Slashdot Mirror
Intel Launches Its First 10-Core Desktop CPU With Broadwell-E
Two years since the release of Intel's Haswell-E platform, which popularized 8-core processor to users. On Tuesday, the chipmaker unveiled Broadwell-E family, which consists of an "Extreme Edition" of Core i7 chipset that has 10 cores and 20 threads. (Do note that Intel is intentionally not calling it deca-core.) Intel says the Extreme Edition is designed for games, content creators, and overclockers. From an NDTV report: The 7th generation Intel Core processors are built on the 14nm fabrication process, and are part of the 'semi-Tock' release -- neither in the Intel Tick or Tock cycle. and come with Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 for more efficient core allocation for single-threaded processes, giving up to 15 percent better performance compared to the previous Haswell-E generation. All four new Intel Core i7 Enthusiast processors, codenamed Broadwell-E, support 40 PCIe lanes, quad-channel memory, and bear a TDP of 140W. Give Intel $1,723 and the Extreme Edition pack is yours.
"Intel says the Extreme Edition is designed for games, content creators, and overclockers."
Also known as people too dumb to realize they're paying a thousand percent markup for commodity hardware.
but does it go to 11?
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
"Do note that Intel is intentionally not calling it deca-core."
Perhaps somebody could elaborate on this?
It's obviously not meant for plebians. It's meant for the programmer who makes >$200 an hour, i.e. the time lost to compiling is worth more than this extreme high-end CPU is.
People who might actually need something like this are those who are running a lot of different applications simultaneously or have individual apps that were programmed to do lots of processing in parallel. I am currently building a data management system that uses lots of threads to greatly speed up processing. The more cores are available, the faster I can process large data sets. With column based relational tables, I can assign a different thread to process each column separately. If there are 100 columns in a table, lots of threads are needed. The more threads that can run at the same time in the CPU, the faster the query will complete. These processors are not just for gaming.
I believe this announcement is a response to the rumors of AMD's Zen processor, with more instructions per clock than Skylake and with a 95W TDP. Competition is sweet. Bring it on AMD!
It's obviously not meant for plebians. It's meant for the programmer who makes >$200 an hour, i.e. the time lost to compiling is worth more than this extreme high-end CPU is.
I did a PC refresh project at a Fortune 500 company a few years ago. The initial batch of Dell workstations had six-core processors. But Dell ran out of six-core processors and dropped in eight-core processors. The senior engineers almost broke out into a riot since they grabbed the initial shipment and the junior engineers were getting the eight-core processor workstations, upsetting a delicate pecking order throughout the office.
With AMD Zen right around the corner (October-ish) I believe Intel is milking their performance monopoly as much as they can with their $1700 CPUs.
The Zen should give us roughly Skylake IPC (Some predict a little better, some predict a little worse.) Being it's AMD, they'll have to undercut Intel's price if they want marketshare. If the arch is good, this will lead to a price war, which should drive down Intel to AMD price levels.
With any luck, high end Zen launch will be a 16-core with Skylake level single thread performance for $999. Sign me up for one of those!
Do the coils also whine 10 times more, it has been a nightmare with this new Skylake.
Besides maybe Ashes of the Singularity does any game use more than 2 cores ( not counting crap like Far Cry 3 where it binds to core 3 for some inexplicable reason)?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It's obviously not meant for plebians. It's meant for the programmer who makes >$200 an hour, i.e. the time lost to compiling is worth more than this extreme high-end CPU is.
Oh please, according to OpenBenchmark you can compile the Linux 4.3 kernel in 62 seconds on an Intel Core i7-5960X. Unless you have a developer who just whacks the build button to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks - which is not the kind of person you should be paying >$200/hour - then almost any kind of employee perk or complimentary service would be more effective than 0.1 second off his compile time.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
While a few companies are re-writing code to multi-thread, many are not. Intel's single-thread champ is still the venerable two year-old i7-4790K, which will smoke any "enthusiast" chip out there for most things that enthusiasts care about, like gaming, rendering, etc.
But the server / workstation -oriented motherboards due have dual cpu / lot's of pci-e slots (Some broads have all X16 with slots at 8 or 16 3.0)
Given the price I think that it's meant for a very select audience.
How many compilers support multi-threaded compiling? I can't find any reference that says Visual C++ complies using multiple threads, but of course that doesn't mean that it doesn't (just that I'm not hitting on the right question) but I'm curious if it does? Most references that I found mentioned that compiling a large project is pretty disk intensive and people recommended a SSD and more ram to speed compilation?
AMD ZEN more pci-e then skylake. With all the pci-e based storage around Intel's skylake can't even power 2 M2 pci-e cards + 1 video card at full speed.
with amd zen it seems like 2 videos cards at full speed + lot's left over for storage / network / usb / TB 3.0 and more.
The software I support takes about an hour to compile with a 20 way build on an enterprise class server blade farm. Before I optimized and increased the parallelization of the build process it used to take 10+ hours. Not every project compiles and links that quickly.
AMD has x86 processors with 16 cores. As I recall you can have up to 4 CPUs per motherboard, so 64 cores total. Whether that's appropriate for your "desktop" is your decision. Their APUs have 4 CPU and 8 GPU cores.
Fry's and Microcenter are reasonable choices for brick-and-mortar retailers.
NUCs are indeed awesome. I've got 3 chugging away in the server closet, having replaced older, slower, bigger, hotter, louder boxes and 1 retrofitted with an extra ethernet port that replaced the consumer grade router. The workload isn't bigger. So the servers can shrink.
I've got one on my desk at work, chugging away on simulations so I don't have to share the data center machines with 10,000 other engineers.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Sounds like a poor company culture to me.
More like H1B culture gone wrong. All Indians.