IDF :: Intel show what Quad core can do for gaming...

[CrazyMonkey]

Well that was just........



Sweet.

[Richie P]

Some of you guys are seriously misinformed...

Not interested in this type of Quad core made by Intel. It will be overpriced & not worth its performance vs. price.

It seems that they slapped two Core 2 Duos on a package. So, where is the innovation in that? Benchmarks are not good enough considering that this double dual core is a quad-core. People we are in trouble if this is the future of CPUs.

You're forgetting that nearly all of today's software is only single threaded, let alone dual or multi threaded, how can a quad core processor be expected to improve software that isn't written for it - thats why most of the game and real world benchmarks are lacking.

Once we have real multi threaded apps, and multi threaded games that utilise the power that quad core processors have in general (not just kentsfield) then you'll see the real power it can bring.

The only reason you see 4x4 sitting in two sockets is AMD couldn't manage 250w in a single socket.
If they had appropriate cores they could easily put two dies onto a single package, hanging it off a HT link, but you can't cope with that kind of heat output in that area.

Never heard this before and i'm struggling to believe it. Since when did whacking two cores together double the TDP? It didn't with the old pentium D's and it didn't with C2D to C2Q.

About what Nick said on having a core dedicated to rendering physics, that would consume much more memory (system) bandwidth than having a seperate Physx card, let's put their perfomance aside for a sec .

Maybe true, but the underlying implementation of physics calculations do not require much memory in the first place. It is much more dependant on the performance of the processor, and i refuse to believe that Aegia can pop up with a £200 card with a core that can work better than a single core of a QX6700.

And I agree on Kentsfield being NOT a big leap forward of Conroe, current games don't even utilise all Conroe resources, having another 2 cores won't help much, at least not linearly.

Again...as i said before. Quad core is basically waiting for the software developers to catch up. Alan Wake is a demonstration of just what is possible with the potential of the new hardware coming out.

Bear in mind as well, that the new G80 core graphics cards come with GPGPU abilities called 'Cuda' i think. This could be another line of investigation in relation to physics processing.

Basically Aegia are screwed. lol

[Thorburn]

Some of you guys are seriously misinformed...

I'm fairly sure I'm not

Never heard this before and i'm struggling to believe it. Since when did whacking two cores together double the TDP? It didn't with the old pentium D's and it didn't with C2D to C2Q.

TDP of an E6700: 65w
TDP of a QX6700: 130w

E6700 (65) * 2 = QX6700 (130)

Maths can be fun children

As for the Pentium D's, the 800-series had Prescott cores in a single piece of silicon which is a little different to two seperate dice, the 900-series had two dice on a single substrate and while the quoted TDP was not double that of a Cedar Mill (a Cedar Mill was quoted as 89w, same as a Prescott-2M, but the reality was less) core in reality it was there abouts.

The only reason you see 4x4 sitting in two sockets is AMD couldn't manage 250w in a single socket.
If they had appropriate cores they could easily put two dies onto a single package, hanging it off a HT link, but you can't cope with that kind of heat output in that area.

Don't know why you think thats not possible either? Its the same as putting a pair of Opterons in a board and only connecting memory to the 1st CPU. The 2nd can simply access the 1st's memory by sending requests over the HT link (with the associated latency penalties).

[muddyfox470]

It reminded me a bit like crysis for xbox 360, where that had no backdrops etc, just one massive island/world.

The water does look very purdy on this tho

Ian