Intel Kentsfield Quad Core Engineering Sample (benchmarks!)

I will no longer refer to it as "Quarter 4," I hereby officially declaire it "Quad." So there.

It will be interesting to see if Conroe's impressive cache system can make up for 4 core's having the share a 1066 FSB and the associated bandwidth.

SCREW QUAD CORE! You can't make me care until I can buy a 8192 core-processor and plug it directly into my skull.

My only question is, how valuble is it really to the consumer market? Apps are only just starting to be written for dual cores.

BTW, Intel really needs to finish CSI.

Hmm. Still stepping 4 not the newer 5. At least that means we can be already be anticipating improvements before launch. Could you post a link to the Coolaler's original thread or article?

On the subject of launches, a 1066MHz FSB is one thing, but if they decide to go from a 3.2GHz Extreme Edition and launch at 2.4GHz I'll probably crack my skull from banging it against a wall.

Where did you find this?

XS

Not until Tukwila, so it seems:

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?NewsID=361&date=05-05-2006


Cheers!

Hmmm.....can't wait to get one or two of them at work.

Q Core in Q4. Pretty far out. I forget, have any power consumption numbers been published?

Max of 95w apparently. Makes sense.

ManOMan, it's really time for the other components to catch up to CPUs. And even moreso, software.

Indeed, I am not very optimistic that the BW with 1066 is going to do it, will need to wait for data.

Ahhh, FSB Intel's Achilles heel.

While I agree in general, It doesn't seem to be a problem for this chip so far. Cinebench 2003 appears to be scaling as well or better than Opterons with HT. Also remember this is an early Engineering sample. Shipping products in Q1 07 (possibly Q4 06) will likely have a 1333MHz bus speed.







2.4GHz Kentsfield:


for reference, 3.0GHz Conroe:


and damn... look at these everest scores, lol:




And for some icing on the cake, this 2.4GHz quadcore chip can overclock to to 3.2GHz on stock voltage:


All benchmarks thus far are at stock speeds, hopefully we will soon see some overclocked quadcore benches!

Cheers!

Is it likely that Intel will introduce something like Dual Independent Bus in their desktop and mobile quad core platforms?

That could solve the problem...

Wow, it's twice as fast as 2 X2 3800+s - even though I don't know how they got 2 of those in a mobo. I guess they did the old multiply x 2 trick.

8O Damn, if i can pop my Conroe and dump a quad Conroe in 12 months on my existing motherboard i'd just flip ! That' be such a nice way to upgrade my future computer. Now lets hope MB manufacturers have 16Gig of memory at least on those Motherboards, and not just the measly 8Gig i think that they are planning.

Well, it may be something of a 'cheap' way to increas performance, but what about Opteron and 4x4?

What about them? AMD is finesse, Intel is brute force.

8O Damn, if i can pop my Conroe and dump a quad Conroe in 12 months on my existing motherboard i'd just flip ! That' be such a nice way to upgrade my future computer. Now lets hope MB manufacturers have 16Gig of memory at least on those Motherboards, and not just the measly 8Gig i think that they are planning.

That's what's nice about an off-die memory controller. Kentsfield servers can run FB-DIMMs, and desktops can still use standard DDR2. That's assuming we can actually drop in a Kentsfield to a desktop 775 board.

Has there been an official statement on whether or not Kentsfield will be drop-in compatible with the 865 chipset?

It is highly unlikely that you'll see it this year. There were engineering samples for the core2 floating around early this year/late late last year. 6 months later, still no chips.

I'm not interested in 4 GPU's in my computer, i think it is a waste of Energy  
all i'm concerend about is 2 GPU's and one Quad CPU and 16 Gig of memory.
I'd just flip for one of those rigs, God i hope the motherboards won't need anything more than flashed bios update

8O Damn, if i can pop my Conroe and dump a quad Conroe in 12 months on my existing motherboard i'd just flip ! That' be such a nice way to upgrade my future computer. Now lets hope MB manufacturers have 16Gig of memory at least on those Motherboards, and not just the measly 8Gig i think that they are planning.

Has there been an official statement on whether or not Kentsfield will be drop-in compatible with the 865 chipset?

Yeah i'm curious to know the answer to that also, i hope so, it would be amazing cool to just replace the CPU and dump a quad in and away you go lol

You may be right(I'm now knowledgeable enough to know) but does that matter as we get performance? Besides, would you rather stab your mother-in-law to death with a toothpick or carve her ass up with a katana? Sometimes brute force ain't so bad :wink:
OK bad example. But hey, it works.

Servers use socket 771.

8O Damn, if i can pop my Conroe and dump a quad Conroe in 12 months on my existing motherboard i'd just flip ! That' be such a nice way to upgrade my future computer. Now lets hope MB manufacturers have 16Gig of memory at least on those Motherboards, and not just the measly 8Gig i think that they are planning.

That's what's nice about an off-die memory controller. Kentsfield servers can run FB-DIMMs, and desktops can still use standard DDR2. That's assuming we can actually drop in a Kentsfield to a desktop 775 board.

Has there been an official statement on whether or not Kentsfield will be drop-in compatible with the 865 chipset?

Quad core will be compatible with 965 and 975 chipset boards manufactured after intel issued the revised VRM spec

What? You say 2 processors costing 2500$ finesse and NOT brute force?
Sometimes I wonder what you AMD Fanpois are smoking all day...

Wow I f*ed that one up. That one slipped past me. Thanks  

What about them? AMD is finesse, Intel is brute force.


Wait, so throwing two chips on two sockets on a single motherboard and calling it innovation is finesse? :roll:

What are you planning to use this quad core CPU for? And what will you be doing that will require more than 8GB of RAM?

What about them? AMD is finesse, Intel is brute force.


Wait, so throwing two chips on two sockets on a single motherboard and calling it innovation is finesse? :roll:

Damn! I can almost smell the pwnage from that one!

What about them? AMD is finesse, Intel is brute force.

Are ya dyslexic cuz last tyme I checked Core 2 iz what we's say in da ghetto as uh phat beeotch while da K8 an' da 4x4 platform iz what we's page in da ghetto as uh stank hoe. otay buh-weet

Moo.

What are you planning to use this quad core CPU for? And what will you be doing that will require more than 8GB of RAM?

Well on a really bad day i have to run the following crap all at once:

Visual Studio 2003
Visual Studio 2005
SQL2000 Server
SQL2005 Server
Oracle Server
Outlook
Borland Dev Tools (porting projects over to Visual Studio)
Excel
Word
Operating System
SatForms (Palm Dev)
and a bunch of smaller crap like MSN, etc...

The last few months it has become so bad, that if not for Conroe coming out i would have gotten an AMD box put together already, but i'm loving the Conroe/Woodcrest chip, and the possibility of a quad CPU   with oddles of Ram .

What are you planning to use this quad core CPU for? And what will you be doing that will require more than 8GB of RAM?

Well on a really bad day i have to run the following crap all at once:

Visual Studio 2003
Visual Studio 2005
SQL2000 Server
SQL2005 Server
Oracle Server
Outlook
Borland Dev Tools (porting projects over to Visual Studio)
Excel
Word
Operating System
SatForms (Palm Dev)
and a bunch of smaller crap like MSN, etc...

The last few months it has become so bad, that if not for Conroe coming out i would have gotten an AMD box put together already, but i'm loving the Conroe/Woodcrest chip, and the possibility of a quad CPU   with oddles of Ram .

Why are you running SQL and VS on the same machine?

What about them? AMD is finesse, Intel is brute force.

Are ya dyslexic cuz last tyme I checked Core 2 iz what we's say in da ghetto as uh phat beeotch while da K8 an' da 4x4 platform iz what we's page in da ghetto as uh stank hoe. otay buh-weet

Moo.

 


Cheers!

What are you planning to use this quad core CPU for? And what will you be doing that will require more than 8GB of RAM?

Well on a really bad day i have to run the following crap all at once:

Visual Studio 2003
Visual Studio 2005
SQL2000 Server
SQL2005 Server
Oracle Server
Outlook
Borland Dev Tools (porting projects over to Visual Studio)
Excel
Word
Operating System
SatForms (Palm Dev)
and a bunch of smaller crap like MSN, etc...

The last few months it has become so bad, that if not for Conroe coming out i would have gotten an AMD box put together already, but i'm loving the Conroe/Woodcrest chip, and the possibility of a quad CPU   with oddles of Ram .

Why are you running SQL and VS on the same machine?
I find it very convenient to have everything on one system, so i can develop, test, and do stuff right there on one box, instead of maintaining 3 separate boxes, that is the reason.

Plus i only have so much room in my office, i already have enough computers which i have to configure and send out to clients, so space is a factor, heat generated by the damn computers etc... i'd rather have less computers in the office. I am not IBM,   i don't have dedicated Server rooms lol

What about them? AMD is finesse, Intel is brute force.

So AMD with K8 was finesse and Intel was Brute force with Clocks on P4. So Conroe's arch is brute force compared to AMD ramping up clocks? besides does it realy matter? As long as its fast n cheap.

http://forum.coolaler.com/showthread.php?t=129598&highl...

Sorry guys, the page is in Traditional Chinese.......

It does show that it has 4 cores but is it because of the HT function???

The title says that its meant to have 8MB of L2 cache but in CPU-Z, it only shows 4096KB!!

Go to page 15 and there's a shot of the CPU......I havent had the chance to check the numbers on there if it is indeed a Quad core!!!

No because it you know sort of has four cores. HT would show eight.



4mb between each conroe.

As Action man said it the HT would show eight but if I remember correctly the new Core 2 architecture has gotten rid of Hyper-threading because it requires an incredibly deep pipeline and thus lowers performance.

Also, has anyone heard anything about the new "peryn" processor. I've heard that it's a sucessor of the Woodcrest or something like that that's made with on a 45nm technology. Also it's supossed to have 4 cores on the same die instead of 2X2, again I've only heard about it but was wondering if you guys knew anything.

Not true, far too lazy to go into it but the Power5 has ~14 stages and it has SMT which works pretty well.



Not much more then that, SSE5 which is meant to be pretty big. Details are thin since conroe hasn't launched and all.

iterations...you going to start another "Collection of..." thread featuring Kentsfield benchies? I know that's a lot of work to maintain, but just wondering(hoping). :wink:

Penryn is the die shrink of Merom and Conroe to 45nm production. There should be 3MB and 6MB versions for the cache. It is a dual core part on a single die that possibly could integrate memory and graphics controllers.

http://endian.net/details.aspx?ItemNo=4122
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/04/top_secret_intel...

A bit premature perhaps?

Maybe if we start to see windspread testing similar to conroe, but then again the features of the Uarch is same as conroe as is for kentsfield.

We will see, its up to iterations i suppose, or anyone else.

So in the 'near' future AMD and Intel will both have Quad core chips. Assuming a single socket motherboard, ignoring cache won't they be similar again. 4 cores, 1 memory controller, 1 system interface. The only difference will be that AMD will have a dedicated system interface (hypertransport) and Intel will have to share system interface for memory interface.

As more cores are added on die, the FSB or on die memory control will both become a bottleneck.

Very common practice to have SQL Developers edition and VS running at the same time, some DBA's are real pains in the ass when it comes to trying to develop.

What are you planning to use this quad core CPU for? And what will you be doing that will require more than 8GB of RAM?

Well on a really bad day i have to run the following crap all at once:

Visual Studio 2003 {...}
and a bunch of smaller crap like MSN, etc...

The last few months it has become so bad, that if not for Conroe coming out i would have gotten an AMD box put together already, but i'm loving the Conroe/Woodcrest chip, and the possibility of a quad CPU   with oddles of Ram .

I feel your pain. Sometimes my VS solutions have 20-30 projects to load, under source-control no less.

JAVA IDE's are worse, but I don't use those as often. Compiling platform builder, big C++ apps, and debugging emulators would benefit GREATLY from 4 cores!

I run SQL 2005 on a virtual server. It lets me stage my app in an environment as close as possible to my production environment. Same goes for IIS 6, Oracle, and a few other server apps I use frequently. I have a dedicated virtual server environment that I don't need XEON-level hardware for, but it'd be nice to have virtualization support and multiple cores on desktop-quality products.

I spend enough on my workstation and my software licenses. I don't need to go dumping more money into my virtual cluster  

Very common practice to have SQL Developers edition and VS running at the same time, some DBA's are real pains in the ass when it comes to trying to develop.

Amen to that.

And the SQL nazi says, "NO DBO FOR YOU!"

Very common practice to have SQL Developers edition and VS running at the same time, some DBA's are real pains in the ass when it comes to trying to develop.

Easy now. I'm one of those pain in the ass DBA's that has to try to reign in you shoot-from-the-hip developers. It's like herding cats sometimes.  

What are you planning to use this quad core CPU for? And what will you be doing that will require more than 8GB of RAM?

Well on a really bad day i have to run the following crap all at once:

Visual Studio 2003
Visual Studio 2005
SQL2000 Server
SQL2005 Server
Oracle Server
Outlook
Borland Dev Tools (porting projects over to Visual Studio)
Excel
Word
Operating System
SatForms (Palm Dev)
and a bunch of smaller crap like MSN, etc...

The last few months it has become so bad, that if not for Conroe coming out i would have gotten an AMD box put together already, but i'm loving the Conroe/Woodcrest chip, and the possibility of a quad CPU   with oddles of Ram .

Why are you running SQL and VS on the same machine?
I find it very convenient to have everything on one system, so i can develop, test, and do stuff right there on one box, instead of maintaining 3 separate boxes, that is the reason.

Plus i only have so much room in my office, i already have enough computers which i have to configure and send out to clients, so space is a factor, heat generated by the damn computers etc... i'd rather have less computers in the office. I am not IBM,   i don't have dedicated Server rooms lol

You don't have access to a farm?

Very common practice to have SQL Developers edition and VS running at the same time, some DBA's are real pains in the ass when it comes to trying to develop.

I'm not into that type of software development, I was just curious that's all.