Intel Hints at Octa-Core CPUs this Year

[Guest]

Lol,, people kill me with "why do i need more than 1 core" lol.. my win xp machine ATM- RIGHT NOW has 66 processes.. HMM and a quad core,.and stuff just rocks. Most users, even granny, use like more than 1 app at a given moment. Mozilla+Outlook anyone? OR the power users, who have word+outlook+excel+Mozilla+Anti Virus+music playing in background???

People should think first. Some games are multi threaded.. LOTS of apps are multi threaded. At this day, this year, most cpu's are multi core. WELL now there is a reason for software vendors to do multi threaded apps.. SAME goes for monitors.. There is no reason for a 28" monitor, but that wont stop people from buying.. AND in the Server world, MORE CORES=MORE POWER!!!.. IN a Virtual environment, This simply brings a smile to ma face...

 

[sonofliberty08]

there is a company had 64 core chips already ... Tile64

 

[tonkatuffmofo]

[citation][nom]avericia[/nom]PLZ stop posting ignorant comments "games only use 1 or 2 cores" have u ever played ut3, Dawn of war 2, Crysis, call of duty 5, Warhammer because those games and more are heavily multi threaded as well as games coming out in the future.4 cores and above allow large performance gains as long the program is optimized to take advantage of it which is becoming more and more common, so 8 cores will just allow game developers to make even more amazing looking games.[/citation]

Ignorant comments? Its well known champ that at present games perform at the very least equal if not gain a performance advantage using dual core over quad/octocore processors barring a very few exceptions. It governed my specific choice of a dual core for my current rig as the only advantage a quad offered was faster encoding where programs were correctly threaded to handle them. I would post a link but hey since you seem to know it all and you are on Toms why dont you have a look at the benchmarks posted for these processors specifically the gaming benchmarks. This will change given time but at present dual cores offer a performance advantage in games due to there higher clock speeds and faster encoding ability to me isnt worth the price premium of a quad personally. Perhaps before you bag other peoples comments you should do a bit of research yourself eh?

Glad you mentioned COD5 by the way, that game is an excellent example of dual cores running faster frames than quads, check some benchies.
Price to performance is the name of the game my e8400 oc'd to 3.8ghz runs all over quads in games at half the price of an equivelently clocked quad.

As far as octocore go's, why not? If the price is right I'll be on newegg tomorrow! You can never have enough power!!

 

[midnightgun]

"Well..
8 cores x 4 sockets = 32 cores"

With hyperthreading, it would be 64 cores in the OS.

And yes, these are server chips.

 

[bin1127]

i believe research is still ongoing for parallel programming. until some breakthrough is made in that area it doesn't matter how many cores intel puts in one chip. then again, if parallel programming becomes mainstream, counting cores might not be the right benchmark.

 

[gamerk316]

As for the whole multi-core programming issue, I've worked with programs where its one line to get scalable multithreaded code. The mistake most deves made was when Duo's came out, instead of scaling to the number of avaliable cores, they wrote code to scale to a limited amount.

They'll get the hint in a year or two.

 

[trinix]

Will 8 cores be useful, sure it will be. But the question is, is the price right to buy it now, when most users don't gain big advantage from running more than 2 cores?

In a year or 2, it might all change, but I don't expect a big advantage for people to work on. 60 processes too small to even consider anything, you want to split it off to 60 cores? Why, so you have them all running at

 

[Guest]

8 core is useful.. it will make coders use their brain a little more so we get some good software games etc... they need a little pressure to work!

 

[Mucke]

8 cores? 24MB of Cache? 2.3 billion transistors?

That was just the mistake AMD made with the first generation of Phenoms: 4 cores in 65nm make as little sense as 8 cores in 45nm; the chip just gets too big, so it will be extremely expensive to produce. OK, these are server-CPUs, so they can solve the problem via pricing -- another sign that there is too little competition on the market.

 

[Guest]

there will always be people who have money for this.
Question is if they really need it!
I'm currently using a near to $100.000 server as desktop.
The server was bought by the company nearly 15 years ago.
Todays desktops are just outperforming this server.
Apart from the fact that you had 8 memory lanes (Could equip it with 2GB of RAM), what does 2GB mean today?
Even my 2 years old laptop outperforms this server.

But there are companies still willing to pay premium price for top notch material, even if the technology will be outdated 3 years down the road!

And Intel? It probably knows. That's why they probably will price the processor high enough to still make profit, while probably selling only a couple of thousand of these processors.
To keep the current alive, 1 year from here they'll probably sell an upgraded version, acting like the 8-core is a grand success!
Companies believe in this crap, buying themselves an 8core, probably owning about 800times the power they actually need for their company, and everybody's 'happy'.

When companies and people really would use their brain, most people won't even need a quadcore computer!
Most people would do just fine with a dualcore, since, what difference does it make playing a game at 32fps or 132fps?
It's not that you'll notice it, other than your electric bill which might be higher.

 

[Guest]

Probably for companies like Google or Microsoft that have servers that handle billions of MB's of data this could be a solution!
Especially Google Maps, and MS update servers handle a bunchload more of data than we could ever simulate with 100 desktop pc's together!

 

[cjl]

[citation][nom]zipzoomflyhigh[/nom]Of couse they are announcing octa-cores, AMD has already announced sexa-cores for this year. Its stupid though, hardly anything even uses 4 cores, why spend the money? And yet another socket change for Intel. s775/1366/1156/and now s1567. What a kick in the ass to those who got suckered into i7. The first 32nm processors wont even be i7/s1366, they will be s1156.[/citation]

People really don't seem to get it. These CPUs will never see the inside of a standard user's computer. They will never even see the inside of an enthusiast's computer. They are server CPUs only, meant for systems with a minimum of 4 CPUs. They will be used for tasks that are already massively parallel, and made for multiprocessor setups.

They will be awesome for this task too.

 

[yumri]

I agree with cjl that these CPUs are made for severs and i know by using only a dual core basic user CPU in mine that render 1 16 fps second crashed it not because it was out of processing power because it was all done on the CPU not the GPU which it should have been done on and but the CPU Bakes it and the GPU renders it when using this API. so the CPU number of cores do still matter. it was split into 8 threads because the beta version didnt work yet. which can now split a program into 64 threads.
to the normal person a 64 threaded program is overly threaded and i do agree but 64 threads in a design screen is not overly threaded and once compiled and put onto the end users machine it will run better since it doesn't have to wait for the next set of threads to come from the hard drive and be sent all at once. thus 3D design programs are advancing to use it just the software which is out for end users are not updated to use it with out putting out a new version because of reasons in which the program might crash often if it is just a patch update and not a whole new program release. Thus why a 32 or 64 core computer will be feasible for a graphics rendering sandbox.