Which Quad Core? - Xeon or Core 2

[Brodieman]

Hi guys,

With the price of the Quad Core intel chips dropping (and me being in a position that I need to upgrade my whole machine to take advantage of DDR2, PCI-E graphics) which of the quad core intel chips should I be looking at?

Both the Xeon and Core 2's apprear to have 2 x 4mb L2 cache, and apart from the clock speed appear... to be very similar. So at the moment it's either a X6600 or a X3220 (or E5335 when they are released due to the 1366mhz fsb).

Has any one got any advise? 5 years ago I would of known this stuff but I've not really followed hardware for quite a while.

Cheers

Brodieman

[piranha]

Not sure which is better but can tell you that Intel plan on making big price cuts in next few months so would advise you to wait a lit longer if possible.

[aidanjt]

Don't bother with Xeons, they can only use FBDIMMs and the Quad core chips can be overclocked to Xeon FSB rates anyway.

[TheAnimus]

FBDIMMs are a good idea in manny ways thou, not too mention that xeon's are the pick of the litter so too speak.

problem is the cost, and whilst one might be able too clock FBDIMMs much faster in the future, we're not there yet.

But whats wrong with FBDIMMs?

[directhex]

intel quad core sucks, due to lack of memory bandwidth

[aidanjt]

Originally Posted by TheAnimus

...

But whats wrong with FBDIMMs?

They suck up more juice, thus generate more heat, and cost silly money, which means less bang for your buck. It's a good design, it just needs refinement and better market acceptance.

[aidanjt]

Originally Posted by directhex

intel quad core sucks, due to lack of memory bandwidth

Intel quad core sucks compared to what exactly? AMD doesn't have a quad core CPU on the market for comparison. The only thing significantly wrong with Intel's quad core solution is their northbridge chip designs are lagging behind their CPUs, way behind, thus memory bandwidth suffers as a result. But in realworld applications raw memory bandwidth isn't that big a deal.

[directhex]

Originally Posted by aidanjt

Intel quad core sucks compared to what exactly? AMD doesn't have a quad core CPU on the market for comparison. The only thing significantly wrong with Intel's quad core solution is their northbridge chip designs are lagging behind their CPUs, way behind, thus memory bandwidth suffers as a result. But in realworld applications raw memory bandwidth isn't that big a deal.

well compared to dual cores for one. our benchmarks show barely any performance increase from clovertown over woodcrest - especially when you factor in the lower clock speed

all depends on whose world "real world" refers to, of course

[TheAnimus]

also when you actually look at peoples code for multi-CPUs its really awful often.

I'm amazed that grads with good grades from top unis (ie, not me) can't get simple concepts about how to program in a multi-cpu environment.

I was a hudge advocate of dual CPUs, since my first dual PII-350. (and i was still in key stage 3!). But 4 cores just aren't value for money. You get bottlenecks too easily, the one that kills me is a 'bad' optical drive, the ability it has too kill the whole WMM sub system and lock it up. (before hex jumps in, the same problem also happens in debian, hence why i'm blaming the optical drive, as looking from win, it is that taking far too long to respond to a seak, in a critical section)

What i'm getting at is with a dual cpu you get the wounder of having a bit of hard work lifted off the main one, most games don't take full advantage of the second one, this is disapointing, but understandable, as its not simple too segregate a game into batches.

4 cores make it bloody hard too write one peice of software too use them all properly.

i could have a bloody big rant here at some code of mine someone changed because they thought they had too lock every time they where accessing a double..... did he tell anyone he'd made this change, which according the the comment was "vital". No. He didn't understand, so played it safe, killing hte performance so much it would of been better single threaded.

As such a 4 core right now is a bit overkill. But if you've got the money to blow, and have some uses that will benefit, go for it.