Upcoming 8-Core Processors: Release Date, Compatibility, and Performance

[Kutt]

When are the long awaited 8-core processors from AMD and Intel going to be commercially available? Will they use current sockets and chipsets or require new ones?

What kind of applications would fully make use of an 8-core 16-thread processor? Certainly there aren't any PC games that would need or use so much CPU resources. Do I really need this much CPU power if I'm just playing games, viewing photos, and browsing the internet? My Core i7 930 (Nehalem) seems to work just fine for everything I do.

I can't remember, but does the Ivy Bridge use Intel socket 2011 or 1155?

 

[chiro]

Hey Kutt.

The first thing is that the OS will make use of the different cores and threads with regards to it's I/O and other interrupt handlers in the context of its execution environments (services, processes, etc).

The second thing is that some types of applications including game engines are becoming multi-threaded due to the necessity of becoming multi-threaded due to the resource requirements to run complex and resource intensive games.

The video card will always handle the graphics routines but a lot of stuff does have to be done by the CPU still and any chance of using multi-threaded frameworks where performance is increased will be coded in at some point.

Also you must understand that modern game engines use event driven frameworks for all the gameplay and even for the internal stuff inside EXE's and DLL's so having multiple threads is very natural in a gaming environment: the big key is the synchronization but you must remember that game engines are designed to not require total synchronization.

In network mode, the engines expect packets to be dropped and it's easier from a design point of view to run a single player game mode as a multiplayer mode with a few tweaks so that everything goes through the same pipeline as the multiplayer mode does and the multiplayer mode has to do deal with lack of guaranteed synchronicity between clients and the server.

For a lot of stuff, you probably don't need the extra cores but when it comes to really resource intensive applications like games, video editing, photo editing, music editing and production, animation and 3D modelling production and a host of other similar ones, then having multiple cores will be beneficial since a lot of the developers of these have this in mind from the start and code their applications to utilize these features.

Also things like computing engines will also be designed to take these into account which include things like MATLAB, Maple, Mathematica and so on.

 

[r4z0r84]

in answer to your question, they already have released a 10 core 20 thread processor with support of upto 4tb quad channel ram and the socket type is LGA1567.

So theoretically you could create a machine using a X8QB6-F motherboard, 4xIntel E7-8870 cpu's giving you a theoretical speed of 224Ghz and 1tb of ddr3 ram running in quad channel, quad sli with two gtx690's, 2x800gb(1600gb total) 910 series intel ssd's in raid 0 or 5 (for speed of 4000mbps read 2000mbps write) or 8x 480gb(3840gb total) 520 series intel ssd's in raid 0 or 5 (for speed of 4400mbps read 4160mbps write)

There you go, a commercially available super computer.

now for the price.

Item___________________cost(ea)__subtotal
intel ssd x8______________$514_____$4,112
cpu x4_________________$4,616___$18,464
mobo__________________$2,325__________
g-skill ripjaws(16gb kit)______$98_____$6,272
graphics x2______________$1,185____$2,370
total____________________________$31,218

So if you have around 30 grand to spend on a computer be my guest haha.

and finally socket 2011 for ivy bridge i7's

 

[wuliheron]

Late next year a 6-8 core ivy bridge-e and 8 core AMD piledriver are expected to come on the market. AMD has been having trouble so it might be delayed, but piledriver is expected to finally produce competitive performance with sandy bridge. If so it could become an inexpensive alternative to ivy bridge-e. We'll just have to wait and see as always.