Intel Gives More Details Six-Core Gulftown CPUs

[enzo matrix]

[citation][nom]JohnnyLucky[/nom]"Gulftown is aimed at high-end desktops and workstations."OK! But from reading the comments it looks like gamers and enthusiasts are itching to give a try.[/citation]
That would be covered in the "high-end desktops"

 

[daeros]

I just thought of a new Mac Pro with two of these in it... 12 cores, 24 threads... **drools on self**

 

[lasaldude]

I'm Thinking That This Will Be The End For Consumers(Home And Business Not Enterprises). What Will We Do With Anything Above This. Everything Will Run So Fast And Efficient That There Is No Room For Improvement Anymore. The Next Task Will Be Penn State's And IBM's Graphene Processors Which Will Bring .5 To 1 Tera-hertz Processors. Where Gonna Fuck Up And Created Non-Stoppable A.I. To Destroy Humanity. I Mean Do We Really Need 8,10, or 12 Cores After This For anything? By That Time We Can Just Use Single Or Double Floating Points On Graphics Card Instead Of CPU Chips.

 

[lasaldude]

Definitely A Buy Since It's LGA 1366 And Good Asus Mobos Should Be Cheaper By This Time. I'M GONNA START SAVING MY UNEMPLOYMENT PAYMENTS NOW!

I KNOW THAT I'M A SHIT BAG!!! CHEERS

 

[theAnimal]

[citation][nom]El_Capitan[/nom]You know what would be better than 6-core CPU's? Dual or Triple Socket Motherboards that could support overclocking. I would rather have three 2-core CPU's that can be overclocked to 4.2 GHz than one 6-core CPU at stock 3.33GHz for 1/4 the price. That would give me a hard on.[/citation]
EVGA already has an OCable dual 1366 on the way.

 

[doron]

with software currently going the way it is and hardware constantly improving while prices drop, cpu upgrade beyond 3-4 cores is a waste of money.

 

[siman]

OC 4.5GHZ AMD quad looks really good for under $200 paired up to 2 5800 series cards that for under 2g this CPU intel is toating about will cost about as much as the whole amd/ati computer

 

[MU_Engineer]

[citation][nom]El_Capitan[/nom]You know what would be better than 6-core CPU's? Dual or Triple Socket Motherboards that could support overclocking. I would rather have three 2-core CPU's that can be overclocked to 4.2 GHz than one 6-core CPU at stock 3.33GHz for 1/4 the price.

There are a few problems with that one:

1. Dual-socket and larger motherboards are almost all targeted at workstation and server users, so almost none of them support overclocking. Right now, the only ones out there that do are the old Skulltrail and ASUS QuadFX boards, and then there's the new unreleased EVGA Classified dual LGA1366 board.

2. CPUs that support multi-socket operation are going to have a lot of cores since the biggest advantage of having more sockets is that you can have more cores per machine. There is only one current-generation dual-core CPU that runs in a dual-socket motherboard, and it's the crippled Xeon E5502. All of the rest are quad-core or six-core.

3. CPUs for multi-socket setups are considerably more expensive than those for single-socket setups. Things just get more expensive as you support more sockets. Take a 2.8 GHz quad-core AMD processor with 6 MB of L3 cache. The single-socket version is the Phenom II X4 925, which is $145. The dual-socket version of that chip is the Opteron 2387, which is $537. The quad/eight-socket version is the Opteron 8387, which retails for a whopping $1867. You're more likely to get a single-socket CPU for 1/4 of the price of a multi-socket one than the other way around.

4. Also, motherboards with more sockets are more expensive. You can get a good single-socket desktop motherboard for $150. It takes $300-350 to get a good dual-socket board. Quad-socket units run from about $600 to $1000.

5. And finally, if you're a Windows user, you need progressively more expensive OSes to take advantage of more sockets since Windows is licensed by socket. You can run any version of Windows on a single-socket system. You need the Professional or Ultimate versions to support two sockets. If you want more than two sockets, you need Windows Server, which starts at about $1000 the last time I checked.

That would give me a hard on.

No, the Internet porn you're looking at on the monitor does that, not the computer 😛

 

[marraco]

The only reason for switch from 920 to it, is if I buy a new video card, and the power saving is enough to avoid buying a new power source, which I doubt.

 

[sinfulpotato]

Lets just all buy AMD's phenom x6, I'm thinking 250-300 for the lower end x6?

Not bad considering many pay for for a graphics card. I would never buy anything over a quad though. This would be for extreme multi-taskers, gamers do not apply.

 

[fonzy]

Where's the 80 core CPU they showed off almost 5 years ago and then promised it would be here within 5 years?

 

[CptTripps]

[citation][nom]doron[/nom]with software currently going the way it is and hardware constantly improving while prices drop, cpu upgrade beyond 3-4 cores is a waste of money.[/citation]

Depends on what you are doing, I have apps that utilize all 8 threads of my quad and brings it to its knees. I welcome 6 core wholeheartedly but will wait for a $2-300 part.

By the time my 920 is getting tired I should have plenty of upgrade options. Woot.

 

[ta152h]

Some of the remarks here are a little incorrect.

Three dual cores is not equal to one six core processor. There are advantages and disadvantages to each.

Most of the people that want more and more cores have a fundamental misunderstanding that with perfect software, you're going to see perfect scalability. It's not so. Remember, you have one memory controller, one L3 cache, and only one processor can access memory at the same time. On the lobotomized LGA1156 platform, you even have the PCIE controller sharing the memory bus, making even more contention. I doubt very much you'll see six core on that - ever, for those reasons, unless they remove hyper threading (which increases memory requirements, of course), which wouldn't make any marketing sense.

Three dual cores would have their own interface to memory, so much more memory bandwidth. But, then there's the problem of all the cores talking to each other. They use the shared L3 cache now, but if they're on seperate dies, they can't. Also, now memory isn't uninform, and some access from one processor will take longer since memory will be local to each, but not to all (NUMA is what this is called). Of course, this would cost much more to make the motherboard, with all these extra paths not only to memory, but to the chipset, unless they were to wire just one processor to the chipset, and have the others request data from it, adding, latency and more contention.

More cores aren't a free ride. It's a poor man's way of increasing performance. They don't know how to increase per thread performance much anymore, which will always increase performance in any CPU bound situation, so they add cores which don't always increase performance, and have a diminishing returns, but is so much easier to do, and despite all the shortcomings, works quite well in many situations. I'm not knocking it, I'm just pointing out that it's not a panacea, and it's not a matter of developers catching up to get the full use out of threads. There's something called Amdahl's law, that basically says parallelism has limits, and it depends on the algorithm. The greatest programmers in the world can't make threads work on certain algorithms; it's just the nature of how they are. The example often used is, I can't get a baby a month from now even with nine women.

 

[JMcEntegart]

[citation][nom]stg_99[/nom]"juicy deets"?What kind of moron writes this garbage?[/citation]

This kind!!

AND I get paid for it.

 

[rambo117]

[citation][nom]JMcEntegart[/nom]This kind!!AND I get paid for it.[/citation]
you go Jane!!

 

[R0B0T]

[citation][nom]El_Capitan[/nom]You know what would be better than 6-core CPU's? Dual or Triple Socket Motherboards that could support overclocking. I would rather have three 2-core CPU's that can be overclocked to 4.2 GHz than one 6-core CPU at stock 3.33GHz for 1/4 the price. That would give me a hard on.[/citation]

First of all, it would not be as fast. There would be a bottleneck somewhere caused by the fact the cores in both or all three processors would need to trade data across there L3 chaches. which would mean that data will need to cross the mobo. like when the QX6800 came out and it was two Dual cores in on CPU package the data between the two Duals was handeld by the northbridge. So a single 6-core solution would be better.

 

[Neog2]

[citation][nom]doron[/nom]with software currently going the way it is and hardware constantly improving while prices drop, cpu upgrade beyond 3-4 cores is a waste of money.[/citation]

I will be getting one of these because it was the only reason I bought a 1366 processor to began with. So I have the 920, and 940, both overclocked decently. Just finished building my 920 rig with the
Asus P6X58D Premium Motherboard, and it supports 32nm 6 core. It also
has USB 3.0, and sata 6.0GB/s.

Anyways as far as upgrades beyond 3-4 cores is a waste. Sure software
it self might not be multi-threaded to 6 core level, but doesnt mean
you can't delegate programs to run on certain cores.

I do it all the time example right now im playing Star Trek online, and
in Task Manager I have Star Trek set to the affinity of CPU 0, and CPU 1,
then I have windows movie maker set to Affinity CPU 2, and CPU 3 and its
transcoding a file right not to a seperate hard drive. Then I have IE open with about 7 tabs open and I have it set to CPU 4, I have dream weaver open as well and its set to CPU 5, and CPU 6, and my anti-virus, anti-spyware program is set to cpu 7. All 8 threads are delegated for
various things. And there are other small programs running that I have set to different cores as well but this is just what im currently running. with this rig. Not necessarily the programs coding, its just how you use the machine.

I7-920 - Overclocked to 3.2ghz
Asus P6X58D Premium
Corsair TR3X6G1600C8D DDR3 1600 6GB [3x2GB]
XFX Radeon HD 5850
WinFast PxVC1100
Intel X25-M 80GB MLC
5 - Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB
Black Magic DeckLink Studio
Thermaltake Toughpower 1K - W0155RU

Dual Boot Win 7 64bit, Win 7 32bit Ultimate.