Quad Core Processors - Generic Plus AMD specific

[ikonia]

After doing a little work on my desktop last night, I realised I may benifit from a dual core cpu in it. I use an AMD FX 60 in my desktop and its fantastic no problems, however I actually maxed it out yesterday, but looking at what I was doing I believe it was down to it only having one core on board. Which pretty much held up a lot of work and forced me to switch to another machine while that work was running.

I've got Intel dual cores in a lot of other machines and found them "fine" nothing mega but still very good. Now I'm toying with a desktop update and thought I'd do some research.

There appears to be a lot of dual core options out there, but with quad core now around, I thought I'd look into this more than dual core. Intel seems to have a fair ammount of offerings at varying prices, but I'm not seeing anything from AMD in either the socket F or Opteron level in terms of quad cores. I've read some articles that suggests that AMD do have quad core technology but its been performing quite badly (thats not a personal opinon just what I have read.)

I'm interested in any information on the AMD side - I'm surprised they don't have an "FX" style quad core to go with their FX style dual cores. I'm even more surprised they don't have anything in the quad core opteron range. I always like to keep my destkop AMD based due to a.) an alternative to Intel for interest b.) The better memory controllers on board, so I'm doing my research (although due to them now being with ATI - I doubt I will).

Give me a brief over view on the Intel top spec quad core and what AMD's up to at the moment as I'd rather have some opinions than dry article fact at this moment in time.

[5aboy]

well it all depends on your price point.

most users are going for the q6600s after the price drops (monday), as they will be very inexpensive, and most tend to hit 3ghz quite easily (not guaranteed obviously).

intel have penryn right around the corner, which is the next new technology which seems to be putting in very impressive performance figures from what little people have already seen.

the current king of the hill is the q6850 - i believe it is a 3ghz quad-core chip, but it is easily more than 2-3x more expensive than the q6600, which is why it is not really for most users.


and as far as the AMD situation is concerned - nothing, heard of this thing called 'barcelona' but it looks just like a nvidia/ati kind of thing with intel having had core2duo/quad out for about a year now, and the amd offering seems to be late, and doesnt bring an awful lot else to the end user.

if you can wait a little (not sure how long) for penryn, thats an option, else any of the intel quad cores will do just about anything you throw at it. it all depends on primary usage.

[ikonia]

interesting view points, not being a massive hardware man myself its very interesting to see what people involved or keeping track on it are doing/thinking.

I'm quite surprised by the AMD offerings to be honest.

[Dorza]

The mainstream quad core for Intel right now seems to be the Q6600 at around £180 which is something of a bargain if you want to go the quad core route. AMD don't have a quad chip just yet, but Barcelona is just around the corner (August launch iirc) which will be natively quad core.

The top of the range quad core intel right now is the QX8650 and for lack of a better word it is demolishing everything right now in mult-threaded tasks, but it does cost nearly £700. Most people these days would suggest you convert to Intel and get a core2duo/quad chip because they are better in general than AMD are right now. If you really would rather an AMD system, then I would recommend that you wait until Barcelona comes out next month and wait to see what the performance of it is like compared to that of Intel's quad cores.

[Colossous]

The rumour is the first quad core Opterons are just round the corner (August ?) and the desktop version later in the year but AMD/ATI are very unreliable as far as release dates go of late and the word is (though nobody really knows for sure yet) that the Intel cpu's are ahead of them !

[ikonia]

The AMD/ATI thing is a massive issue for me and one of the reasons I'm looking at intel options.

[aidanjt]

Yeah, the AMD/ATi merger was probably the biggest mistakes AMD has made to date, it's seriously undermined their ability to stay competitive with Intel, short of cut-throat price cuts which is hurting them even more after depeleting so much money on the investment.

AMD has been calling Intel's Quad offerings as 'fake-quad' because Intel uses two dual-core dies in the package with a FSB/SMP interconnect rather than 4 cores on the same die. But they can't really talk much when all they have is a vapour-quad chip to date. I'm sure they'll pick up, maybe next year, but for this year Intel seems to have the lead.

[ikonia]

as I feared, thank you.

I read some very dry info on the intel quad being 2 dual's, and this is part of the reasons I was curious to what AMD was doing, more so with the on board memory controller always being a strong point of the ADM chips.

It does look like the intel chips have a massive head start even if they are not as hardware sound as the potential amd chips.

[ikonia]

This looks an interesting approach/option
http://www.amd.com/gb-uk/Processors/..._14598,00.html

[aidanjt]

The whole onboard memory controller thing is a bit overrated anyway, it provides slightly higher memory bandwidth, but with the massive load of L2 cache the Intel chips have prefetching tends to keep it quite filled to work with anyway, thus less dry cache hits that you get on AMD chips. Word has it that Intel has plans to move memory controller on-die with Penryn (or was it the next gen) chips but I wouldn't be fussed either way. On basic Engineering principles the memory controller is better off on the NB IMHO.

[Dorza]

The whole onboard memory controller thing is a bit overrated anyway, it provides slightly higher memory bandwidth, but with the massive load of L2 cache the Intel chips have prefetching tends to keep it quite filled to work with anyway, thus less dry cache hits that you get on AMD chips. Word has it that Intel has plans to move memory controller on-die with Penryn (or was it the next gen) chips but I wouldn't be fussed either way. On basic Engineering principles the memory controller is better off on the NB IMHO.

Nehalem . That sounds like it will kick ass, but it's a way off yet. The whole onboard memory controller has done nothing to help AMD since Core came out. As you said Intel have been bundling copious amounts of L2 cache on their Core chips, so that probably helps them out there.

This looks an interesting approach/option
http://www.amd.com/gb-uk/Processors/..._14598,00.html

In my original post I did talk about QuadFX, but I didn't know what the situation was with it now so I removed what I had typed. Whatever the situation is with it, QuadFX is a very expensive route to go I think, mainly because you have to buy two cpus, two cpu coolers (if the cpus are oem), and two sets of memory modules since each CPU has its own bank of DIMMs.

There is more on QuadFX here

[SuicidaL]

the Phenom's are due later this year and early next List Here

the only thing is all the pissing around with socket changes from am2 to am2+ and 1207+, although to start with you could for instance use an am2+ chip on an am2 mobo but would be limited and sooner or later am3 will be released (and apparently am3 chips will be backward compatible to use on am2 boards, all this is giving me ).

[ikonia]

fantasticly interesting information. Big thanks.

aidanjt, you make interesting point about the benifits of cache over the memory controller and have to admit to not being up on hardware enough to debate or discuss it, my only experience on this is with the larger infrastructure kit with large ram bundles in which case I've found it very effective, however as Intel C2d's don't appear in the big kit there is no real comparision.