RSSIntel Begins Shipping Dual-Core Chips
By Nate Mook | Published April 11, 2005, 4:03 PM
In the race to bring dual-core processors to the market, Intel may have a leg up on rival AMD. The company announced at the Intel Developer Forum in Taiwan that dual-core "Extreme Edition" chips have begun shipping to customers and could reach consumers before the end of the month.
"We just passed an important milestone," Abhi Talwalkar, general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group, said in a statement. "Intel is shipping the Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 840 running at 3.2 GHz and Intel 955X Express Chipsets, Intel's first dual-core processor-based platform, to our customers."
AMD is expected to unveil its own dual-core Opteron on April 21 to commemorate the two-year birthday of the chip. Both companies have taken a different approach to the dual-core market, however, with AMD focusing on servers and Intel going after high-performance desktops.
By including two processing units into a single design, dual-core chips will bring improved performance when running multiple applications - even though speeds will initially be lower than current single core offerings.
Some analysts see the race to be first as a way that AMD can better its position in the market against Intel, the only other major player in the CPU industry. Intel retains about 82 percent of the processor market, with AMD holding a little under 16 percent.
Do you recall explaining to friends (or enemies) how a 386 processor was like a teaspoon digging dirt, a 486 a tablespoon and a pentium like a shovel? It helped them visualize getting more work done, not necessarily focusing just on the MHz - which would be how fast your digging implement was moving. The dual core is getting two processors on one die. The question you need to ask yourself is if you purchased a system with two (or more) processors did you take advantage of it (ie. are you running Symmetric Multiprocessing software? The vast majority of people would answer "No". That's why this processor is currently geared toward high end workstations for Intel and servers for AMD. Using the dirt analogy, you can dig more dirt with two hands than one, even if your hands are moving a little slower (MHz). Bottom line - if you have a specific need for dual-core chips, then great - go for it. Otherwise don't waste you money AT THIS POINT.
Addendum - going off on a tangent, same thing with 64-bit processors. It's going to be great, but if it takes two years for the OS and (equally important) the software to evolve, you have a two-year old processor which you haven't been utilizing to its fullest potential. Please don't go off on this part. Yes, I run Linux and know it supports the 64-bit processor and before my current servers I had a 64-bit Sparc server which ruled with Solaris, etc. etc. I'm talking about value for the average user.
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|YES! I will be ordering a super computer, 64 bit processor for my Linux box too :-)
Is it true that if you compile the software for your 64 bit kernel, the software itself will indeed be 64 bit too? Or do you have to get a source code designed for 64 bit?
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|dual-core is over-hyped anyway. You still have the bottle-neck of the CPU socket. In fact, early benchmarks have shown that some applications are even slower on a dual-core. It just depends on what kind of programs the user is running and how capable the OS is of taking advantage of the dual-core capabilities. All-in-all, it's not that fantastic of a difference.
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|So does the fact that Intel released their dual-core cpu faster than AMD make them better? Not in and of itself, nor was AMD better than Intel for having the first 1GHz desktop processor.
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|Well it does in the respect that they were the first. So all of the bleading edge technology geeks will run out to get it saying "I was one of the first to get the new state-of-the-art dual core chips" and rub that fact in the faces of their peers and pretty much everyone they know. So yes they will make that much more coin because of it, which also means stock will go up which is double plus good.
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|Indeed, but... AMD *is* better because they sell chips that outperform Intel at a lower cost to consumers.
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|Yes, I agree.
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|But, it will be interesting to see what new games will utilize the dual core.
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|I agree with you, but we are in the minority--at least 82% of the market does not use AMD...
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|As stated in the article and some of the comments above, it is likely that benchmarks will actually show a DECLINE in performance over the single-core processors UNTIL software is designed to utilize it. Happened with HT technology too, you could take a 3.06GHz processor to benchmark faster when HT was DISABLED in bios. Once software started taking advantage of the hyper-threading, though...
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|There are indeed lots of lemmings out there...
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|I'm yet to see any common apps take advantage of it and this is being typed on a 3Ghz Hyperthreading box (my office PC - I won't waste money on intel stuff for *my* home network).
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