Intel Unveils 6-Core Xeon 7400

JagsLive recommends CNet coverage that begins "Intel officially unveiled its six-core 'Dunnington' Xeon 7400 processor Monday ... As expected, Intel launched the Dunnington chip for high-end servers ... The Xeon 7400 is also one of the first Intel chips to have a monolithic design. In other words, all six cores will be on one piece of silicon. To date, for any processor having more than two cores, Intel has put two separate pieces of silicon ... inside one chip package."

Specs?

[sanosuke001]

There wasn't much in terms of technical specs in TFA. 6 cores, 16MB cache, anything else? Clock speed? 16MB of L2? L3? FSB? DDR(n)? (Though this is probably more up to the MB manufacturer) Why are they moving the memory controller off silicon? That in itself seems like a step backwards.

I would like to see them pushing consumer multi-core computing more personally. Get MS and other application manufacturers to support more cores. Servers have been doing it for ages and with pretty much all consumer level chips being dual core they should be pushing this angle more.

Though, them incorporating all of the cores on a single piece of silicon is definitely a step forward; the lack of additional specs and the notion of moving the memory controller make this seem like not as big of an announcement...

Re:Specs?

[morgan_greywolf]

I would like to see them pushing consumer multi-core computing more personally. Get MS and other application manufacturers to support more cores. Servers have been doing it for ages and with pretty much all consumer level chips being dual core they should be pushing this angle more.

And before anyone says...."yeah, but Linux/Mac OS X supports multi-cores out of the box".... Yes, yes it does. However, most of the applications don't actually benefit much from SMP by themselves. A few things like video conversion, but, for the most part, office suites, e-mail user agents, etc., do not actually benefit directly from SMP.

OTOH, why should they? Any processor made within the last five years is good enough for that stuff.

Re:I really want to know...

[Anonymous Coward]

Really. Why 6 cores? Or 4 or 2 for that matter?

Doesn't that just validate the Ever Increasing Bloat (TM) of software.

I'm not being a smart a$$. I don't understand these incremental increases for software that only marginally changes...except in size.

It's a Xeon. It's for your server. It's not for the Ever Increasing Bloat (TM) of software, it's for the Ever Increasing Server Load (TM) of Successful Business.

Re: "yes, triple core do exist"

[confused one]

What's wrong with that. Intel has sold defective processors for years, either binning them at a lower clock speed or trimming out chunks of cache and selling them as Celerons. If it can serve a purpose, does the job you need to get done, and it's available cheap... I don't see a problem here.

Re:Why buy multi-core? nothing uses it

[squizzar]

In this case, much as it pains me, it has nothing to do with windows, and everything to do with you getting the wrong tool for the job. You have a double garage and two cars, but you can't drive them both.

I on the other hand have friends I like to let use my spare car: Things like VHDL Simulators and FPGA synthesis tools, that will gladly consume a core and several gigs of memory for a few hours. On a single core machine you might as well go to sleep because the system will be next to unresponsive while it's processing that kind of load (well windows systems, in my experience linux and unix systems maintain an impressive level of responsiveness even when they are being hammered). The core2duo in my machine at the moment means I can carry on using my machine and do the heavy processing (or do two lots of heavy processing and go to sleep).

For me it's more efficient and convenient than having two PCs, and not as expensive. Which seems like a good solution. At the end of the day it sounds like you don't have any application that will make use of your extra cores.

I use Ubuntu at home and I'm afraid the same thing applies: Unless you have applications that are designed for parallel processing, or you actually want to do more than one thing at the same time, then you won't see the second core get used. VMware won't magically parallelise your code, so unless you are running two instances that are doing things at the same time you won't see both cores get used.

That's just the way things are: there aren't too many applications that are easily parallelisable that haven't already been parallelised.

Re:Why buy multi-core? nothing uses it

[RightSaidFred99]

This is a server CPU. Not sure what XP has to do with it, really? People who run servers definitely use multiple cores.