Dual core coming soon to a CPu near you. [Archive]

Marquee

6th April 2005, 00:49

Well guys we have reached anther mounment in computer history. Dual core CPU were around for a while but the first desktop CPU are finaly being reviewed. I guessing we are like a mounth to mounth and half away to release. Can't wait. Although Iam not a Intel fan Iam really excited to here the news.

Well I hope programers out there are makeing use of the dual cores in there next games they release. Iam really happy to here this let here the feed back from you guys?

And please if any one has an idea when AMD we release there dual cores please post. Any news relateing to dual core post it here. Let this be a thread to show the dual core release information for all to see. A sort of a data-base on Dual core.

fillip

6th April 2005, 01:50

It's promising technology buy i'm not sure developers will be that keen to start making software that utilises the multi-core setup. It's taken long enough to see any sort of 64 bit software materialise so I doubt it'll happen over night. There certainly wont be any Windows support until Longhorn afaik, so thats about 18months away at least.

I'll get excited about it when it means something in real world performance and when it's affordable.

dutchcedar

6th April 2005, 02:08

"Make it and they will come" doesn't always hold true in the 'puter world, but if more programs get SMP capable, us dually addicts won't complain.

My next major upgrade (or build) will be a dually dual core 64 bit Opty rig with next generation SATA... I'll wait patiently for the technology to come to us. :lol:

A bit off-topic... back when I built BaDassII, there was a bit knot in my gut for not using Opterons, thinking I would miss out on 64 bit schtuff. In retrospect, I didn't miss much... it still ain't all there. That's the way it is with 'puters... you can read the sites about all the great schtuff "about to come out and revolutionize the 'puter"... or you can wait for it not only to come out, but to be proven as a real step worth spending the bucks on. I've fallen into the latter category. B)

Let's hope its not another SLI... very expensive and soon to be passed by other technology.

Not that this dual core schtuff doesn't excite me, because it does. I'll just wait to see the proof in the pudding.

Vis

6th April 2005, 03:27

Sometimes these things take a while to catch on. Bluetooth was around for a long time as a technology looking for a killer app.

Highperf15

21st May 2005, 03:06

jaguarking11

21st May 2005, 04:22

Windows does suport dual cores as those dual core cpu's are nothing but smp made easy. They use a single memory controler for both cores. Windows itself can see up to 4 cpu's if its xp pro. But you have to have apps and games writen to take advantage of two cpu's. The only game I recall that was dual cpu capable was quake 3 or quake 3 engine based games. But I could be wrong.

I am a very big fan of dual cpu's, but because of my budget I cant aford two cpu's. But if my budget permits I will most likely get two dual core zeon chips and probly load about 4gigs of ecc ram on it. But its highly unlikely.

I hope that dual cores are here to stay as I realy would not mind duble the heatoutput as long as there are two chips under that heatsperder.

Oh and intel is sceduled to relese a dual core hyperthreading chip as well, so in windows it will apear to look like 4cpu's :)

Jewels

31st May 2005, 14:12

AMD's new Athlon 64 X2 outdistanced Intel's Pentium Extreme Edition 840 in the latest battle of the new dual-core processors.

http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?NewsID=3762

fillip

31st May 2005, 14:33

AMD's new Athlon 64 X2 outdistanced Intel's Pentium Extreme Edition 840 in the latest battle of the new dual-core processors.

http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?NewsID=3762
Saw somehting similiar in a Uk modding magazine, it'd take something extra special to make me buy an Intel processor now, imo AMD have stolen Intel's thunder well and truely

Da_Rude_Baboon

31st May 2005, 17:51

The thing you have to remember though is that if intel wanted they could just drop the prices of their CPU's to such extremely low levels that AMD couldn't compete and would go bancrupt. The only thing stopping them is a large anti-trust law suit. Also most of intels revenue is the server market which AMD still struggle in.

All these things are cyclical and Intel will make a return. It wasn't that long ago when ATI looked like they would be crushed by Nvidia before they made a spectacular come back with 9700-9800 series.

fillip

31st May 2005, 18:02

The thing you have to remember though is that if intel wanted they could just drop the prices of their CPU's to such extremely low levels that AMD couldn't compete and would go bancrupt. The only thing stopping them is a large anti-trust law suit. Also most of intels revenue is the server market which AMD still struggle in.

I don't dispute that fact, but it's true that right now AMD make the best desktop processors at the best price, and from my perspective have done for the last 2 years. Surely the longer AMD remain top of the pile for enthusiasts the stronger they'll become.

I'll always support the little guy over the megacorp as long as I don't suffer as a result. http://wizdforums.co.uk/images/smilies/happy.gif

Fibbles

31st May 2005, 18:19

I don't dispute that fact, but it's true that right now AMD make the best desktop processors at the best price, and from my perspective have done for the last 2 years. Surely the longer AMD remain top of the pile for enthusiasts the stronger they'll become.

I'll always support the little guy over the megacorp as long as I don't suffer as a result. http://wizdforums.co.uk/images/smilies/happy.gifThe only issue seems that outside of the enthusiast base, no one seems to know AMD (or any alternative) to Intel exists.

New technology is both exciting and terrible. It keeps getting faster and faster, with more features being added left and right, but it's going a little too fast. From looking at video cards, there's all sorts of new ideas being brought to the table, but how many are actually implemented into today's games? Granted a large part of the problem is that there are so many different solutions out, and software has to be written for both advanced hardware and absolute low-end hardware together. Why can't we all have GeForce 3's with software written to support it with a similar baseline for all? We're not consoles is why! Sorta anyway.

[OT] Haribo Happy-Cola and a wood duck chirping!

BigBen2k

31st May 2005, 20:46

Glad to see some people considering AMD!

There's a few articles on Anand, one of which outlines an interesting fact about how AMD Opteron server CPUs have an advantage over Intel's offering:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2419
(*Very* technical)

In short, Intel's HyperThreading technology isn't working so well, and is going to need a re-vamp. AMD on the other hand has it down right.

zer0

31st May 2005, 21:53

In short, Intel's HyperThreading technology isn't working so well, and is going to need a re-vamp. AMD on the other hand has it down right.
OT:
er... now that make me wander is it even worth the extra heat to have hyperthreading enabled?

Da_Rude_Baboon

1st June 2005, 10:13

I was only playing devils advocate btw as i have never owned an intel chip as they have always been to pricey. I also think they have had the lead on the desktop technology front but its a bit strange that intel are lagging behind like they are.

Fibbles

1st June 2005, 19:42

I had a 3.0ghz P4 with Hyperthreading and I always had it on, why turn off a 'feature'? It was pretty fast, but then I killed my board. For a fast replacement I figured that I'd go for an AMD64, so I chose a 3400 socket 754 and an nForce 3 250gb board, cause they were in my range and I wanted 2.4ghz (comming off an Intel with a GHz rating, I was afraid of anything lower than 2.0ghz). Long story short, the AMD is so fast, so very fast. It tears through games and it's smokin', well, except for multitasking. When you're doing a lot at once, things tend to slow down to a crawl for a few seconds, especially when you're first switching. I'm a gamer foremost, so there's no way in heck I'd switch, but if I wasn't here for the games, Intel would be the way to go.

Where do all the Intel EE/Extreme Editions fit in? It seems they're all in the $1000/500GBP-ish price range?

I think I'll wait for socket M ^_^

zittware

1st June 2005, 22:53

It's promising technology buy i'm not sure developers will be that keen to start making software that utilises the multi-core setup.
Your missing the point.
MultiCore has been around forever... since the first multiprocessor "NT" kernel.
MultiCore is already built into WinXP Professional... you just install on a "multicore" product and your off and running.
No fuss. No mess.

Many 3rd party programs are already support Hyperthreading... and as such... multicore is the next logical extention.
I know from personal experience
( http://www.zittware.com/Products/CDMaster32/hyperthreading.html )
that coding for hyperthreading gives you performance gains for multicore.
Many Audio/Video encoders are already "pro"MultiCore.

It's taken long enough to see any sort of 64 bit software materialise so I doubt it'll happen over night. There certainly wont be any Windows support until Longhorn afaik, so thats about 18months away at least.

This is a different beast.
64bit doesn't buy you performance. Infact it really doesn't buy you anything but more memory addressability.
Right now; there aren't a lot of "game machines" which exceed 4GBs of main memory. As such; 64bit is a mute point.

The only game I recall that was dual cpu capable was quake 3 or quake 3 engine based games. But I could be wrong.
True; but it never worked... at least when I tried it on my Dual Xeon w/ HT.:unsure:

I hope that dual cores are here to stay as I realy would not mind duble the heatoutput as long as there are two chips under that heatsperder.

I think published roadmaps seem to indicate as such:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/13/intel_confirms_netburst_end/

Oh and intel is sceduled to relese a dual core hyperthreading chip as well, so in windows it will apear to look like 4cpu's :)

Correct.
Extreme edition of Intel Pentium-D:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/18/intel_dual_core/

I speak for neither Intel nor AMD. :cool:

Pug

2nd June 2005, 14:29

True; but it never worked... at least when I tried it on my Dual Xeon w/ HT.:unsure:
Wouldn't that appear to the engine as a quad-core then?

I know that with some games, such as Thief2, HyperThreading causes the game to think that there's a second CPU and can cause a total system lockup. Fix detailed here (http://www16.brinkster.com/salvage/thief/darkengine.htm).

drazkeavi

8th June 2005, 02:30

From looking at different articles, it doesnt look like Intel has the lead on the technology front anymore.. at least not for consumers. They beat intel to the punch with the 64 bits, they did a far better job with their first Dual Cores (the 275 opterons and X2) than Intel, (apparently, the EE is just two cores pasted together.) And with the advent of the Dual Cores to the consumer market, it looks like Hyperthreading just lost whatever lead it had in the multitasking bussiness.

Games AMD>Intel
Multitasking (as of X2s release) AMD>Intel
Servers Opteron>Xeon/AMD>Intel

Anyone disagree?

Articles for reference:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2388
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2389
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2419
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2397
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2410
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzY2
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzU2
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NzM0
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/athlon64-x2/index.x?pg=1
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/pentium-xe-840/index.x?pg=1
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q2/opteron-x75/index.x?pg=1

Well.. thats all the links i have for dual cores.

jaguarking11

8th June 2005, 03:53

point remains that wether you like it or not the most sold and manufactured chip on the planet is the celeron. Simple. Wether its faster or slower than a sephron or a duron thats another argument.

Intel has not been the same eversince the head designer leaft intel in 2000. The last great chip intel made had a codename tualatin. I owned a tualatin chip and tell you what, it was a celeron 1.4ghz chip that was a hot runing chip by p3 standards but it mashed a p4 2.0northwood to bits in raw performance and real world performance. it outdid 1800+ amd cpu's easily. and this was the celeron version with 256k l2cache. That core has now been revamped as the pentium M, it is a monster thats been tearing benchmark scores eversince the ct479 adaptor came out. If intel was smart they would revamp that core to .65nm forget about hyperthreading on the chip, load it with cache (4mb) and put two of those cores in a extreme edition with a 1200fsb and posibly native runing at 3ghz. both of those cores would put out leass heat at 3ghz than a stock noprthwood and guess what it would probly demolish anything else out, but they are dumb and probly wont do it.

my .02cent

drazkeavi

8th June 2005, 15:03

Do you have any benches for the tualatin chip? Becuase im having a hard time believing that intels value chip would beat their performance chip. At a .6ghz deficit at that.

zittware

8th June 2005, 19:10

both of those cores would put out leass heat at 3ghz than a stock noprthwood and guess what it would probly demolish anything else out, but they are dumb and probly wont do it.

Dumb, no.
Slow, yes.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/13/intel_confirms_netburst_end/

Won't be long...

Risky

8th June 2005, 19:44

The Tualatin celeron was a bit of a bargain as they upped it to nearly the spec of a Coppermine P3 but on a .13process. I bough a Celeron-T 1.2 on the very day it was available, a great little chip and good clocker. I still use a 1.0 in my mATX box.

One the AMDvsIntel thing, its easy to loose perspective when you're looking at it from a gaming/overclocking perspective. Hyper-threading is a great technology for an office machine, not the same as having a dualie or Dual core, but helps a lot. You see benchmarking and gaming is just hitting one process at a PC not running anything else, but here I am at work with a few spreadsheets, access dbs, mail, browser, sql server tools and a few of our apps. None of this needs to be recoded for multithreading, it just makes the machine more responsive when you've got a lot of different apps grabbing the cpu time.

Dual core is going to be a lot better but seeing as there's not a whole lot of DC silicon available to buy as yet it's a bit harder to call the scores yet. I lot of it comes down to the chipsets and i955X looks promising.

In the server world AMD were always going to have a long haul as you need to build up a rep before big companies are going to commit a big heap of cash to a new technology. Intel's record in chipsets and supplying their own motherboards will have a lot of weight in these decisions.

From a consumer perspective we need competition to hold the prices down. Either side managing a big win is going to be bad news for us in terms of chip prices.

Fibbles

8th June 2005, 23:02

jaguarking11

9th June 2005, 00:04

Do you have any benches for the tualatin chip? Becuase im having a hard time believing that intels value chip would beat their performance chip. At a .6ghz deficit at that.

I dumped that chip a while back, in favor of a p4 with more grunt. But do a bit of web surfing and you will find the tualatin core was a good pice of kit.

jaguarking11

9th June 2005, 00:20

I have a 1.3 Tualatin and a 1.4 Tualatin core Celeron (Tualatin weren't 'value' chips, the Celeron one is more like a Coppermine P3 than a Celeron). They are really good chips, but they were not priced in the affordable range when they came out (not the Celeron ones anyway), so who bought them? Perhaps that's why they didn't last to long?

It's Sempron. Semprons are actually very nice chips, they walk all over Celerons.

Competition is good, if there was no AMD, how much would Intel be charging for the older tech we'd still be using?

I bought my tualatin celeron for 43bux and paid 5bux for a lin lin converter and 30bux for a soyo p3 mobo and about 20bux a stick of pc133 256mb for a total of 768mb of ram and grand total of about 138bux for a full system overhaul from my p3 500. Best band for the buck I have ever bought, and all the stuff was new and not refurbed, the cpu was oem and kicked ass.

The celeron ran slighlty faster than a p3 at its clock rate (note still more eficient than their willamete crap with .18micron) and the p3 1.4ghz tualatins had 512k of low latency cache that put zeons to shame, those chips are still being sold to this day, you can still get a nice tualatin powered rack server for litle money but performance will be realy good. You even had some dual cpu tualatin boards that used ddr as well.

Very litle is know about these chips as intel hiked up their price once they saw these chips kill their flagships, it was another mistake for intel, just like when they lost a huge market share when the celeron A's were relesed that performed on par clock per clock with their big brother the p2 as the celerons had 1/4 the cache but it was on die and the crapy p2's had 4x the cahce of the celeron but it was runing 1/2 speed of the chip and it was external.

Oh and tualatins clock really nicely as well depending on the model you get and how good you mobo is.
Here is some talk about the tualatin
http://hardware.earthweb.com/chips/article.php/921121
quick google stuff
And this was in my old bookmarks
http://digilander.libero.it/grandecigno/Tua_BX_41.htm
And the guy got a 50% oc out of his celeron.

jaguarking11

9th June 2005, 00:39

It's Sempron. Semprons are actually very nice chips, they walk all over Celerons.

Actualy the celeron D is a good bang for the buck for any enthusiast, if overclocked does very well. Depending on where you look you can pick up a celeronD for about 70bux for a 2.66ghz model and people are pushing these things sky high, I have seen people runing these at over 4ghz on air withought hicups with value ram and a cheepo 865mobo. Performance at that speed is comparable to a p4 3.2 witch cost around three times more.

Check around xtremesystems.com and you will see what I mean. I do agree tho the sempron chips are good chips, far better than their older counterpart the duron. But socket A is completly dead so buying a sempron in that socket is unadvisable, and buying it in the 745 socket is also unadvisable as its being phased out.

But the celerons can be picked up in both 478 and lga form so it can be a transition chip to get the system runing untill you can aford a better chip.

jaguarking11

9th June 2005, 00:54

Dumb, no.
Slow, yes.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/13/intel_confirms_netburst_end/

Won't be long...

If thats true then I definitly have soemthing to look forward to.

My main upgrade paths will be pci-e, dual core cpu, and posibly the next gen 965 and or 975 rumored chipsets. Only time will tell. One thing is for shure tho I wont upgrade untill the technology has matured enough to warant the load of cash spent.

FYI pretty mutch all first gen intel chips suck eversince the p2 came out.
I remember the p2 266 came out and it was pretty mutch a flop compared to the p1, then the p3 450 came out and performed exactly like its older sibling the p2 450 then the early willamete p4 came out and man did they suck. But during each chip's life span there are gems to be found.
I had a fiew gems in my posetion b4.
I had a p1 233 that could hit 300mhz 100% stable
I had a p2 333 that oc'd to 450
I had a p3 copermine 650 that oc'd 40% 915mhz or something.
I had a 1.2tualatin celeron that did 1.5ghz
I had a nortwood A (400fsb) 2.4 that oc'd to 3.0ghz
I had a northwood p4 3.0C that ran 100% stable at 3.6
I now have a p4 530j tetering on the 4ghz mark if I can keep this dam mobo cool enough.

Dam I have mesed with way too many chips...lol.