Apparently every one missed the article yesterday in bloomberb. Intel has had a 59% increase in inventory and since they previously blew out the core duo chips this is most likely Core 2 woodcrest.
"Intel, whose semiconductors power more than 70 percent of all personal computers, had $4.48 billion in stockpiles on Sept. 30, up 59 percent from a year earlier."
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=alGJJnX8OrSU&refer=news With the adoption of HPCC
http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/index.html as the bidding standard for most 4P and larger uses. The benchmarks you see posted on Tom's and Anandtech and Hexus are for HPL type tests only. Intel has not been able to achieve the highend server or HPC sales they have wanted. Intel received a 100% shut out on DOE contracts the third quarter this year and the only quadcore contract went to Cray/AMD. http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=873357&highlight=
This award was due to Cray AMD's vastly superior PTrans and random access scores.
"To David Womble, acting director of Computation, Computers, and Math at Sandia, "The question is [similar to] how much traffic can you move how fast through crowded city streets." Red Storm, he says, does so well because it has "a balance that doesn't exist in other machines between communication bandwidth [the ability of a processor to get data it needs from anywhere in the machine quickly] and floating point computation [how fast each processor can do the additions, multiplications and other operations it needs to do in solving problems]."
"More technically, Red Storm posted 1.8 TB/sec (1.8 trillion bytes per second) on one HPCC test: an interconnect bandwidth challenge called PTRANS, for parallel matrix transpose. This test, requiring repeated "reads," "stores," and communications among processors, is a measure of the total communication capacity of the internal interconnect. Sandia's achievement in this category represents 40 times more communications power per teraflop (trillion floating point operations per second) than the PTRANS result posted by IBM's Blue Gene system that has more than 10 times as many processors.
"Red Storm is the first computer to surpass the 1 terabyte-per-second (1 TB/sec) performance mark measuring communications among processors -- a measure that indicates the capacity of the network to communicate when dealing with the most complex situations.
"The "random access" benchmark checks performance in moving individual data rather than large arrays of data. Moving individual data quickly and well means that the computer can handle chaotic situations efficiently.
"Red Storm also did very well in categories it did not win, finishing second in the world behind Blue Gene in fft ("Fast Fourier Transform," a method of transforming data into frequencies or logarithmic forms easier to work with); and third behind Purple and Blue Gene in the "streams" category (total memory bandwidth measurement). Higher memory bandwidth helps prevent processors from being starved for data."
http://www.physorg.com/news62939660.html
IBM's Cell/Opteron design promises to be even faster.
http://www.supercomputingonline.com/article.php?sid=11894
DOE contracts start at about 10,000 Cpus and go up to 125,000 cpus. Since Intel didn't win any of the 14 contracts issue I suspect that they have an obvious surplus of Core 2 inventory. If Intel expets to win any future competions they need to redesign their cpus to work togehter on an integrated basis rather than on single cpu performance. Their designs give them an edge in the enthusiast market today that may be short lived as GPU acceleration overtakes CPU calculations. As Stanford University says:
"Now in 2006, we are looking forward to another major advance in capabilities. This advance utilizes the new, high performance Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) from ATI to achieve performance previously only possible on supercomputers. With this new technology (as well as the new Cell processor in Sony’s PlayStation 3), we will soon be able to attain performance on the 100 gigaflop scale per computer. With this new software and hardware, we will be able to push Folding@Home a major step forward."http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-ATI.html
That is 2.5 times faster than Core 2 and 1.25 times faster than Intel's Kentsfield and can be accomplished by adding a second video card on a crossfire motherboard.
http://ati.amd.com/technology/crossfire/physics/index.html
Since the US Government HPC use alone is 6 times the enthusiast market , Intel needs to rethink its marketing and engineering strategy or the inventory will continue to build as the GPU and Cell chips make quadcore and dual core obsolete.