Intel's future looking bright

[Sazar]

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/04/top_secret_intel_processor_plans_uncovered/

Interesting times ahead for Intel.

Yes, amd has the performance crown but the new processors are looking extremely appealing.

Yorkfield cores are currently undergoing signal integrity testing and just imagine an 8 core setup :cool:

The key note to take away, and something not mentioned in the THG article is the development of ultra-low power procs for various apps and that technology being migrated to the desktops.

We have seen examples of this with the Yonah core and there will likely be more info on these (potentially) sub 1w procs soon.

I can't wait to see what AMD has up its sleeve to counter some of the new developments at Intel.

(xmassign)

[jolle]

About time they do something right..
Low heat = less noise, for us air coolers atleast..
Good to se something finally happening on the market, seems AMD will have to take things up a few notches and sweat a bit too now, never hurts with competition.
hoping first sign is lower priced dual cores..

[Riptide]

But I thought Intel = teh suck?

:D

[shabby]

Dual core, quad core, octo core... yet almost every application/game is written for a single core. So what will be the point of upgrading to these multi core cpu's when nothing useful(at least to me) will take advantage of it?

[Riptide]

I agree for the most part. With a few exceptions I didn't notice some sort of massive speed increase after going dual core and I run multiple applications nearly all the time. Mainly I did it so I could run two sessions of folding@home concurrently. Games have seen almost no benefit and from what I understand coding for dual core such that a game takes full advantage of it - it's not exactly a cakewalk. It's gonna be a while before support becomes truly widespread.

[hectorsm]

Even with future and applications and games writting to use multicore, I see diminishing returns for running more than two cores. But 8 cores will sure make a nice folding@home machine... that's for sure.

[jolle]

Dual core, quad core, octo core... yet almost every application/game is written for a single core. So what will be the point of upgrading to these multi core cpu's when nothing useful(at least to me) will take advantage of it?
Well, the games are going there, even tho some protests from parts of the industry.. its apparantly alot more work trying to keep the balance and sync, stuff like that..
And Quad & Octo cores arent due THAT soon.. but the sooner they come, the sooner they (and dualcore) become mainstream, the more support we´re gonna get..
And with the Xbox360 using a multicore cpu, the ports are prolly getting easier on dual/quad core CPUs (dual now, quad later).

In my case I want a dual core now, to do rendering, a area where it really pulls its weight since these apps have been multithreaded for ages now..
Video editing is another area.. even for the gamer who occationally edits video, start a render on one CPU and game on the other for example.. spose that would require some extra RAM perhaps..
Any type of multitasking scenario really.. and with Video drivers getting multithreaded you se a small increase there aswell.
But going back to the Multithreaded games, there are few already, but I think we are gonna get a slew of first gen games featuring all the teething issues of Multithreading for games.. I hear Serious Sam 2 isnt operating fully as it should in Dual Core setups, and its multithreaded..
lets just hope Oblivion stays sober hehe..

Man, I wish I had a powerful Dual Core laptop with like 2Gb RAM..
could work and play anywhere, and then use it as a rendering server at home..

[Riptide]

I think it's funny how any developer would "protest" the way things are headed. I mean seriously what planet are they living on if they have that attitude? We know Intel/AMD are at the point now where they can't just continue to ramp up clock speeds because of siginificant engineering challenges. So what do these "protesters" expect anyone to do about it? Multi-core architectures are the only way to continue increasing processor throughput.

[nutball]

Well how you view the protests of software developers depends on who you are of course.

The hardware boys scoff at the software guys and their whines about programming getting harder... because in their eyes the programming community have had it easy over the past twenty years. With steady performance improvements coming from faster hardware, the software community just invent new ways to burn all the extra CPU power on fancy-looking but fundamentally useless eye-candy in the GUI, or inventing profligate languages such as Java. There are some great bun-fights about this topic over on RWT :)

The software boys do have a point though, fundamentally there are limits to the parallelisability of almost all applications. Debugging parallel/multi-threaded applications gets exponentially more difficult as you add threads too.

Look at it this way... if the software route was the easier route, the industry would have taken it years ago. If massively parallel was the easy route, why build 3GHz processors? Why not build a 100-core 30MHz 486?

[Sazar]

Understand that Intel still has a dominant share in the server market where multi-threading is a massive boon.

Further consider that the majority of the processors and technologies are slated for sampling, integrity testing or otherwise in Fiscal year 2006/2007 so with Vista on the way in and new app development, multithreading is likely to play a much bigger part.

Remember with HT, not everything took advantage of it initially and there are a lot of apps out there that still don't, however with both amd and intel developing multi-core procs for the consumer market, there is little chance that this market will not be catered for.

Key reason I went dual-core was not for speed improvements but rather a lot smoother performance for video editing and running 2 instances of f@h. On both counts, I have been succesful.

Gaming actually has been a little improved in some instances but I think that probably has something to do with my extra gig of memory.

[Riptide]

Well how you view the protests of software developers depends on who you are of course.Well sure but the reality of the situation is that they can't increase clock speeds like they once did. So like it or not there is very little choice in the matter. Optimizing for multiple cores is the way forward until they can find some way around silicon based technology.

[jAkUp]

The Forceware drivers are multithreaded, so most games get a rather nice boost in CPU limited scenarios.

[Riptide]

3dmar05 sure does. I get at least 600 points more with 81.xx. To bad I can't run those drivers though.

[Sazar]

I haven't tried the new cat drivers in games yet. I am still annoyed that my flippin remote wonder drivers have to be reinstalled EVERYTIME I change my cat's :(

Bleh.

[nemecb]

The problem with dual-cores is that multi-threading increases the complexity of programs significantly, and it results in some very difficult to track down bugs because they're not reproducible. A bug due to a race condition may happen only 1 out of 100 times, but that is enough for it to be a problem. I'm thinking of bugs along the lines of 1 out of 100 times you fall through the floor or can walk through a wall. Granted, there are applications out there that are multi-threaded today and work just fine, but games have historically had some bugs that needed to be worked out without multi-threading, and I can only imagine what a place like EA will come up with when the coding becomes more difficult. Game developers are almost certainly going to have to take a lot more time on multi-threaded games to ensure that they are at least largely bug-free. Not to mention that the overhead of managing many threads may kill the performance advantage after a certain point. I agree that dual-core is the only way to scale these days, but I think that is an unfortunate development for gaming.

As far as Intel goes, I take the same stance I do on ATI ATM which is that I'll believe it when I see it. They're touting their next generation of processors because their current one sucks. I've heard almost nothing about what AMD will be coming out with, and I'm pretty sure they haven't been sitting on their hands while somehow simultaneously patting themselves on the back for having such awesome processors. Intel may very well come through with new processors, but AMD's not going to just hand over the performance crown without a fight.

[Tygerwoody]

Viva La Intel Revolution!

[Redeemed]

I don't doubt that Intel will retake the performance lead, I'm just doubting about how quickly they'll do it. I'm betting that 06 will belong to AMD and most of 07. But come 08 I'm betting Intel will start to come around.

What I'm wanting is for games to multithreaded to the degree that one core deals with, say, physics (if you don't have an add-in PPU) and the other deals with AI and such. That would probably significantly boost performance in games. And with quad and octo-cores have the game scale accordingly. With 8 cores you could have four dedicated to the game and the other four four other tasks you'd want to do while gaming: burning a dvd/cd, rendering a family movie, etc. I'm not running dual core yet, out of my current price range, but I aim to. Or if quad core is available by the time I can afford a new rig, I might go that route.

[rohit]

all i want is a great performing proc sucking v low on power, producing minimal heat and available in my country for avg. joe's budget :D (am asking too much i know).
Intel is far from making such a proc. Athlon A64 has completely changed my view towards AMD.

[Monnie Rock]

If I am not mistaken, Win XP can only use two logical processors, anything more than two you must use Win sever 2000?

[Nutty]

If I am not mistaken, Win XP can only use two logical processors, anything more than two you must use Win sever 2000?

Well I imagine that MS is contemplating xb360 game ports to Vista, so hopefully Vista will support more cores, just like their console supports upto 6 hardware threads.

[superklye]

If I am not mistaken, Win XP can only use two logical processors, anything more than two you must use Win sever 2000?
I don't think that's the case. Maximum PC's ultimate rig this year had two dual-core Opterons in it...they may've been using Windows XP Pro x64, but I can't remember and no longer have the issue, but I know it wasn't a server OS and I know it had no problem seeing all four cores.

[MUYA]

WinXP Home is licensed and supports 1 CPU.

WinXP Pro is licensed and supports a max of 2 CPUs.

Microsoft recognizes even dual core cpu as one cpu I think.

[shabby]

Microsoft recognizes even dual core cpu as one cpu I think.

Yup, physical cpu's is the key. It can have 8 cores but it still counts as 1 cpu.

[bkswaney]

Like it or not "AMD Fans" Intel is back in the game the second
half of 06 and forward. There new upcoming cpu's look sweet. :) (xmassign)

They will take back a large part of the desktop market next year
with Yonah giving us a baseline of things to come. "Conroe"
The future looks much better for intel. :)
Someone had a review of a Conroe the other week
but I cannot find it tonight.
Intel is now like AMD and not so in the Mhz but IPC. ;)
Conroe will put Intel back in the game.


(xmassign) (cheers)

[nemecb]

I call (bs)

See my previous post for my opinion on all of this "Intel is going to pwn AMD in 06" crap. Until they actually release something that beats AMD (other than the Pentium M's which are nice processors) all they're selling is paper. They've already had problems getting some of their next-gen Xeons to market, so I have every reason to take their projections with a grain of salt. Besides which, as I also said before, AMD hasn't been sitting around idly waiting for Intel to catch up. If Intel does surpass them performance-wise, you can bet that AMD will have an answer coming not long after. See, I can speculate on unreleased hardware too.(xmasmile)(xmassign)