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.
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?
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.
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!
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.