Intel Quad Core QX6700 Evaluation

[Gizmo]

"We have long been used to various supermarkets and megamalls, so we are not surprised if a pair of shampoo bottles or tooth-paste packs glued together are sold for the price of one. Today Intel, the owner of the largest processor supermarket, is making us a similar offer: a pair of Core 2 Duo E6700 CPUs, well, not for the price of one, but glued together nevertheless. So, let's take a closer look at what "lies beneath", and what we should do with it."

Read more on the Front Page:
http://www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/content/view/1360/2/

[madcatmk3]

seems they ddint work to hard on these quad cores.

[cloasters]

If it will take years for programs to be written to take advantage of two cores, not to mention four cores... Think I'll save my moolah.

[Gizmo]

Originally Posted by cloasters

If it will take years for programs to be written to take advantage of two cores, not to mention four cores... Think I'll save my moolah.

Individual applications may not take advantage of multiple cores, but the operating system certainly can.

Bear in mind that not every task can be reasonably multithreaded, also. A word processor is typically spending most of its time waiting on the user. Making it multithreaded does what? make it wait 4 times faster?

However, when running a word processor, a web browser, an e-mailer, a virus scanner, a spyware blocker, and a stateful firewall (as well as a host of other things in the background to keep the system running well), a well written OS will be able to take advantage of multiple CPUs to keep things humming along smoothly.

Unfortunately, WindowsXP doesn't really handle multiple CPUs well. The server OSen are better (Windows2003 and Windows2000 Server), but Windows Vista is supposed to have much improved multi-CPU management. Or you can go with a Linux system, which has much better multi-CPU handling, as I understand it.

[keithwalton]

Having run windows vista on both a single and dual core of similar specification having the second core made a hughe difference to how the operating system responded (vista tends to do alot of optimisation / searching in the background all the time).

A good use of this sorta tech i think would be in the infamous speech to text / command engines. Have one core listening to what you are saying and preprocess (frequency filter etc) the signal, have another core process the signal into what you want doing. Then a 3rd core actually carrying out the commands.

With efficent coding and in this case proper use of the twin dual core cpu (use the signal processing cores as a physical pair to make use of the shared cache) it could become far more responsive than the current approaches which all seem to have a few seconds delay before it does it wrong.

It's true it may not be a hardest way of getting 4 cpu's onto one physical die. But at least they're on the one chip. The amd Quad cpu thing is using two dual core opterons chips on a single mobo. If i wanted that i'd of gotten a pair of 5100 series xeons months ago. It would probably of been cheaper

[cloasters]

Very interesting, thank for posting this 411 keithwalton!

[bonesaw]

eh what about games that would be cool if in newer games in the opinions you could select how many cores you had so the game would know to take advantage of them. But that may be a little far fetched at this point in the game. but i like the idea.

[cloasters]

I didn't know that AMD's quad-cores were really two CPU's on one m'board. Gosh, knowing that, I'm in so much more of a hurry to buy that setup. Not.

[keithwalton]

Yeah and they have the cheek to dig at intel for putting two dual dies on one chip and calling that quad core.

As for games i believe i saw somthing from valve the other week which could make use of quad core cpu's. Somthing about multi threaded engine or somthing.

This would be it http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/976/