THG (P)reviews "Core 2 Quadro" - aka Kentsfield!

Holy moly this review is completely crazy!! The Core 2 Quadro will be so future proof.

I doubt it. Intel generally only maintains 1 Extreme Edition price slot at a time which means that the X6800 and Kentsfield will likely co-exist at the same price. I believe, the price of the X6800, 965EE, 955EE, and 840EE are all still officially $999. In this case, it'll make some sense since in some cases the extra clock speed of the X6800 may be more important than extra cores. Whatever's going on with the 3.2GHz X6900, I don't know.

OMFG!!!!!!!! 8O

Soo awesome!

lol



Techie

lol

Yeah, I saw it earlier; that's going to be my next chip.

it pains me to say this but, AMD has been sleeping on the job. usually I like to see AMD with higher performance but intel has pulled ahead for the moment...

Impressive stuff, the AMD fanboys aren't going to be happy when they read it.

EDIT: Whollly crap, did you see the utter butt thump the multi-media math benches are putting on the Athlon/P4 line..... jiminy --- now we see why all those encoder benches seem to take off. I mean look at the SiSoft Multimedia Integer bench, a 3.33 GHz Kentsfield is 7x (700%) faster than an FX-62.

Looking at the spread in the matrix of data, looks like a few companies have lazy software writers and are not writing well optimized code for their customers (quad core or not).


Jack

8O
I almost fell off my chair.
had to put my reading glasses on and clean the monitor.
I new I was holding off on core2 for a reason.

Good god ... look at the linear 2 to 4 core speedups on:
MainConcept H264 encoder
Premiere Pro 2
Windows media encoder 9
3D Studio max

And to think you get double the peformance for the same price.

To put this into perspective ... One Kentsfield OCed to 3Ghz ($1000) is equivalent to four 2.8 Ghz Opterons (4x$1200=$4800): http://www.digitalvideoediting.com [...] p?id=61808

AdvancedMicro what?

Well, this is a truly exciting preview of what to expect out of intel in the coming weeks (about 4-6 if you believe their mid-october blurb).

AMD though has their card to play yet, we still need to see what the 4x4 will do. Gaming wise, I expect it to do well with a quad SLI setup, I hope we can see a quad SLI 4x4 up against a Quad SLI Core 2 Duo rig to get a good compare; ultimately the best comparision will come with a 4x4 against a Kentsfield setup with quad SLI. We will need to see.... I am sure there are a few HW sites out there just crazy enough to try it.

Interestingly Toms was treated to another AMD dog and pony show (last page of preview) with the 4x4 where they ran a bench for them to see it work. .... no numbers, no data but hey they got Halo (the telecoference not the game) to see it in action --- sadly they did not actually see it though.

Jack

4X4 will probably= $x$ though. I still feel it was a knee jerk reaction and will not be competitive in terms of cash per unit of performance, especially compared with the Intel quadcores. AMD needs to get their 65nm quadcores out right fast. One can only hope that AMDs early release rumors are true and that they are well into 45nm work ups. If Intels quad core does come out in october, I think AMDs momentum is in danger of hitting the proverbial immovable object.

What an explosive year in the CPU arena. I cant help but wonder if Intel isnt pushing quadcore out sooner than planned in response to stock prices. There is no competition from AMD right now, and early release of quad core can only hurt C2D sales, so there doesnt seem to be another reason for dropping quad core on the market right now. Additionally, it leaves one wondering what (if anything) Intel has waiting in the wings, not to mention the possiblity that they may be adversely conditioning consumers to expect major advancements every 6 months.

Lots of stuff to ponder

When Pentium 4 EEs, Pentium D 840EE, 955EE, and 965EEs are all still a grand, I think not. Only AMD ever seems to let its top-dog CPUs drop in price over time. What you WILL get is a multiplier-locked E6800 with the same 2.93 GHz core clock and 4MB L2 that the X6800 has. And yes, that will be much less than $1000.

Well Jack, the FX-62 is a dual-core CPU at 2.8 GHz and the Kentsfield is a quad-core CPU at 3.33 GHz. Also, each core has the same number of FPUs, so you have twice the amount of FPUs on the Kentsfield than the K8. I know what you're trying to get across (that the integer performance of the Core 2 arch is good) but when one takes into context the differences in the setup, the results are less outrageous, but still impressive, mostly due to the 4-issue core and the single-cycle FPU than anything else.

The Kentsfield at 3.33 GHz is 20% faster than the FX-62 in clock speed. The Kentsfield is a 4-issue chip and the FX-62 is a 3-issue chip. So you would expect the spread to be (3.33/2.80) * (4/3) * 2 = 317%. The Core 2 is roughly 10% more efficient clock-for-clock than the K8, so that brings the integer performance up to 349%. The integer unit in the Kentsfield takes a single cycle to do 128-bit calculations and the K8 takes two as its 80-bit unit splits 128-bit numbers up into 2 64-bit parts to take 2 cycles IIRC. So voila- there's your 700%. BUT that 700% speedup will likely never get seen "in the wild" as getting a consistent 4 IPC will be pretty much impossible for the CPU- 2-2.5 is as good as it gets from what I have heard. So that 4-issue core giving a 33% boost will be negated for the most part.

Hmm, those 4 X 4 sound more like some type of lumber product.

What is AMD thinking with that $ x $ crap? What is stopping somone from getting a Tyan board with dual sockets and putting 2 dual core cpus on them?
They will still be slower than a woodcrest system.

Oh well, too bad about the software support for quad cores, i doubt we will see games with quad core support anytime soon, maybe 18 months from now. It is one thing to do media encoding, and another to use 4 cores on a game.

I concur, I am very impressed with Kentsfield. It is nice to see a system limited by its graphics card instead of its CPU (like my system). I am still batting from the single core dugout so Kentsfield is looking like an excellent buy. Imagine that increase... going from a measely 2.75GHz Venice to a 3GHz+ Kentsfield, thats nuts.

I am heading towards peltier cooling and Kentsfield gives me damn good reason to go that way too. A TDP in excess of 100w, plus 3.33GHz w/o a voltage bump? Oh I definately see 4GHz on the horizon if I can get the temp down low enough. I may have to go insane and get a 407w Qmax peltier to cope with the 4 cores, but we shall see.

From what I see, anything having to do with video or audio encoding gets a huge bump from 4 cores. Oddly enough that may be the one thing I do least, maybe its because I can't ever get the freaking audio and video synchronized. I blame my current rig, although I don't acctually know the problem.

What I want to do is encode my current DVD's into Divx, XVid, or WMV HD (obviously 480P to match DVD quailty) so I can store them all on my home server and then just stream them to any of my TV's. Kentsfield may provide the raw horsepower that I need to encode a few hundred DVD's in a reasonable time frame. I don't even want to deal with HD DVD or BluRay and their insanely overpriced marketing schemes lol.

Point is, props to Intel for really putting AMD to shame. I have and AMD and still like them, but I have to say it: AMD you woke a sleeping giant and are now under the wrath of god (of the silicon industry that is ).

4x4 = Desperation from AMD (sorry to say it... I doubt it will do much for them)

I am wondering why nobody put the single-cycle integer units in chips already. It did not seem too terribly difficult for Intel to do so. I guess AMD rested on its laurels with the K7 and K8s' 3 fully-pipelined FPUs beating the PIII's single FPU and NetBurst's 1 fully-pipelined unit and 1 partially-pipelined unit and stuck with the standard 80-bit integer unit like everybody else did at the time.

AMD said that the K8L will have single-cycle integer units and be a 4-issue core like the Kentsfield. It will be much wider on the inside than the K8 is and will be a native quad-core unlike Kentsfield. So it will be a very interesting 2007 for sure. Nobody is sure on what AMD is really up to and the ETA of their products as they have only told the press about their 65nm transition after they'd been shipping wafers for two weeks and the quad-core tapeout only after it had happened also. I guess they have to be vague to try to head Intel off at the pass. Too bad for us though The closest we get to knowing what they might be up to is The Inq

I am all for that statement. I've had 7900 GTX's in SLI and I've had one by itself... I can definately agree with you on that one. Even if it's only akin to 7900GT's in SLI, it is better to have that in one card then have two 7900 GT's seperate or two 7900 GTX's unless you plan to liquid/peltier cool them and go nuts with volt modding, but thats a very rare case.

I wish ATI would counter with something akin to the 7950... although they don't really need to performance wise, but you get the idea...

I am all for that statement. I've had 7900 GTX's in SLI and I've had one by itself... I can definately agree with you on that one. Even if it's only akin to 7900GT's in SLI, it is better to have that in one card then have two 7900 GT's seperate or two 7900 GTX's unless you plan to liquid/peltier cool them and go nuts with volt modding, but thats a very rare case.

I wish ATI would counter with something akin to the 7950... although they don't really need to performance wise, but you get the idea...

Indeed i was hoping ATI would get some dual GPU's out but nothing so far, i am very interested in the DX10 part from ATI, i might just get that if it blows the 7950 out of the water, even in single gpu mode lol