8-core Ivy Bridge?

[ambam]

Any word from Intel on when the 8-core Ivy Bridge processors will be out?

Will they use the current socket type or a different socket/chipset?

What kinds of applications would fully make use of an 8-core 16-thread CPU?

 

[obsama1]

Intel's consumer processors only go up to 4 cores. Their E series goes up to 6 cores. IB-E is out in a few months, but it will only be 6 cores. 8 cores would dispel a ton of heat. It would be very hard to cool something like that. The only CPU's that Intel makes that are 8-core is their Xeon chips. But, those are clocked pretty low, and aimed at the server market.

 

[amuffin]

All of the current ones are Sandy 8 core 16 threads.

 

[jaguarskx]

Ivy Bridge E CPUs will only have 6 core and will be socket 2011. They are expected to be released sometime in Q3 2012. Q3 ends on October 31st.

Applications capable of using 6 cores would be video encoding programs, 3D rendering programs, financial and scientific modelling software, and massive database programs.

As mentioned above, the only 8 core Intel CPUs will be the Xeon series which is geared for servers. They lack integrated graphics core and they also consume a little less power than consumer version Intel CPUs. Programs that can benefit from 8 cores would be the same as above. Servers basically need a lot of core to process incoming requests for whatever users are looking to do and there's always checksum calcs going on in the background to ensure whatever is being done correctly. Companies have large number of servers to handle incoming traffic since there can be thousands or millions of requests per second (like Google).

 

[twelve25]

I've got some dual 8 core Xeons servers at work, and really only a huge database or a VMware server can use that many cores. Something like a huge rendering or scientific calculation workstation could, too. But as Xeon boards are almost all dual processor, you are usually cheaper getting two 4 cores instead of one 8.

And just a minor correction to amuffin's comment, quite a few of the Sandy Bridge based Xeons are not hyperthreaded. Especially the 8 way capable chips.

If you really have an app that can burn 8 cores, the FX-8150 will actually peform quite well there.