Comments on: Intel puts four on the floor

This week's Intel Developer Forum should reveal more about quad-core processor designs and plans for mobile and server chips.

[Kiyomizu]

Corporations Rejoice, Consumers Cringe.

Quad core for servers is great news for corporations leaning on Intel based products.

Now, it's a grey day for consumers since most people have no use for quad core computers, yet. Even dual core is still in its infancy with almost no apps available to boost this new found effiency. Heck, 64bit is not even widely used and has almost no apps available either.

I'd like to see a more cohesive and consumer friendly initiative that won't bog us down in technological technobabble. I'm tired of tech companies trying to persuade users to become fanatics for unnecessary technology.

Make it simple, even for people who understand the technological innovation required to impulse us into the digital age.

[baswwe]

These chips fly!! Already reviewed and they are FAST..

tom's hardware guide has already reviewed them..

They are screaming fast.

[TheRealJizzler]

You forgot about...

The prosumers!

The ones that are between needing a dual-core and a full-fledged dual Woodcrest Xeon system.

I so need these extra cores for what I do :)

If you don't, then any chip out now should suffice for your needs.

[rmiecznik]

in that case

Since you don't see any use in PCs for dual and quad core, I suggest you switch to a Mac and the great OS X, it uses 64 bit :- )

Get the Power Mac G5 or the new one that came out to replace it, G5 would be cheaper since a replacement is here, you can get a great deal on a used PC.

OS is 64 bit, hardware is 64 bit, you'll love it and it is simple to use, yet powerfull under the skin and great updates are just around the corner.

[Lindy01]

I agree

99.9% of consumer software is 32bit single core. Of course little by little it will start to use dual core but quad core wont have more than a dozen consumer apps that will support it for 3-5years.

[Agit66]

misconceptions abound......

I was reading the comments and want to clarify 2 thngs:

1. The only true 64BIT procs are Itanium/Itanium2's (at least in the world of intel)
2. The only true 64 bit os's are RHEL IA-64, Windows 64BIT ...... I know there are prolly more but you get the idea.....
3. All current desktop/server procs w/the exception of the Itanium line are x64 (meaning they can handle 64 bit addressing & extensions, but are still 32-bit procs).
4. When people say they are running 64 bit windows (i.e. XP x64) they are really running a 32bit os with 64bit extensions ex: 6+ GB of memory.

The G5 is a Dual Proc system, not a dual core.

[domino360]

Agit66 - intelligent points

Most people have no idea the difference between "architecture" and "platform" and they buy whatever the sales poeple (or rumors) say.

In the low end (sort of) semiconductor industry such as AMD and Intel, true 64-bit architecture is in the Itanium. IBM and Sun know that because they don't like sharing the "pie" with a third competitor. Opterons are brilliant (so far) in the multi-processor (8+) platform systems, and they don't require too much motherboard modifications (great for cost cutting in building new servers).

Amazingly Agit66 nails almost everything (95%), except the G5 which it's true up to a point. Since Apple has upgraded the G5 with the Mac Pro, dual-core processing is a reality with the Woodcrest chips. After November 2007 we are going to have Quads.

Mentally balanced viewpoints are very rare on forums such as this.

Cheers mate!

[ralfthedog]

Define what you mean by not 64 bit.

Are you trying to say that the Athlon does not have 64 bit registers? Are you trying to say that it does not have instructions that operate on those 64 bit registers? Perhaps you are trying to say that the AMD and Intel chips don't have a 64 bit data path to ram?

Yes the x86-64 and EM65T both execute 32 bit instructions and do them well. This does not make them any less a 64 bit operating system.

I will grant that all pushes and pops to the stack are 8 bit.

[Montevale]

Video - Speech... Encoding THIS and THAT!!!

Whoever said that dual cores are not needed because there is no software - is out to lunch!!!
If all you do is type letters and wbsurf... then even an old Pentium II will do the trick.
Have you ever tried video editing? A segment of 25minutes with multiple special effects will sometimes take 10hrs to render on P4 3.2HT... and you souldn't use your computer while doing it as it will take even longer...
How about speech recognision? do you know why all of these programs suck? you guessed it it needs more horsepower.
How about you have four monitors hoocked up to your system all showing multiple different programs running at the same time without delays or hickups? ...and I'm not even talking about games.
We have no idea of how we can use computer yet!!!
Learning curve is toooooooo long, because they are toooooooo slow.
Finally the gigaherz war is over and the real development paralell computing or multicore war is ON... 64bit processing? how about 64 bit processing on 64 cores? sounds crazy? not if Moore's law holding true and it does and we are going to be there at the current rate of development in about 5 years.

[martin1212]

OSX is not fully 64 bit yet

The GUI is not 64 bit. You need to wait for Leopard, next year, to get the full 64 bit support.

[pokiri]

Happy to see Intel catching up in multi-core battle field

Will they overtake sun microsystems in this field ? They have 8 core multi-threaded niagara chips .

[Seaspray0]

What most people need

Unless you are doing some intensive graphics rendering or other involved process, over 95% of the time, the processor is sitting there idling... waiting... using electricity. The public has put great demands on or chip makers to give us faster, more powerful, multicored processors. Only until recently has anyone said "give me a processor that will perform more calculations with less electrical power". The electricity used by a processor can be very costly because that energy is translated into heat which takes more electricity to cool it back down. Where server racks once contained a few servers, now you can stack dozens of servers into the same rack, all generating more heat per processor than their predecessors. The chip makes need to direct much more of their focus into this issue.