less, you've got machines that are reasonably current for 4 years, and the system you get out at the end is faster.
You're also sending twice as much to the garbage pile.
I know this isn't a consideration for most, and it's all but encouraged through the new "disposable electronics" thing that's crept up over the last decade, but at some point we need to consider that some considerations extend beyond the financial, even when talking about buying consumer goods.
For instance, I know people that buy a new printer every time their starter ink runs out because it's still cheaper than buying replacement ink cartridges. Three times a year they're throwing a perfectly good printer into the trash. Yeah, it saves them money, but does that really make it right to throw it in a landfill? I have a hard time saying yes.
Maybe if we required manufacturers to subsidize the disposal of their goods when such goods are non-biodegradable it would help do something to eliminate the whole "designed for the dump" phenomenon?
You're also sending twice as much to the garbage pile.
Not that your point in general is wrong, but you're actually sending about 150% to the garbage pile, not 200%. One machine every 2 years, instead of one machine every 3.
As things like sata 6, usb 3.0, PCI-e based SSD cards, cable card tuners, Thunderbolt, need the pci-e lanes as well.
1) SATA 6 and USB3 is typically on the mobo not using up PCIe anyway
2) The thing is, the number of machines not owned by enthusiasts that actually use these other things is tiny. Are you seriously going to spend thousands on a PCIe SSD, but not be willing to shop out for a decent CPU too? I have no idea who actually uses a TV tuner any more with on-demand services being infinitely more convenient, and thunderbolt is a) something that should be integrated into the graphics card anyway b) something which only really benefits laptops, as it's pretty much the generic docking station and nothing else.
The Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition finished well ahead of the second-place Core i7-990X
I don't see any benchmark placing the 3960 more than 10% faster than the 990. How can 10%, and under, be "well ahead"? The FPS tests are all under 2% in favor of the 3960. $1,000 + Motherboard upgrade for 2%? With the Icy Bridge you will get a die reduction. This means at least you will get a power consumption drop.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Blame Intel for their cockamamie upgrade path that makes every component obsolete every 12 months.
Why even bother buying motherboards and processors separately if they're both going to become obsolete at the same time thanks to Intel?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The result will be that you've spent $300 less, you've got machines that are reasonably current for 4 years, and the system you get out at the end is faster.
You're also sending twice as much to the garbage pile.
I know this isn't a consideration for most, and it's all but encouraged through the new "disposable electronics" thing that's crept up over the last decade, but at some point we need to consider that some considerations extend beyond the financial, even when talking about buying consumer goods.
For instance, I know people that buy a new printer every time their starter ink runs out because it's still cheaper than buying replacement ink cartridges. Three times a year they're throwing a perfectly good printer into the trash. Yeah, it saves them money, but does that really make it right to throw it in a landfill? I have a hard time saying yes.
Maybe if we required manufacturers to subsidize the disposal of their goods when such goods are non-biodegradable it would help do something to eliminate the whole "designed for the dump" phenomenon?
A machine that was bleeding-edge two years ago is still quite powerful today for the majority of people out there. Also, not every server in the rack has to be equal. There are plenty of less-demanding but still important roles that two year old machine can fill when it is kicked down a notch. I'm sure the "weakest link" hardware can be put to good use elsewhere when upgrade time rolls around. I know I consider the mobo-CPU combo as a unit now, rather than thinking "I can upgrade the CPU later". Maybe I can and maybe I can't, but it doesn't matter that much. So long as I have room to boost RAM and storage, I can extend the useful life of the hardware a great deal. It just may not be my fastest, l33t3st system any more. At worst, I can give the machine away -- my 3 year old secondhand hardware is generally as good as most people would buy off the shelf new, and I already have a good idea what it does best.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
You're also sending twice as much to the garbage pile.
Only if you actually throw the machines away. If anything, it's the reverse. If you upgrade components of a machine, it's much harder to find a use for the bits you remove than if you replace the whole machine. A two year old machine may be underpowered for you, but there are lots of people who can use it for another few years.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What kind of moron would throw a still semi-decent computer in the trash? Sell it for $250 to recoup some of the loss. And who says it would end up in a landfill? I don't know about you, but my state has a recycling program. I can drop it off at Goodwill and it gets recycled.
I bought an PS3. 400 bucks and I haven't had to upgrade since. Maybe I might buy a slick SSD and throw it in there for giggles.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
> When buying hardware, trying to future proof is dumb. You could try to "future proof" now and buy a $1500 system. In 3 years it'll be shit though.
That's total nonsense.
a) The gaming rig I built in 2001 lasted until 2008 -- upgrading the video card from a GeForce 2 to GeForce 4 to GeForce 6600GT kept it alive much, much longer.
b) I just priced out a complete gaming rig for a friend based on what I have. For $1300 you can build a gaming rig that WILL be perfectly fine for gaming in 3 years. By that time, you can upgrade the video card and it will play all the latest games.
You _do_ know that MOST games are GPU bound at 1920x1080, not CPU bound right?
Here are the benchmarks to back that claim up:
Sabertooth 990 FX
http://www.guru3d.com/article/asus-sabertooth-990fx-review/17
And proof that GPU's are the bottlenecks in the latest games ...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063.html
I could go on, but there would be little point.
So go ahead, and blow $500 on that latest i7-2600K -- meanwhile us budget AMD guys will be putting money that we saved on buying the cheap 4-core system towards a high end GPU like the 6970, because you are forgetting one tiny, but important fact. Almost ALL the big PC games are designed to run on the 5 year old console hardware -- the PS3 and XBox 360 only have ~6 core and ~2 cores respectively, which means modern CPU's are NOT the bottleneck -- the GPU's are.
LGA2011 really replaces LGA1567 for the Xeon MPs. Intel's on-again, off-again planned replacement for LGA1366 is actually LGA1356. However, it seems like Intel may somewhat simplify their socket lineup and just have LGA1155 for general uniprocessor platforms and LGA2011 for performance UP and all multprocessor applications.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
I have no idea who actually uses a TV tuner any more with on-demand services being infinitely more convenient
I use a TV tuner. Not very often, but it's part of my disaster plan. When disaster strikes, such as a power outage, or traveling, it's still possible to plug in the TV tuner and get digital broadcast TV. That way my wife doesn't miss DWTS. It's all about continuity of service, dude.
So go ahead, and blow $500 on that latest i7-2600K -- meanwhile us budget AMD guys will be putting money that we saved on buying the cheap 4-core system towards a high end GPU like the 6970
1) the i7 2600k is $300, not $500
2) You seem to have completely misread my post – I was advocating not buying insane CPUs and instead buying something middle of the range.
That said –I wouldn't be buying anything AMD for this build –the Phenom II X4s are beaten by the i3s on price and performance, and the X6s are beaten by the i5s on price and performance.
I have 3 TV tuners in a system. I record all the TV I want to watch. Then watch it when I want to. I have found the on demand services to be lacking for the show that I want to watch. They also forced me to watch on their schedule. The show would go away after a while. I record them and watch when I want to. it is great to not have to wait for all the 2 part TV shows unless it is a season ending cliff hanger.
I thought they were for the entrance and exit routines for Oz???? (That Wiz can be pretty tricky, ya know?)
If you posted that using your Z80, THEN I'm impressed. ;)
...the chip's die actually has eight cores on board (two inactive), due to power and yield constraints...
So that means that some of these chips might have 7 or 8 cores functioning, but they still won't enable them because it would probably exceed their TDP. I wonder if it is possible to find out which cores are working and enable them? This might mean that once the yields go up they could start binning them and sell 7 and 8 core versions. The other interesting thing is that this chip won't perform as well as a 6-core chip with only 6 physical cores, because it will be harder to dissipate the heat when there are 2 cores just sitting there acting as an insulator.
It is for people who demand the max performance and aren't concerned with the stiff price premium to have it.
For my, personal taste, I prefer Atoms - they draw less power, I can leave 3 of them them booted and running 24/7 for the cost of a single "barnburner" like the latest i7 running 8 hours a day, and they do what I need.
However, if you need the performance, increasing the cost of a processor from $150 to $1150 is only going to increase your total system cost by a factor of 3 (2 if you pay for a copy of Windows...), for a performance increase of 4x or more....
The value proposition is there, much better than the (warning: bad car analogy ahead) Ferrari to Honda performance vs. value proposition.
The question is: do you really need it? If all you're doing is booting to a web-browser 30 seconds faster, buy an Atom and leave it booted up - hell, buy an Atom for every room in the house and save yourself the time spent walking to/from the PC.
I've got some of that problem going on. The leftovers aren't a whole computer; they're really a motherboard+RAM+CPU. It's not like I need to upgrade the 10-year-old-ATX case or 5-year-old power supply. So I need to find someone who wants computer "guts" which aren't a whole usable computer. That rules out anyone who isn't a computer-dork. But computer-dorks don't want my ancient electronics. All that's left is to BUY MORE EQUIPMENT to turn the obsolete guts into an obsolete system, just so it'll be usable enough to have sufficient appeal that some non-dork will be willing to take it off my hands for free.
It's not worth the trouble; at some point you just have to left it go, and allow it to poison some poor Chinese solder recycler and a few generations of people who live whereever he works. There isn't a good secondary market for motherboards. And I sort of understand that; I don't like to buy used motherboards, either. I don't trust 'em.
Sure, that's the common sense approach which works for most normal users, but there are some of us who directly benefit from having a faster machine NOW, typically because we have a real business need for it. I could do my work on a "mediocre" system, but it would slow me down significantly, and after a month or two, the time (=money) lost waiting for the slower PC exceeds the cost delta of the faster machine.
The problem with Intel's latest processor is it isn't that big of an improvement over last year's 6-core line-up, putting the 3960X in a strange niche that only interests a small pocket of wealthy e-peeners. Those who want more cores would go for a dual Xeon, and those who want gaming performance would overclock the tits out of a 2600K. Four-slot SLI has never caught on, it's just an experimental curiosity. Even 2x dual-GPU rigs are notoriously unreliable thanks to crappy driver support, so you stand to gain very little from this X79 platform at this point in time.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
still has HyperTransport
> 1) the i7 2600k is $300, not $500
i7 = Mobo+CPU = $500
AMD = Mobo+CPU $250-$300 (depending if you want Crossfire or not)
A SB-E? No I don't need it. A regular Sandy Bridge? Yes, and thus I have one.
Uhhh, the FX-8150 is $250 alone, where are you getting this magical $0 motherboard from?
Other than that, your figure for the i7 is way off. Good quality Z68 boards can be had for $100, if you want to drop crossfire as you suggest, more like $70, so you're looking at $370 for a system that blows any AMD system out of the water.
Scale back to the i5 2500 and you're looking at $270 for the mobo and CPU, only $20 more than the bulldozer CPU on its own.
Scale back further to the i3 2100 that can beat the 4 core Phenom II X4 you're talking about and you're looking at $180 for motherboard and RAM, which is less than the Phenom II X4 system costs.
http://tinyurl.com/free-satilite-tv
There are plenty of valid business scenarios that constitute increased ROI from using such a chip as opposed to a lesser chip. This thing should be getting benched against the i7 extreme, not the amd proc which can't compete w the extreme to start w (all due respect to AMD it wasn't meant to article is just a little dirka dur).
Also remember, you can OC... this processor, so if your willing to take the jump, you can get even more out of it, and the proc isn't limited by the software your running, it's simply designed to run a lot of software at once whether the software is designed to run on multi core arch or not. If you have a lot of apps you need open at once as required with a lot of dev / graphics positions, for a company the increased productivity might steep the cost of the proc, of course not every IT person can take advantage of it either.
Unless you're running massive amounts of video/audio encoding, the 2500k currently beats everything on the market price/performance wise. As you overclock it gets even closer to the 2600k in terms of performance in everything but audio/video encoding as well.
If you're a gaming enthusiast the answer is jack all. The 2500ks clock up to 4.8 at similar rates, and moreover can do so on(admittedly very good) air cooling, and while the extra L3 cache will help, it won't help enough to justify the extra $100, assuming they don't drop the price of the 2500k even further.
Great reads, nice to see things are advancing on the CPU front... which is great - as I only buy once every 3-5 yrs. typically (between this & the advances in video too? Great gaming + work rigs too that will probably DOUBLE what I have now (Intel I7 Core 920 + NVidia GeForce 470 GTX).
APK
P.S.=> I wonder how fast + how many cores we'll see on silicon based CPU's? I heard 4-5ghz is the "limit" ghz-wise on it, until they "change the game" & go to something like gallium arsenide (which I heard is risky & poisonous to work with plus isn't as plentiful or economically 'efficient' to produce)? apk
Also, we're presuming that my system is not going going to be handed down/on to someone who isn't as demanding on the machine. I go through work machines every 12 months or so, it doesn't mean they go in the bin - they just get handed onto users who don't need anything even remotely special.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You're assuming there is a benefit to running video over 16 pci lanes. News flash: PCI x16 is still slow for video. Get a video card with an appropriate amount of memory and you should not be hitting the PCI bus enough to matter. If you're hitting the PCI bus constantly your performance is already fucked, whether it is x4, x8, or x16. AMD may win the PCI bus race, but they lose in CPU speed, heat, stability and power consumption.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
thats probably why all the 3 supercomputer orders in the last 3 weeks have been placed by amd bulldozers. because 10 core xeons 'quite handily' beat an amd 16 core machine ..
go fuck off.
Read radical news here
where in brazill?
You can get MBs for $99 for intel, and the AMD idles at higher watts so over 4 years, your power bill will double your cpu cost.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
There's always somewhere to use last generations' computer...
My p4 is used for programming my car, and the K6-II 450 is my TV computer for my bedroom; it will run mythTV.
All the later one will still play games, so they're loaded with whatever was current at the time.
Oh, I guess using more power is bad too. Oh well. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Or if you are like me, you don't throw anything away, only re-purpose them as web servers, file servers, media pc's, bookshelves, small tables, dust protectors, ancient artifacts, and curious images of days of yor.