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Intel Launches Core I7-4960X Flagship CPU
MojoKid writes "Low-power parts for hand-held devices may be all the rage right now, but today Intel is taking the wraps off a new high-end desktop processor with the official unveiling of its Ivy Bridge-E microarchitecture. The Core i7-4960X Extreme Edition processor is the flagship product in Intel's initial line-up of Ivy Bridge-E based CPUs. The chip is manufactured using Intel's 22nm process node and features roughly 1.86 billion transistors, with a die size of approximately 257mm square. That's about 410 million fewer transistors and a 41 percent smaller die than Intel's previous gen Sandy Bridge-E CPU. The Ivy Bridge-E microarchitecture features up to 6 active execution cores that can each process two threads simultaneously, for support of a total of 12 threads, and they're designed for Intel's LGA 2011 socket. Intel's Core i7-4960X Extreme Edition processor has a base clock frequency of 3.6GHz with a maximum Turbo frequency of 4GHz. It is easily the fastest desktop processor Intel has released to date when tasked with highly-threaded workloads or when its massive amount of cache comes into play in applications like 3D rendering, ray tracing, and gaming. However, assuming similar clock speeds, Intel's newer Haswell microarchitecture employed in the recently released Core i7-4770K (and other 4th Gen Core processors) offers somewhat better single-core performance."
"a die size of approximately 257mm square."
I suspect that should be 257 square mm. A 257 mm square die couldn't even be covered by a standard sheet of paper (US:letter, EU:A4)
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Low-power parts for hand-held devices may be all the rage right now, but today Intel is taking the wraps off a new high-end desktop processor
Actually, I think that useful computation per joule is all the rage all over the device size scale. See? This one works everywhere.
Ezekiel 23:20
These chips are slightly faster (given equal core counts) than their predecessors but not in any interesting way.
However, you have to remember that these are really server chips that are repurposed for high-end desktop use. The one vital metric where these chips shine is in their power consumption (or lack thereof): Techreport did a test where the 6-core 4960X running full-bore is using about the same amount of power as a desktop A10-6800K part ( http://techreport.com/review/25293/intel-core-i7-4960x-processor-reviewed/9 )
That level of power efficiency will do wonders in the server world and these chips (and their 12-core bigger brothers) should do quite well in servers.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
It's laughable how small the performance gains are between recent generations of Core processors. I realize there are other improvements like power consumption and integrated GPU performance but the desktop gamer isn't going to drop another grand to save watts or get better performance on an IGPU he never will use anyway.
Because the only Multi Chip processors are still 4 years behind this. Why dont they just enable the ability for me to drop 4 of these on a single motherboard so I can have my 24 core monster for editing and rendering 4K video?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I don't think you understand correctly how a superscalar processor works. Maybe you're confusing parallel instruction execution with pipelining? Even single-core, non-hyperthreading processors have been able to execute multiple instructions *simultaneously, in a single cycle* since the first Pentiums or earlier. See, they can fetch two instructions at once from the cache because it has a wide internal bus, decode them simultaneously, and execute them simultaneously (if they are independent) because each core has multiple execution units. Modern processors can easily execute 3 or 4 instructions at once on a single core, in a single cycle. As I understand it, hyperthreading comes in when part of those execution units are sitting idle because there are not enough instructions in the main thread that can be executed in parallel - they're not independent, some depend on the results of others - and so those idle units are used to process another thread. Of course it's slower than having two full cores, but the point is that a single core CAN execute a lot of stuff in parallel.
Since their devotion to TPM, my answer to intel was, is and will be: GO F**** yourself.
This CPU very low, if not the lowest performance per price of current models, so in one category it is the worst possible buy you can make; it is incredibly over-priced.
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Amazing. Everything you said about HT is completely wrong. Where ever did you get this information?
Intel's hyperthreading consists of two logical processors sharing the same compute resources. Each logical processor has its own register set but shares decoders, adders, shifters, cache, etc. as it goes about executing its assigned thread. The sharing process is vastly more complex and efficient than you seem to think -- there's no alternating of cycles. Once instructions are decoded into uops, they flow through the pipeline in a dynamic fashion that sometimes leads to one thread using most of the resources while the other one waits. In fact, this is a big advantage of the design -- when one thread stalls from a cache miss, the other one uses all the resources until the first thread's memory access completes. A much better plan than your scheme of using only even/odd cycles.
Managing this process is not simple, and steps must be taken to avoid both deadlocks and livelocks as the two threads compete for resources. But the process is dynamic -- the design allows one thread to run unimpeded when it makes sense to do so, while still preventing one thread from being starved at the other's expense. But this "every other cycle" notion of yours is pure nonsense. The core can retire up to four uops per cycle, and at times these all come from the same thread.
I was about to mention that all of the things you talk about are more memory intensive than anything else, which of course is OS dependent, requiring 64-bit, which in addition to hardly anyone bothering to run multi-threaded software, no one bothers to write software optimized for 64bit systems either.
The main problem being is that relatively speaking single thread 32bit applications are what people are used to making is simple compared to writing a multi-threaded 64bit optimized application. Unless there is a real advantage why do it, if it will take longer, cost more money, etc... I agree it will eventually happen, just not as soon as you may be alluding to.
The next step really needs some method/tool/language to make the process easier for the developers to write the software, allowing them to do it more efficiently, which will in turn start to get management on board to create some of these things.
*Note: I have no experience whatsoever writing multi-threaded 64bit optimized software. I have only heard on the interwebs that its inherent complexity make it more difficult to do.
Also there is the 32bit crutch. Lots of apps out there that are 32bit so it is not going away anytime soon, not like a clean break. While it is still an available option developers will use it. That said, I am not even sure how much difference there is, some benchmarks show very little improvement from one to the other, but that could be a mature technology VS a new one and not a fair comparison.
That said using more available cores, particularly for specific tasks would likely see immediate dividends. From my understanding it is a timing/scheduling and organizational issues that make it more complex.
OK I may have rambled a bit.
It safe to say it does not, as TSX is a Haswell feature and 4960X is an Ivy Bridge CPU.
What you would need is the 4960X's successor, which is Haswell-E on a new socket called LGA 2011-3 with ddr4, and its server counterparts. Or get a vanilla 4770 or 4771.