Intel Dual Core Reviews!!!

[wolverinero79]

By PCWorld.

<A HREF="http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,120264,00.asp" target="_new">http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,120264,00.asp</A>

Anandtech!!!
<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2388" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2388</A>

I'm just your average habitual smiler =D<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by wolverinero79 on 04/04/05 04:28 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[slvr_phoenix]

It's not looking too good for ol' Intel. :O

Of course I'm still not convinced that just a BIOS upgrade is going to handle AMD's dual cores either. I have a sneaking suspicion that power specs are going to be a factor as well. But we'll see. Maybe AMD can pull it off. And either way, they're still looking to be in a much better position than Intel.

<pre> <font color=purple>I express to you a hex value 84 with my ten binary 'digits'. </font color=purple></pre><p>@ 185K -> 200,000 miles or bust!

 

[wolverinero79]

Anandtech's looked more promising (especially regarding the multiple applications tests).

Interestingly, Anandtech states that AMD will get a bigger boost, because their chips haven't been able to do multi-threading before. IMO, that could hamper them, since we don't really know how the AMD chips will handle multiple threads. I suppose we have some indication with Opteron scaling, but who knows.

I'm just your average habitual smiler =D

 

[Schmide]

<A HREF="http://forums.legitreviews.com/viewtopic.php?t=1628" target="_new">fix a el wuza link a</A>

<A HREF="http://www.legitreviews.com/article.php?aid=184&pid=1" target="_new">Actual link</A>

Dichromatic for your viewing plesure...

 

[Spitfire_x86]

Quite impressive, considering the fact that it wasn't supposed to do better in single threaded apps.

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[endyen]

But he should have included the most common multitasking.. That would be a person reading thier spam, while having multiple M$ apps idling in the background, and counting how many times a virus could replicate itself, and how many emails said virus could send.
All joking aside, the biggest plus for me, will be in folding.

 

[Spitfire_x86]

Does F@H take advantage of Dual CPU?

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[ChipDeath]

I guess you'd have to have <b>4</b> client instances running, one for each 'virtual' CPU.

---
Winnie 3200+ @ ~2.5Ghz, ~1.41V
1Gb @ 209Mhz, 2T, 3-5-5-10
Asus 6800GT 128Mb

 

[slvr_phoenix]

I haven't bothered reading many dual core articles yet, but has <i>anyone</i> compared a dual core box to a CPU-equivalent dual-CPU box? :\

<pre> <font color=purple>I express to you a hex value 84 with my ten binary 'digits'. </font color=purple></pre><p>@ 185K -> 200,000 miles or bust!

 

[davemar14]

I cannot dispute that dual core CPU's are better. But, you have to remember that the slowest parts in a computer are the hard drives. From the reviews, it shows that they are better when multi-tasking. That is good, but if you got a dual core Pentium, and a dog slow 7200 RPM drive with 2 MB cache, it is still going to be slow when opening programs. A brand new CPU ain't going to give you as much as a boost as getting a fast set of hard drives in RAID. Obviosuly if you are upgrading from a 5 year old machine, it will be much faster, but the CPU isn't everything. I got a XP 2400+, and I will admit it's not the fastest processor, but I got 2x74 GB Raptors in RAID 0, and since adding them, the comp is a lot more responsive.

My Rig and System:
<A HREF="http://www26.brinkster.com/amdgamer1/main.html" target="_new">http://www26.brinkster.com/amdgamer1/main.html</A>

 

[endyen]

F@H should be able to run 2X on dual core chips, just like it can do on HT systems. Of course in dual core, each instance will have it's own core. A dual core @3200 speeds, should be able to do twice the WUs as a single core 3200.

 

[slkhlaw]

I think Intel is just trying hard to keep up with the Moore's Law but meanwhile not doing its homework. We have seen the potential of a Dual core way back when we have dual Pentium Pro or SMP system. What do we see back then? Not enough multi-threaded program to make full use of SMP. What do we see today? Not enough program written multi-threaded. What difference does it make?

We used to convert DVDs into DivX back in 2002, having to wait for 8 hours to complete the conversion. With SMP system, we won't shorten the time down to 4 hours, basically we can run two simultaneously with 2 converted DivX in 8 hours. With today's dual core, it is similar, we won't see a two fold increase in performance.

 

[slkhlaw]

I tend to disagree with Anandtech's view on AMD's dual core. We having difficulties in filling 3 of the AMD's ALU all the time, what benefits would it give us if we have 6 to fill? I see no improvement in performance, just a bit more responsive, thats all... very similar to what we see on Intel Dual Core.

The bottleneck is at the FSB, memory latency and memory bandwidth and hardisk transfer speed, so, dual core seriously will not increase the performance tremendously in most case. For those who really like to show off the capability of dual core, yes there is a benchmark that can make you jumps -- download RC5 from distributed net. You will see two times the performance of a single core. But how many software are purely limited by CPU these days? I can count with my fingers ;-)

By the way, Toms has forgotten to enable SMP support for Quake 3, that program is written multi-threaded (I would say very poorly written (Sorry, John Carmack)), you should notice about 10% decrease in performance when multi-threaded is enable because of the synchronisation between the two core is needed.

 

[davemar14]

I really don't see the need for dual-core CPU's when hardly any programs can take advantage of it. Save yourself the money, and get a single core CPU until dual-core CPU's can actually be used to their full potential. Granted there may be a few programs that will benefit, but the vast majority will not. Also, there is no increase in performance in games, which is what most of us are looking at.

My System:
<A HREF="http://www26.brinkster.com/amdgamer1/main.html" target="_new">http://www26.brinkster.com/amdgamer1/main.html</A>