Intel Unveils 6-Core Xeon 7400 235
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."
And we're now tuesday (Score:5, Informative)
I'm betting new Mac Pros will be launched today.
Re:And we're now tuesday (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.apple.com/uk/imac/ [apple.com]
Hmm, the page you're looking for can't be found.
interesting.
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Weird indeed (iMac page is there for the Canadian website, and the UK Mac mini is also present).
Somebody's gonna get in trouble real soon now(TM).
Re:And we're now tuesday (Score:5, Informative)
The article from Ars technica says:
"Unlike the 65nm, quad-core Tukwila, Dunnington is produced on Intel's 45nm process. This means that Dunnington uses less power, and indeed, the top-end, 2.66GHz SKU has a 130W TDP (compare Tukwila's 170W TDP). The 2.4GHz part boasts a 90W TDP, and there's a 2.13GHz part that runs at a relatively cool 65W."
Re:No this a S4 cpu the mac pro is S2 and we need (Score:2, Redundant)
A mini-tower [wikipedia.org] with a single Core 2 duo would be nice, in the $1000-$1400 range, Room for two drives, single DVD drive, and 4 GB RAM Mac would work. Maybe just three PCI slots, with one spaced apart from the others for larger video cards.
Base 2 (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it just me, or does 6 seem like a counter intuitive number of cores ?
2,4,8,16 ... we've been using binary since the start, now we have to start in trinary ?
Re:Base 2 (Score:5, Funny)
That's already the case. (Score:5, Informative)
6 = 8 - 2 broken cores ?
You joke but that's already the case with PS3's Cell (7 SPU = 8 - 1 broken), with tripple core Phenom (3 = 4 - 1 broken), and with a very high number of graphic cards (The range segment {pro/mid/low-cost} on which a GPU is used = the number of functional cores they managed to salvage)
A separate reason may be the number of {quickpath/hypertransport/etc.} interconnects (6 cores require 15 interconnect to communicate, 8 cores require 28 interconnects). 6 to 8 cores isn't such a big increase but keeps the number of inter connect reasonnable.
(Other processors types like Tilera end up only interconnecting adjacing cores on their 64x chips and you have a strongly *Non*-Uniform Architecture, with not all core able to reach and talk to others at the same speed)
Re:That's already the case. (Score:4, Informative)
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You joke but that's already the case with PS3's Cell (7 SPU = 8 - 1 broken), with tripple core Phenom (3 = 4 - 1 broken), and with a very high number of graphic cards (The range segment {pro/mid/low-cost} on which a GPU is used = the number of functional cores they managed to salvage)
Just because they're disabled doesn't mean they're broken. Say you have a 95% yield on a PS3 core. 8 SPU good = 0.95^8 = 66%, 7+ SPU good = 0.95^8+8*0.95^7*0.05 = 94%. Yet they can't use the full power of the 66% perfectly fine processors without creating two console versions. In other things like CPUs and GPUs they do go in different bins of functional cores/lines/clockspeed but it also depends on what the market wants so they can be downbinned and sold as cheaper parts. In the past people have been buying
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The only three core processors [theinquirer.net] I know of are effectively defective quad core processors.
The 4th core is defective so, rather than disposing of them, they are sold as tri-core processors.
Whilst there's no requirement for base two, there is usually a requirement for an even number of cores in SMP (symmetric multi processing)
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The "symmetric" in SMP refers to all CPUs being identical, not to the actual number of processors.
I stand corrected. Thanks
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_multiprocessing [wikipedia.org]
Re:Base 2 (Score:4, Informative)
That has nothing to do with symmetric multiprocessing. SMP means that all the chips can make memory accesses to all the memory at the same speed. It is the opposite of Non-Uniform Memory Access, or NUMA, in which certain processors (some or all of them) take longer to talk to certain parts of main memory than others or systems in which processors have a faster path to some private off-chip memory in addition to the main shared memory.
Re: "yes, triple core do exist" (Score:2)
Again, this is a defective four core chip which you've been duped into purchasing.
Re: "yes, triple core do exist" (Score:4, Informative)
That's no different from the 486SXes, many of which were 486DX parts with the defective math coprocessor diked out. It's not very different from how the clock rate on every mainstream chip is determined by how many chips turn out to be stable at which speeds.
Re: "yes, triple core do exist" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Again, this is a defective four core chip which you've been duped into purchasing.
In the industry, we call it a "reworked" part. It's not being "duped" if it costs less and does what it advertises.
By the way, your memory is almost certainly "defective" by your definition. Memory is reworked like crazy - loads of extra traces. And if it's REALLY bad, the top-tier guys sell it to discounters to sell as lower-capacity part.
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You're really being sold 3 tested and working cores. You're supposed to ignore failed core on the die. It has nothing to do with the 3 that do work.
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see amd ... they have 3 cores in one chip and the shit fares prety well
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see amd ... they have 3 cores in one chip and the shit fares prety well
AMD once said there was a greater efficiency in interconnecting 3 cores, compared to 4.
Re:Base 2 (Score:4, Interesting)
AMD once said there was a greater efficiency in interconnecting 3 cores, compared to 4.
Anyone with simple graph theory can see that. 3 nodes only need 3 edges(or interconnects in this case) so that they are only one hop away from each other. With 4 nodes you need 6 edges for a complete graph / clique (each node is adjacent). Now whether that is applicable to the amd chip is a whole other question. I don't have the time (nor do I care to) look up the implementation of the chips.
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They are, but they still work pretty well. They're careful to turn off the core that doesn't work rather than one that does. They could dedicate themselves to only shipping processors with all four cores working, but that would make the quad-core chips much more expensive. This way, they can sell three working cores for part of the four-core price and save lots of cash on wasting chips that work fine as three-core parts.
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No, they are designed to be 3-core. That way you only need 3 interconnects to connect each core with all other cores.
You need 6 interconnects to do the same for 4-core CPU.
Re:Base 2 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Base 2 (Score:5, Funny)
2^(log2(6)) to be exact.
Re:Base 2 (Score:5, Funny)
Pentium 1 user, aren't you?
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Is it just me, or does 6 seem like a counter intuitive number of cores ?
Remember they need to put other stuff on the silicon too. The XBox 360's CPU uses three quarters of the die for three processors and puts the shared cache etc. in the fourth quarter. Six + support circuitry probably fits a square die better than eight + support.
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Sun had 8-core server CPUs since several years now. They didn't have any problems allocating the die's surface.
Re:Base 2 (Score:4, Informative)
Sun is first in everything (Score:2)
Sun has been 64-bit for well over a decade too. Sun had hyperthreading(SMT) before Intel too, and they could do 4-way SMT rather than Intel's weak 2-way. Sun has always been ahead of the curve and gets no credit for it. I guess it's because they are good with technology and bad at capitalizing on it (at least not as good at it as Intel)
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Yeah, especially with the new motherboard that fits three of these together...
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Well, if it can run on souls it means it will also lower my electricity bill.
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we've been using binary since the start, now we have to start in trinary ?
You need to be more flexible. I seem to recall from my Number Theory class that the base you choose can be somewhat arbitrary. In fact, I've heard that a lot of people use a Base 10 system!
The AMD Phenom comes in a 3 core variety (which may or may not be a "broken" 4 core chip). The Xbox 360 has a 3 core processor. The cell processor used in the Sony Playstation 3 and IBM blade servers is a 9 core (granted only 1 is a full core). There's no good reason for limiting yourself to powers of 2...
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Sperry Univac actually had a machine with 9 bit bytes... those were the days ! Just think about what you could do with that extra bit...
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You need to be more flexible. I seem to recall from my Number Theory class that the base you choose can be somewhat arbitrary. In fact, I've heard that a lot of people use a Base 10 system!
That would be correct, the main issue with some bases like binary is that they're difficult for humans to read and take up a huge amount of space on paper. There isn't any inherent reason why we could be using hexadecimal or larger base.
Re:Base 2 (Score:5, Informative)
No, it just matters that you have more than one.
Specs? (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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OFC if your dealing with server, then it does make a difference for example Unisys 96 core offering (*nix & possible mac only) would be able to hold 256 SQL server databases ... or vista pro
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Notice "SQL server" with a small "s". Just because Microsoft goes and trademarks a common phrase doesn't mean that servers which run SQL queries aren't SQL database servers.
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I thought that mysql innodb supported multi-core cpus ?
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You can, on most operating systems, actually run more than one application at a time now.
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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.
Pentiums have never had an on-die MMU in the first place, they're actually doing that for the upcoming Nehalem. AMD has used an on-die MMU since the Athlon 64, and while it certainly helps squeeze more efficiency out of the system, the faster clocked bus on Intel rigs often made up for the theoretical performance gap.
The Clock speed was omitted from the article, but the Xeon 7400 is clocked at 2.6ghz. That's actually pretty decent for a Xeon, they don't go as high as the mainstream processors because they
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It has six cores... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It has six cores... (Score:4, Funny)
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Don't you have something better to do with your life than post redundant copies of Onion stories with cheap find-and-replace jobs run on them?
Oh, wait... this is Slashdot. Never mind.
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Don't you have something better to do with your life than post redundant copies of Onion stories with cheap find-and-replace jobs run on them?
I'm at work, so figure it out.
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Besides this being a not very funny copypasta, AMD is as American as Intel and the Core 2 model lines come from designs done in Israel.
Wattage (Score:5, Interesting)
I think server builders these days are less interested in the number of cores per CPU and more interested in improvements in the performance/wattage ratio.
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Qu'est-ce qu'il dit?
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Watt you say?
You have no chance to survive make your time.
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That depends entirely where those servers are. Many places rack space comes at a huge premium and anything packing more punch into less space is valuable. Of course, if you're talking about your local server room where you could just put in another rack if you needed to it's not that big a deal.
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Well, considering this 45nm part uses less power for 6 cores than the 65nm parts from the same company use for 4 cores, I'd call that win-win.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
And how will you power it build your own nuclear p (Score:4, Funny)
And how will you power it build your own nuclear power plant?
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Simple. He'll catch the black holes produced in ZPMs. They'll be released for civilian use by the time anything runs Crysis properly anyway.
ZPMs give off too much power for home use NAQUADAH (Score:2)
ZPMs give off too much power for home use NAQUADAH REACTORs for that.
Re:And how will you power it build your own nuclea (Score:2)
With a catch.... (Score:4, Informative)
"There's an odd catch, however, that will affect the highest of high-end configurations. "Because Microsoft Windows operating system support is limited to a 64-core environment, within a single OS instance, we'll support up to 64 cores," said Colin Lacey, a Unisys marketing vice president."
Gads, who on earth would run a 64-core Windows box? Unless they want to virtualize out multiple servers on one bit of hardware. Most of the "heavy lifting" I've seen on servers with mucho processor cores are running some flavor of Unix. I'm kinda surprised this hasn't been fixed already given the momentum of multi-core processors.
Cheers,
Re:With a catch.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:With a catch.... (Score:5, Funny)
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SKU? Do you work in retail?
At the moment,
Windows Datacenter [microsoft.com] supports 32 cores on X86, and 64 cores on x64 and Itanium.
The implication of "SKU" is that this limitation is trivial, and is imposed purely by marketing considerations.
Anyone doing heavy-duty OCR would (Score:5, Interesting)
Gads, who on earth would run a 64-core Windows box?
The ABBYY OCR engine (Windows only) in any of its latest versions (either direct from ABBYY or OEM'd into someone else's product) will multithread during recognition -- one thread for each core. We currently use a dual quad-core Xeon Windows Server box and I wish I had more cores -- when you get a project to OCR 2.1 million docs in a timeframe of less than a few years, you will too. ;-)
ABBYY's own server-level product (Recognition Server) will span multiple boxes and use any designated cores available on those boxes -- and it scales linerally with the number of cores available (distributed or local). So yeah, there are still some Windows-only applications where a truly monster box would be great.
OCR is one of those apps where you can absolutely NEVER have enough resources for big jobs.
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Gads, who on earth would run a 64-core Windows box?
Someone trying to run Microsoft's bloated software?
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64 cores should be enough for anybody.
Now you can open six tabs in Chrome... (Score:5, Funny)
... and each one will have it's own processor core.
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That's actually one of the reasons why Google went with processes for tabs instead of internal threads or trying to use OS-level threads. It's easy to get separate processes onto separate cores.
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Why buy multi-core? nothing uses it (Score:2)
Being stuck in a windows world I see no benefit in multi core CPUs since XP does NOTHING with the 2nd core. I have a dual core CPU at work and CPU utilization NEVER goes over 50% meaning only one core is doing the work.
Does VMware workstation or Ubuntu actually make use of the extra cores?
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Then you're running single-threaded applications. Try running multithreaded applications and you can pin both cores at 100%.
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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
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This is a server CPU. Not sure what XP has to do with it, really? People who run servers definitely use multiple cores.
Yay, more cycles we can't utilize (Score:5, Interesting)
Until Intel unveils their version of HyperTransport, this will be more of the same.
You put a quad-core Xeon against a quad-core Opteron and under most conditions (besides CPU-only work) the Opteron will kill the Xeon.
Now, we'll have even more cycles we can't utilize, because of the old design of the system.
If you're going to do anything that uses both RAM and CPU (aka VMware hosts, which is what most big servers are used for these days) you'd better off with an Opteron.
I'd rather use a dual or quad socket Dual-Core Opteron than a dual or quad socket Quad-core Xeon.
Re:Yay, more cycles we can't utilize (Score:4, Informative)
In the article it's pretty clear this is a legacy-at-launch part to be a last upgrade for people using the current FSB technology. Other products will use QuickPath, but this is for those who want to keep their current motherboards for one more generation of processors.
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You could not be more wrong. Xeons dominate the VMmark benchmarks [vmware.com]. Go home, fanboi.
HyperTransport may indeed be better design than a shared high-speed bus, but that design advantage is negated by Intel's process and manufacturing excellence. Almost all benchmarks bear this out, SPEC, TPC, VMmark, whatever. Except perhaps at the extreme high end
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"but that design advantage is negated by Intel's process and manufacturing excellence"
Who's the Fanboy?
Look - almost everyone I work with for VMware installations insist on Opteron. Benchmarks are one thing, but real-world performance is entirely different.
There's no doubt that the Intel CPU's are better performers on single-thread operations or operations where there's not a lot of memory IO. But the Opterons crush Intel when there's a lot of memory IO. Why do you think Intel is moving to a HyperTran
Wow! [obligatory] (Score:2)
But, can it run Windows Vista? Or how about running Duke Nukem Forever on top of Windows Vista? Or is that just wishful thinking?
AMD vs. Intel: CPU cache (Score:2)
Can anybody explain me why AMD still has tops 1MB cache per core? And this is on Opterons. Normal AM/AM+ CPUs have only 512K cache per core. Intel now has 4MB of cache per core on its workstation CPUs.
I can not understand why AMD doesn't increase cache size, while it's obvious that cache helps tremendously on memory intensive operations. Smaller caches are not even offset by its integrated on CPU memory controller.
I'm planning upgrade and though I like AMD price/performance ratio, even for modest wor
Yes! It should totally be a power of two. (Score:5, Funny)
I think they're really making 8-core chips but their factories are primitive so normally only about six of them work.
These chips are all defective. I wouldn't buy one and neither should you.
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Re:Yes! It should totally be a power of two. (Score:5, Funny)
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you'd hope that out of 8 fpu's they'd get at least one to work ?
Re:Yes! It should totally be a power of two. (Score:5, Funny)
I steal my computers from really rich orphans. 'Course, if they have parents, it takes just a little work and they're soon orphans.
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Thankfully the core Python developers have been telling us that continued hardware development of adding more cores is simply not happening. Furthermore, this evolution of continued development is simply wrong, bad, and is silly. To make matters worse, we are all delusional and no one is running more than one core and anyone leveraging more than one core is using their computer poorly and inefficiently.
Thankfully, here very soon, we'll all reason that Intel, AMD, ATI, and NVIDIA are all doing the wrong thin
I Want (Score:5, Funny)
I'm holding out for a 12 core processor.
I'm also holding out for a razor blade with 6 blades, screw those wimpy 5 blade razors that Tiger is pitching right now. (F*ck, I have a beard, why do I want a razor blade? Screw it, I'm still waiting for 6 blades.)
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I'm holding out for a 12 core processor.
So is AMD [pcworld.com]
I've been following the news of this 6-core processor for a while, and the news articles about it in the past say that it is the last of the Penryn line for Intel. So, what ever happened to the Penryn V8 [google.com] (8 cores)?
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Obligatory Onion reference:
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades.
Why is 8 a special number? (Score:2)
Why wait for 8 cores when you can get two 6 core chips in a package and have 12?
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