Kentsfield Timing: When Are All These Goodies Gonna Be Out?

[orsino]

Ok, I've just jerry-rigged my system to keep from fragging itself for another few months, and I've to cut a deal with my local council to heat my entire block this winter with the heat from my Prescooker.

Now the question is when are all these goodies expected to be out and in at least first revision since I don't believe in paying to betatest manufacturers' preemies.

Here is the system I'm shooting for:

1) Kentsfield (at least 2.6, higher if I can afford it)

2) Kentsfield-savvy Mobo (won't be OC'd) with minimum 4 RAM slots and whatever slot to hold a killer D3D10 card.

3) Aforesaid killer D3D10 card.

4) 8GB RAM.

5) 2 x 7200.10 300GB+ SATAs in RAID 1. (Possibly two 750GB Barracuda ST3750640AS if the price has come down by then.)

6) Min. 32GB Flash for the ReadyWhatsit.

7) Vista x64's at least SP1, again since I think that as soon as Vista x64 RTM comes out it will have more bugs than a rainforest and there will be all of three drivers that will work with it.

8 ) Adobe Pr0noshop to run on above and take advantage of the RAM.

I'm fine on case and cooling as with the addition of a Scythe Ninja or better, my setup will challenge any $400 WC rig out there on plain silent air (eat that, liquid enthusiasts!). For PSU I'll go with the OCZ 750W or similar.

So... given the current estimates for release of these goodies plus the time for the sufficient revisions so that all the fanboys who rush in and max out daddy's credit card can do my entomology for me, when is the best guess for all this stuff to be ready? My seat of the pants guess is Aug. 07. What's yours?

 

[dasickninja]

Intel says the Kentsfield will be ready early 2007... I'm not too sure about the rest, it either happens or it doesn't.
Microsoft Vista is the only big if.

 

[m25]

The correct answer is when are quadcores going to be affordable.

 

[Doughbuy]

I feel like your spending a lot of money on unnecessary stuff... the 32 gig of flash is one of them...

You would also probably get a native quad-core if you wait that long, plus PCI-E 2.0 and DDR3 memory... but then you'll miss out on 32nm tech and DDR4 memory, and DX11 will rape you, but you might also make it in time for wireless-N

Now I'm just spouting bull, but whatever.

 

[DeathwingX]

my guess would be what it has been in the past, extreme edtion will be 1000+ and the rest will be under it, and the DX10 cards will prboyl be 600-700, then ram will cost you 200-400 a stick, so your looking at about a 4k comp, and i wanna say Q1, though the gfx cards wont be out till Q2 (pure guess), gl and give me your final specs when you pick everything out, also id go with a 590sli nb if you can, they seem to handle things well and can run both pciex16 at pciex16 and not split it down to pciex8, gl and hf

 

[m25]

I feel like your spending a lot of money on unnecessary stuff... the 32 gig of flash is one of them...

You would also probably get a native quad-core if you wait that long, plus PCI-E 2.0 and DDR3 memory... but then you'll miss out on 32nm tech and DDR4 memory, and DX11 will rape you, but you might also make it in time for wireless-N
Now I'm just spouting bull, but whatever.

:lol: I still use a 128MB flashdisk FYI and always spend my money on BASIC equipment, however, quadcores are to hit the market above $1000 and that is still a lot of money for the average buyer spending at most $200-300 on a CPU.

 

[m25]

Pretty curious to see some benchmarks, however, have seen that AMD plans a 512K/core L2 and shared 2M L3 on their quadcores. What advantages could bring them a shared L3 compared to distributing the same amount of cache to the L2 and making 1M L2 per core?

 

[mkaibear]

1) Kentsfield (at least 2.6, higher if I can afford it)

By Christmas - will be the extreme edition.

2) Kentsfield-savvy Mobo (won't be OC'd) with minimum 4 RAM slots and whatever slot to hold a killer D3D10 card.

Can get one now.

3) Aforesaid killer D3D10 card.

November, according to nVidia.

4) 8GB RAM.

Can get this now.

5) 2 x 7200.10 300GB+ SATAs in RAID 1. (Possibly two 750GB Barracuda ST3750640AS if the price has come down by then.)

Can get this now.

6) Min. 32GB Flash for the ReadyWhatsit.

Can get them now. http://www.kanguru.com/flashdrive_max.html

7) Vista x64's at least SP1, again since I think that as soon as Vista x64 RTM comes out it will have more bugs than a rainforest and there will be all of three drivers that will work with it.

Ooh, my word... XP - released Oct 25, 2001, SP1 released Sept 9, 2002. So I'd expect Vista SP1 to be about a year after the launch - so maybe March 2008?

8 ) Adobe Pr0noshop to run on above and take advantage of the RAM.

I suspect Adobe will never release a product called Pr0noshop...

 

[ElMoIsEviL]

Kentsfield (desktop) and Clovertown (server) will launch mid-November
http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/09/19/intels.core.2.quadro/
http://www.pcstats.com/NewsView.cfm?NewsID=53479
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/6148/

Via rumor mills, Digitimes, and various other sources --- I don't believe I recall a specific date from Intel other than November.

Intial speed will be 2.67 GHz as an enthusiast part, thus likely a $1K price tag, I have heard rumblings that it would be multiplier unlocked though.

Just about most major HW sites have posted preview data which came from IDF:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2846
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6871
http://techreport.com/etc/2006q3/kentsfield/index.x?pg=1

Two sites, Tom's and VR-Zone has skirted NDA's to publish more extensive preview data:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/10/four_cores_on_the_rampage/
http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4098

Overclocking appears to fall inline with C2D type headroom:
http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4098&s=7

Most C2D motherboards will support quad core with a bios update, the list is growing:
http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4130
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2848
http://www.techreport.com/onearticle.x/10973

In gaming you will not see much difference as, of course, gaming is not well multithreaded. However, encoding and decoding applications will see nice performance boost, some up to 80% (hmmmm where have we heard that number before....).

All-in-all it will be interesting to see how this works out, this is some 6-9 months ahead of AMD in servers, and at least that long or longer for desktop. The competitor of course will be the 4x4.

Jack

Well yes Jack.. as I pointed out to BM Kentsfield will improve upon Core 2 Duo by about 80% under heavilly Multi-threaded applications. This is the same number AMD touts initial 4x4 (2xAthlon64 FX DC) improvements over current K8 Dual Core processors.

In other words.. the performance difference per clock between 4x4 and Kentsfield will be about the same as the current performance differences per clock between Core 2 Duo and Athlon64 FX-60/62.

In other words.. Kentsfield will be 120-140% faster per clock then the current Athlon64 FX-60/62 processors.

 

[m25]

...Shared L3,... could be anything to do with the famous REVERSE HTT?!

 

[Wombat2]

The first of the cheaper processors QE6600 is scheduled to arrive in late January 2007. There are no indications as yet as to what it will cost.

 

[orsino]

@ Jumping Jack: Thanks for the links. They are very helpful!

@ DeathwingX: $4K is a bit more than I wanted to pay, but I do agree with your pricing estimates. I might have to tone down the videocard and go with 4GB RAM. I think that although the D3D10 cards will likely be around that $700 point when they first come out, I doubt that they will stay up there for very long. That is just way too much money to ask the general public to shell out for something that most people can't tell the difference between the $700 and the $100 card.

@ Doughbuy: The flash was to try and load Pr0noshop into so that it will actually do things in human rather than glacial timescales. Sometimes I'm playing around with files so big that it literally takes 5 minutes to apply a filter, rescale, etc. Tell me more about PCI-E 2.0, how much faster/better is it than the current version?

@ mkaibear: I'm frankly afraid of Vista RTM as my work is like being in the Army. Hurry up and wait. There are long periods of time, days, weeks, sometimes months, where the only thing I have to do is replace the fusion reactors in my SimCity 3000 scenario. But then all of a sudden, I'm on an unexpected deadline and I work 16 hours a day for a week or more nonstop. With my freakin' luck, Vista x64 would decide to pack up the printer driver, corrupt my Word files and give me blue screens for two days straight, right when I'm under the gun. I can't afford to betatest for Gates, I have rent to pay. I know that a dualboot XP/Vista system could be the way to go, but I think that I'd rather wait until the bloody thing is stable!!! And BTW, it might as well be called Pr0noshop as that's what it's mostly used for!!!