Intel Core 2 Quadro Kentsfield

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: Pabster

Originally posted by: JackBurton
I don't know about everyone else, but I can always use a faster processor. It comes in VERY handy with compression.

Seems the AMD fanboys here have done their best to declare Kentsfield a "waste" because "most" software can't take advantage of 4 cores. They conveniently forget those of us who do advanced 3D rendering, video compression, et al. which can and will make use of every bit of processing power.

My argument is that the majority of people in the marketplace don't have any use for this, and won't for a long time. Dual Core I can see because it's so reasonably priced at the moment, plus there's gonna be a necessity for dual core CPUs in the not too very distant future.

 

[Pabster]

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
My argument is that the majority of people in the marketplace don't have any use for this, and won't for a long time. Dual Core I can see because it's so reasonably priced at the moment, plus there's gonna be a necessity for dual core CPUs in the not too very distant future.

True enough. It is a minority, and it will be a minority who jump on the quad-core bandwagon.

That said, quad core won't be "unreasonably priced" for long. I think 2007 will see them shift in to the mainstream and by late in the year to 2008 they'll be priced comparably to Conroe's today. IMHO, of course.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: Pabster

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
My argument is that the majority of people in the marketplace don't have any use for this, and won't for a long time. Dual Core I can see because it's so reasonably priced at the moment, plus there's gonna be a necessity for dual core CPUs in the not too very distant future.

True enough. It is a minority, and it will be a minority who jump on the quad-core bandwagon.

That said, quad core won't be "unreasonably priced" for long. I think 2007 will see them shift in to the mainstream and by late in the year to 2008 they'll be priced comparably to Conroe's today. IMHO, of course.

I don't think that is going to happen. I think Dual Core will be mainstream and quads will be expensive comparatively. Furthermore most everyday apps will take advantage of dual core but may not fully use a quad core to the fullest. This is how it currently works as someone said earlier. The boost from 2-4 cores wasn't very large on most apps that you would likely see in use all the time. There's really just a handful of apps that show a marked boost in performance. The same could be said about a single core to a dual core, but as I said dual core will become necessary and it's cheap enough.

 

[FelixDeCat]

INTEL RULEZORS! :laugh:

I think Im going to bypass c2d and go straight to quadro. Thanks guys!

 

[Armorize]

GIVING AWAY QUAD CORE PROCESSORS

ftp://download.intel.com/pressroom/kits/idffall_2006/Stephen Smith Core2 Extreme Quad-Core.jpg

j/k look at those eyebrows rofl

 

[BrownTown]

@ Duvie:

dexvx is correct in what he is saying, SMT is designed to make use of the wasted functional units in a processor. In the P4 implimintation there are a large number of pipeline bubbles that occur due to the long pipeline of the processor which is very difficult to keep filled. The Core 2 processors have a much sorter pipeline, but it has a very large decoding and execution bandwidth. This measn that if one thread cannot use all this bandwidth then another could be added in to take advantage of the unused resources.

Basically think of it this way: the P4 has trouble reaching peak throughput becasue of the pipeline is often stalled, whereas the Core 2 has trouble reaching peak throughput because it has more pipelines in parrellel which are often unutilized. Also, the Core 2's cache structure provides it with several advantages over the P4, the large cache makes it easier to load multiple threads without thrashing the cache, and the ability to lockdown blocks of cache for certain threads measn you do nto have to worry about one thread kicking the other out of the cache. Also, you dont have the replay bug that screwed over the P4s CMT implimintation.

 

[dmens]

Originally posted by: BrownTown
whereas the Core 2 has trouble reaching peak throughput because it has more pipelines in parrellel which are often unutilized.

that'd be sweet, but it pretty much never happens. c2d is deeper, but also wider, so it fills pretty quickly. stalls everywhere. ugh.

 

[coldpower27]

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd

Originally posted by: Pabster

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
My argument is that the majority of people in the marketplace don't have any use for this, and won't for a long time. Dual Core I can see because it's so reasonably priced at the moment, plus there's gonna be a necessity for dual core CPUs in the not too very distant future.

True enough. It is a minority, and it will be a minority who jump on the quad-core bandwagon.

That said, quad core won't be "unreasonably priced" for long. I think 2007 will see them shift in to the mainstream and by late in the year to 2008 they'll be priced comparably to Conroe's today. IMHO, of course.

I don't think that is going to happen. I think Dual Core will be mainstream and quads will be expensive comparatively. Furthermore most everyday apps will take advantage of dual core but may not fully use a quad core to the fullest. This is how it currently works as someone said earlier. The boost from 2-4 cores wasn't very large on most apps that you would likely see in use all the time. There's really just a handful of apps that show a marked boost in performance. The same could be said about a single core to a dual core, but as I said dual core will become necessary and it's cheap enough.

And this is based on? Dual Core was introduced cheaply by Intel because their performance wasn't that good in comparison to the X2, while the X2 were priced in the 500-1000US range at first, over time they too fell to more reasonable levels.

Quad Core will be expensive at first, but will filter down to the mainstream over time, it will take somewhat longer simply because there won't be a "bad" Quad Core from either party at first. The Core 2 Extreme QX6700 will be the only Quad Core product in town hence the 999US price tag, though a Q6600 is on it's way for Q1 2007. Once Intel's hits the 45nm node then Quad Core can start filtering to the mainstream.

1 Core to 2 Cores only brought about gains in certain things, not everything either, and were only starting to go forward on more programs being desifned for 2, slowly this will shift over to 4 as well, but Intel and AMD need to continue to reduce prices on them.

Dual Core will become necessary, over time, but you can say that about Quad Core, though it's just further down the road then Dual Core.

It's as expected though at this stage of development, some programs take advantage of Dual Core on desktop, even less can take advantage of Quad Core now, this will of course change over time.

 

[BrownTown]

Originally posted by: dmens

Originally posted by: BrownTown
whereas the Core 2 has trouble reaching peak throughput because it has more pipelines in parrellel which are often unutilized.

that'd be sweet, but it pretty much never happens. c2d is deeper, but also wider, so it fills pretty quickly. stalls everywhere. ugh.

Core2 is not deeper than P4... And about stalling everywhere, how do you mean that?

 

[dmens]

i meant resource deep, not pipeline deep. who cares about the latter, lol.

as for stalls, that's just reality, even for the widened c2d datapth. only hand-crafted code will utilize the full width of the machine at all times, but when it happens, damn its an impressive sight.

 

[BrownTown]

Oh ok, now i understand what your saying. Usually when someone says "deep" i think deep pipeline. But thats more or less what I said, the decode/execution bandwidth is larger than most threads will be able to use, so there is a clear room for improvement via SMT due to more efficiently utilizing the width of the processor.

 

[dmens]

sort of... SMT can utilize stall holes opened up in the pipelines because the machine isn't deep enough to hold all the data in flight. there's no such thing as a pipe that is too wide. if so, it is a design miscalculation.

 

[zest]

Check this astonishing report-
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1839/

 

[BrownTown]

Astonishing report? I'll I see is something that talks about dual/quad cores not being all that fast at most things. Not only is this common sense, but it is well known to pretty much everyone.

 

[Skott]

Most enthusiasts know this. Yeah, the unitiated user wont. I think thats who they are trying to get the word out to.

 

[zest]

I bow to your superior kowlge.......


However , I have not been investigating CPU's vey much recently .
But I was planning a CPU/MB upgrade early next year and Kentsfield 4 core EX was my planned upgrade along with the best mainbaard available.
This damning info about core 4 really screws things up.

 

[Duvie]

I showed ppl this many months before lame-o THG....Video encoding only scores high with 4 cores when doing HD quality stuff...normal mpeg2 stuff becomes limited by IO long before using all the cores...

The rest has been common knowledge...

The only scary thing was THG report on the temps....Stock 2.667ghz and he was hitting 66c while the dual core version only hit 44c....Yikes this may need to be water cooled if you even dream about 3ghz...may not be for overclockers...

 

[sxr7171]

Originally posted by: Duvie
I showed ppl this many months before lame-o THG....Video encoding only scores high with 4 cores when doing HD quality stuff...normal mpeg2 stuff becomes limited by IO long before using all the cores...

The rest has been common knowledge...

The only scary thing was THG report on the temps....Stock 2.667ghz and he was hitting 66c while the dual core version only hit 44c....Yikes this may need to be water cooled if you even dream about 3ghz...may not be for overclockers...

Yeah it looks like the overclocker would likely be better served with a dual core machine unless video encoding is the main use of the machine.

The Divx 6.22 transcoding of regular DVD quality MPEG-2 material to MPEG showed large gains with quad core as did WMV9 encoding of DV to WMV.

 

[Zim]

Originally posted by: zest
Check this astonishing report-
http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1839/

Astonishingly ignorant. He totally misses the point that computers never run just one process. Although singled-threaded processes may not run significantly faster, they do get a larger slice of CPU time when running with other processes. The OS alone has multiple processes that can be dstributed over as many cores as there are. That said, this is great in theory. My own experience tells me that Windows for one doesn't distribute the workload across cores as well as it might.

 

[BrownTown]

BrownTown's currrent CPU statistics:
-Processes: 48
-Threads: 487
-CPU Usage: 2%

So yes, you never run just one thread, but if you are playing a gmae that is taking 98% of the CPU time while the other 500 threads are taking 2%. The only way to fully use 4 cores is to run a game, encode DVDs, run a file server, and do CPU intensive rendering all at the same time. I don't know about you, but 99% of the time I only utilize 1 Core, and 99.99% of the time I am using 2 or less.

 

[The-Noid]

Once the Kentsfield comes out you will see the problem it has. My second box is an ES Kentsfield QX6700 @ 395x10 under Custom Vapochill LS. Even with vapochill under load I am hitting -1 or 0 degrees. When I had my Tuniq on that thing it did like 68-74 degrees under orthos @ 3.33 ghz. Kentsfield is going to be a good clocker, but not the great clocker conroe is. Conroe has been the easiest to overclock processor in quite some time, but once the kentsfield comes out again there is going to be a need for more exotic cooling solutions again.

 

[coldpower27]

Originally posted by: Yoxxy
Once the Kentsfield comes out you will see the problem it has. My second box is an ES Kentsfield QX6700 @ 395x10 under Custom Vapochill LS. Even with vapochill under load I am hitting -1 or 0 degrees. When I had my Tuniq on that thing it did like 68-74 degrees under orthos @ 3.33 ghz. Kentsfield is going to be a good clocker, but not the great clocker conroe is. Conroe has been the easiest to overclock processor in quite some time, but once the kentsfield comes out again there is going to be a need for more exotic cooling solutions again.

This wouldn't be surprising as you have 2 Dies on the same package which is theoretically twice the energy disappated, though hopefully it will have more power optimizations in place compared to Conroe to help curb this problem.

This is the exact same thing basically as compare to the Presler and Cedar Mill only were talking about Core based architecture products compared to Netburst based units.

 

[ProSlayer]

Sorry if this has already been answered, but is there a release date on this? I plan to buy my computer parts at the end of November, but if these are coming out a month or two later, then I will wait so the prices drop.

 

[lopri]

Hyper-threading is very different from dual-core design and cannot really be compared on a level field.

On a different note I still maintain my opinion on quad-cores that there will not be a wide-spread market acceptance at this time due to obvious reasons: Cost efficiency (including performance/watt). For dual-cores you could get away with an assessment like "dual-core smoothness", but it can't be applied for dual vs quad. Of course for people who will benefit for real, quad-core is an extremely cost-effective way of computing.

Once again the biggest reason for C2D's popularity, IMO, is its exceptional single-threaded performance. Similarly, I predict the K8L's success in the market will largely depend on its single-threaded performance.

 

[lopri]

Originally posted by: ProSlayer
Sorry if this has already been answered, but is there a release date on this? I plan to buy my computer parts at the end of November, but if these are coming out a month or two later, then I will wait so the prices drop.

November 13th.