Intel quad-core server and desktop processors will arrive this year instead of next, Chief Executive Paul Otellini said Wednesday, firing a new competitive volley against rival AMD. “We notified customers we’re pulling in both the desktop and server (launch) of the first quad-core processors into the fourth quarter of this year from the first half of 2007,” Otellini said.
I can smell the eggs cooking on the tops of Intel labs’ test boxen right now…
Honestly though I can only wonder what this means for highend dual processor (8 cores!) Apples once they release Intel based PowerMacs. Time will tell.
Cores are the new gigahertz.
Actually from all I’ve read the newest Intel chips run cooler than they have in a long time. Of course I don’t know about quad cores…
Don’t forget that those processors mentioned are still based on that old Netburst technology, which basically means that Apple won’t use them. “real” quad core processors that also have a sane power consumption will follow later in 2007 according to intel.
No, Kentsfield is based on Conroe (Core 2 Duo) and Clovertown is based on Woodcrest (Xeon 5100). NetBurst is dead.
Don’t forget that those processors mentioned are still based on that old Netburst technology, which basically means that Apple won’t use them. “real” quad core processors that also have a sane power consumption will follow later in 2007 according to intel.
You might actually wish to read the artile before making a fool of yourself; these quad processors are using the new core architecture, not the netburst; the netburst was formally killed off once the core 2 was shipped – hence the reason why the netburst based processors were being sold off in a ‘fire sale’ for the last few months.
As for Apple, it’ll be interesting to see whether or not Apple uses them in iMac or whether they decide to keep it specially for the PowerMac replacement or the Xserver.
Wiki suggests that Clovertown is actually two woodcrest cores, so actually it’s not netburst but Core-based…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_Microarchitecture
Cheers,
Mark
With hardware manufacturers pushing massive parallelism to consumer hardware, perhaps we’ll see an increased focus of programming these systems using a functional programming language like Haskell or Lisp.
It’s almost as if the Japanese were ahead of their time with the concept of the 5th generation computer:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer_systems_proj…
The tricky part is for applications to be developed to use this, most software languages, even those that support threads, are not-particularly geared for parallel processing. Ask anyone who has tried to write a complicated threaded program in C or even Java.
This is great though for massive compilation, or transcodeing a bunch of video files, etc.
-Matt
Edited 2006-07-20 18:54
You don’t have to write multithreaded programs to take advantage of multicore processors. Just write one simple single threaded program and make it fork or execute it several times. That, ofcourse, on unix based OS. For Windows users there’re still the difficult to program threads.
another thing is that you can have the machine do more without getting bogged down in task switching.
the best thing would be if the os could more or less make a core exclusive to a program. that way i could have a movie going in a window, and no matter how much i taske the other cores, that video will play back more or less flawlessly…
thats the true power of multiple cores for home use…
Last time I checked, Windows had an API to start subprocesses. Granted, its equivalent to posix_spawn rather than fork, but if you’re multithreaded in the parent at all, then you probably want to do that anyway, and both Windows and UNIX can handle shared memory well enough. And some of us have been programming with threads for a long time – they aren’t that hard in C++ or Java or .net. Please don’t fud!
Hehe, most people will just watch the movie, don’t start multitasking because what’s the purpose of “watching” the movie then?
You can set processor afinity for a program if you want. Don’t know how because I don’t have a SMP system. But I heard it works.
By the way, you don’t need a multicore processor to watch a movie and do multitasking if you want.
For me multiple cores don’t have any “real” use other than servers/rendering. Gamers don’t benefict, normal people neither.
Gamers will benefit. Look at PS3 for example. Look at the upcoming Unreal Engine 3.0 based games. Look at the multicore patches for COD 2 and Quake 4 I believe. Threaded game engines are a reality. These AMD and Intel engineers are driven by the gaming industry. Why else are any meaningful benchmarks based on games? (Well for their non-server processors anyways but now people have opterons in their gaming god boxes)
For overwhelming majority of people, quad core gains them nothing, accept bragging rights and the hard-on they get from thinking about how fast there computer could be.
My current desktop is a Sun Ultra 20, 2.613 GHz of single core Opteron power, 2GB of ram, a fairly decent 250GB SATA hard drive, Nvidia FX1400 video card with 128MB of ram on board, LAN is a mix of gigabit and 100mbit systems, Including a couple Solaris and Linux boxes with fast SCSI on board and decent amounts of ram. My link to the internet is 3000/384. Okay it’s not the top of the line system but it’s no slouch.
The reason I tell you all this is to make a point. For the most part it runs my apps amazingly fast, even in Windows XP sp2. Yes Windows XP, I know it’s not often people around here admit they run it, but it’s what 80+ percent of the world runs. There are times I run one or more operating systems inside vmware, yet the box is still stable and quick. Lately I have even been surprised to find my son on the desktop when I’m logged into it via my laptop using rdesktop doing stuff in windows, (yes I found a great patch that makes this possible in XP), and in the OS inside vmware, and I had no idea that anyone else was using the system. Yet even with all this computing power there are times I click a link and the system just sits there or freezes up. One thing that is pretty much guaranteed to freeze up the windows system is accessing a Shared filesystem, Some times just accessing local filesystems; another big one is opening up a PDF file in adobe’s PDF viewer. The window/application locks up. These problems occur because of bugs in Windows it’s not the filesystem or the hard disk that is having problems, operations just have to time out, before the OS will try again. It’s not a matter of CPU speed or the amount of ram, disk speed, or network speed. It’s the wall clock that is the real limit.
Now when I boot into Linux or Solaris, I don’t face any of those slow downs. Everything is pretty dam fast, the only time I have to wait, is for IO 99% of the time everything is IO bound. I’m not talking about little stuff like opening a 100MB file or moving them around my network. The only slow down is moving multiple gigabyte files. The only task I ever do lately that is CPU bound is burning videos to DVD’s it takes 2 hours. Perhaps when I compile a large application it takes an hour or so max.
Yes I wouldn’t mind a dual core processor, some times. Then one could run the background tasks and perhaps my main apps would be a bit faster. But really more than that really isn’t going to do much. Do you really need to buy a faster computer to burn a DVD faster, something that you only do once or twice a week?
Most games depend heavily on the GPU. Also on a fast processor. I don’t see how a threaded game can get a significant advantage to make it not only better, but also faster. Aren’t the game developers putting too much weight on the processor, rather than further requiring the physix chip?
Also I don’t think Intel and AMD are driven by the gaming industry. Most computer users are not gamers. Intel and AMD are driven by the necessity to make money, thus they need to compete and sell more powerfull processors. If AMD launches a 4 core processor, then Intel will also launch one. The day Intel launches a 128 bits 32 core processor, then AMD will have to do the same to compete, even if most people don’t really get much benefict from this.
The thing is, you go buy a PC and you don’t get a P3 800Mhz that possibly will fit many internet users. You get a 2Ghz 64 bits processor with Windows 32 bits installed. So you are not using you new PC at full power.
>Most games depend heavily on the GPU. Also on a fast
>processor. I don’t see how a threaded game can get a
>significant advantage to make it not only better,
>but also faster.
Easy. One processor handles interrupts/IRQs, etc. The keyboard and mouse interrupt stall things quite a bit on PC hardware. Another processor to handle AI, another processor to handle feeding the graphics GPU and yet another to handle various spatial params. Of course, even better yet is to spin off tasks to whatever CPU is least utilized as you go, which a good SMP scheduler will do for you automatically. CPU affinity isn’t all bad, either.
>Also I don’t think Intel and AMD are driven by the
> gaming industry.
Oh, yes they are. The only ones buying big, fast CPUs are gamers, scientists, programmers and CAD operators. Everyone else buys commodity hardware from Best Buy/Future Shop/etc. etc.
Once games start to utilize multi-core CPUs, they will benefit enormously. Pretty well any other task will benefit if the OS lets it, already. Obviously, Windows has the short end of the stick here.
This is meaningless for the average desktop user of Windows XP Home (and even professional) since the maximum # of processors utilized by the O.S. is 2 (professional)….
Unless, of course, microsoft has enabled use of more than that in XP in some fashion (SDK perhaps?)
Anyone want to chime in on this?
Anyway, what I find was using the Amiga in the past and presently BeOS that the ability to startup/move programs onto diffirent screens makes it more easyier to keep track of multiple programs. The basic Windows appoach of putting all the programs onto one screen tends to clutter up the display and discourage multi-tasking. Even the approach you see on Macs discourages using more than about four programs at a time (note: I have *not* seen the latest Mac OS).
I think many window people don’t see the need for large scale multi-tasking because thier enviroment does not make it easy to do and follow.
PS. Personally I have uses for quad core or even more. Running BeOS I do notice a slow down on my dual cpu machine once I go over 4-6 programs processing at the same time. Note: FireFox seems to be the main culprit, once I am using it, it looks like it grabs one CPU mostly for itself and slows everything else down. It has gotten to the point that I start off loading tasks to NetPostive, NetPenguin, and NetNautiX all at the same time to avoid FireFox’s slowdowns. Without FireFox running I may have a dozendiffirent programs running without noticing any slow downs at all.
More CPUs sure would be a big help.