Intel Dual Core Performance Preview Part I: First Encounter
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 4, 2005 2:44 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
I was in Austin visiting AMD when I saw the email - Intel was prepping a dual core system to be sent out my way for a preview. That was last Wednesday, the machine arrived on Friday, and today's Monday; needless to say, it's been a busy weekend.
This type of a review is a first for Intel. For the most part, doing an officially sanctioned preview with performance benchmarks isn't in the Intel vocabulary. Don't take this opportunity lightly - this is a huge change in the thinking and execution at Intel.
Make no mistake, Intel isn't officially releasing their dual core desktop processors today; this is merely a preview. Intel's dual core line is still on track to be released sometime in the April - June timeframe. Intel will beat AMD to bringing dual core to the desktop first, while AMD will do the same to Intel in the server/workstation world. We still have no idea of actual availability when these chips are officially launched. Remember that all of the first generation dual core chips are basically twice the size of their single core counterparts - meaning that they put twice the strain on manufacturing. Intel, with 11 total fabs, is in a better position to absorb this impact than AMD, but both have paper-launched products in the past, so there's no telling which way the dual core wars will go initially. All we can say at this point is that we've seen dual core parts from both AMD and Intel running at full shipping speeds, and Intel was the first to get us a review sample for this preview.
The clock speed race is over, both AMD and Intel have thrown in their towels, and now it's time to shift to dual core. Intel has been extremely forthcoming with their dual core roadmap, and for those who aren't intimately familiar with it, here's a look at the next 24 months from Intel:
The green bars are dual core, the blue is single core. Enough said.
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haveblue128 - Wednesday, July 6, 2005 - link
Only downside but I think a majorleague heat solution should make everything sweethaveblue128 - Wednesday, July 6, 2005 - link
Oh Please give us a break. If you want to be a purist, go live in the woods without clothes. I say that multitasking makes my day a breeze.Whats your dilemma??
haveblue128 - Wednesday, July 6, 2005 - link
Wow-I just purchased a new sys with an Intel Dual CPU setup. As a multitasking monster on my machine, I was always having crashes in the past.I think that is gone with George Bush in 2008. THe good news is the dual core pair is already hear and ready to run. Give them a try-no downside, albeit a good bit of heat. That is something I will need to work on, but....
peufeu - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
I forgot to mention... gentoo linux ;)peufeu - Monday, May 9, 2005 - link
Dual CPUs to compensate for the inept MS Windows.Interesting.
I'm torturing a webserver I just wrote, on my laptop. It's in Python. Right now it's serving about 2000 requests per second with 1000 concurrent connections.
I don't even notice it's running. The CPU gauge is at 100%, so what ? Nothing special. As reactive as usual. It doesn't swap. The harddisk even put itself in standby....
Go, bill, go !
shady28 - Sunday, April 17, 2005 - link
Making special tests just for these processors seems a bit contrived to me. In particular, comparing dual core processors to a Pentium 4 with HT disabled, in a multithreading/multitasking benchmark, is just plane lame.
I would have been a lot more interested in seeing how dual core compares in multitasking vs dual opterons or dual Xeons. Right now it looks like dual core is slower at doing one task at a time, suprisingly not that much faster at doing two tasks at a time than HT Pentium 4s. The only exceptions were the off the wall tests done at the end.
Since these new 'benchmarks' are made to simulate 'real life use', does that mean that all Anand's previous reviews were bogus?
JimGunn - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
I think I will want one of these for my next video editing & encoding workstation. Will come in handy for HDV post I am sure!BoBOh - Monday, April 11, 2005 - link
Where are the code compile tests. We're not all gamers, some are software developers! :)BoB
warath - Friday, April 8, 2005 - link
I can't wait to see 64-bit dual cores! :)WoodenPupa - Thursday, April 7, 2005 - link
Well, I'm not a tech whiz like everyone else here, but here's my 2 centavos...I can attest to the fact that every machine I ever buy, I bring it to its knees. I usually wait several generations before I upgrade in order to get a more profound effect. Yet that strategy doesn't seem to matter because no matter how fast my computer is, I find that my NORMAL computing habits end up crushing the CPU and everything else.
I use Cool Edit Pro and some other audio programs, and I am also a chess player, and like to anyalyze games in the background with Fritz or Chessbase, both of which allow for gigantic hash tables. So as a typical case I like to do wave transforms and chess analysis as background items while I compose e-mails or use Word for more serious writing. Naturally I like to listen to music at the same time, but usually I have to give that up. Needless to say, all of this stuff cripples my computer---I'm due for an upgrade, I know---my box is a 2.53 GHz P4, 1 GB of Rambus 800 (no groaning, please), a GF4 ti 4600, 120 GB HD, I'm not even sure what the cache on that is, I don't think it's 8 or 5 MB---feels more like 2.
I usually end up quitting the Chess program or the Mp3 player---once in a while I can do all of this stuff concurrently if the wave transforms on cool edit aren't too complex, and I minimize the hash tables on the chess program.
Ideally I want everything to be instantaneous, but...:) Anyway, from what it sounds like, I need a dual or even quad processor setup. Because even with all the above mentioned programs running, I can think of more I would like to add. I'm a monster multitasker and really like to kick a computer right in the face, to show it who's boss. I'm tired of winning, though---I'd love it if one day the computer just scoffed at everything I threw at it. Sadly, I don't think it'll happen in my lifetime.
Should I upgrade to a dual core, or should I save and get a true multi-CPU Mobo like a quad Xeon??