The end of 775 socket (LGA775)

[Thanakil]

Originally Posted by tuanming

If you're only seeing Nehalme only as cores then you are missing the big picture. Pro and con, okay.

That's what you don't understand. I'm not seeing it as cores only. I know there's more to it, but the discussion we had was only about cores and the bad and good things about having more cores, we weren't talking about the other advantages of the Nehalem because it wasn't the point of the discu. We know there's more to it, we're just ignoring it for the sake of the comparison. It was a comparison between 2-4-8 basically, not a comparison between current CPU (and all the tech involved) and Nehalem (and all the tech involved).

Originally Posted by tuanming

Pro: More is better (parallelism)
Con: Current developer sucks.

Con : It's not only developers (even tho they account for part of the problem, but I'd rather have them fully use 2 or 4-cores and we'll be fine), it's trying to sync everything.
You lose power (and it takes a lot of time to code) by trying to make sure everything is working like it should. It's easy for things to go wrong with 2-cores, it's even easier (and harder to make goes right) to go wrong with 4-cores.
Not all the CPU power goes to the task at hand, since part of it is being used to make sure stuff don't go wrong, so while you get more cores, part of that power is still being held back/used for other stuff.

[skoreanime]

@tuan

...

It's a waste on those extra cores, period. You really think the average household gamer is going to need 8 cores next year? Or the year after that? Please, be reasonable, even you should realize that.

Current developers don't suck, you just sound asinine. You really think coding is such an easy job? Go ahead and do it, since you make it sound oh so easy. What's the point of adding on more cores beyond 4 right now? Nothing. It's just a way to make the average computer buyer go ohhhh and ahhhh and get their money, it's simple as that.

[tuanming]

@skoreanime

....

It's true that the average joe doesn't need all that processing power, but you guys still do not see the bigger picture here...

Ok, maybe the word "suck" i used wasn't exactly best suit my expression. How about "incompetent"? xD I'm not a developer, but I supports those developers that look toward the future and think differently than those traditional single core/dual core optimized application.

[Phil]

What program needs 8 cores? is that EFFICIENT??

[skoreanime]

Ummm, no, we are seeing the bigger picture.

It's a waste at the current level of consumer technology. And it'll be like this for at least another 2-3 years guaranteed.

Dual cores been out for awhile now and the worlds just recently gotten really comfortable with it. Engineers are still pulling all nighters with the quad core dilemma and I suspect most will want to commit suicide if their boss suddenly tells them to start another project for 8 cores+.

[tuanming]

Seems like we need more "skilled" programmers/developers. I read an article or something like that and they said programmers and developers are all taught in a traditional fashion/way. And the result? Hardware are outpacing softwares...

And as to the person who asked "What program needs 8 cores? is that EFFICIENT??" Curently program like video encoding, and other application alike and sooner or later pc games. And tons of applications awaits for multi-core optimized in the future

[PCXL-Fan]

Originally Posted by Phil

But will it OC good? and have you ever heard of heat? um sorry but nehalem is only around 4 years old. its not optimized like the Core searies yet.

Only 4 years old?

4 cores on rare occasions does have its place even with the regular users. Say you want to play a game while while running a virus scanner such as norton or mcafee. Don't worry as computers increase in power it will let the programmers create less efficient/ sloppy coding, which is something a fair bit will take advantage of to the fullest.

Already computers reached the point 2 or 3 years ago where they and the applications they run are sufficient for 90% of computer users. Its only with the increasingly demanding OSs, videogames, HD video, CAD, bloated virus scanners and Adobe bloatware that more is required for the remaining 10% of users, and even most of them now have sufficient power as well.

The computer sales will be headed for a major slowdown soon in northamerica, unless developers can help out the pc industry by uniting and bloating all their software or intel and amd start making degradable organic processors that die out every 3 or 4 years of heavy use.

[skoreanime]

PC gaming will always favor GPU power over CPU. AMDs realized that and that's the main reason why they bought out ATI. Intel knows that and have dipped their hand back into the GPU race. Nvidia knows it's king and holds a playing card with Intel to keep them on their toes.

It's not that the world doesn't have skilled programmers. It's just that complicated. And when I was in Java at university, my prof didn't teach us the "traditional way" as you so eloquently put. He urged us to code in different ways. He urged us to break away from the textbook style and do it our own way. So you're wrong there.

And there will come a time where just adding on more cores will be useless. It happened with clock speed and it will happen with cores.

Why do people always think more = better?... You'd think humanity would have realized that's not the case by now...

[tuanming]

Time will tell whether "more cores" would be useless or not Comparing cores to cpu clock speed is not a good comparison... Of course GPU is the main horse power in pc gaming... Currently gpus can't harness enough power to run Crysis at a stable 60 fps or higher, hence there will be multi-core on a gpu chip Somethink like Intel's Larrabee or Amd fusion...

[PCXL-Fan]

Originally Posted by tuanming

Time will tell whether "more cores" would be useless or not Comparing cores to cpu clock speed is not a good comparison... Of course GPU is the main horse power in pc gaming... Currently gpus can't harness enough power to run Crysis at a stable 60 fps or higher, hence there will be multi-core on a gpu chip Somethink like Intel's Larrabee or Amd fusion...

Really what exactly do the e8000 or e9000 series offer over the e2000 to 85% of the regular users who don't play games or 3d rendering etc?

Whether its faster clocks, more cores, more cache, improved instruction sets, more efficient pipelines computers are losing their need to improve. More and more the hardware manufacturers will be grasping at straws trying to validate the need for more proccessing power.

Videogames are moving farther and farther away from PCs and more towards hybrid consoles with web browsing, hdds and movie playback abilities.

[skoreanime]

/slaps head

Egads man, this is like when you thought the R600 was Gods second son. And we all know how that went.

HD video playback on PC now relies quite a bit on the GPU. Do we need 8 cores just to run a movie? Play a song? Look at pictures? Chat with friends?

Gaming, maybe. Highly unlikely though for the foreseeable future.

For professional works like rendering and encoding? Possibly. But I'm 100% sure some other aspect of the computer will be hindering the magical 8 core CPU before it's fully used, like say...the hard drive?

P.S.
Crysis is a bloated piece of coding who's developers are too lazy to optimize it's coding and left it to ATI and Nvidia to make drivers work decently with theirs.

[cottonvibes]

future games will actually be more CPU dependant.

why? well because the new trend in videogames is Physics and particles.
do you guys remember the physics cards that were released a couple years ago?
well all the physics now can be done with multi-cored CPUs.
and since we're dealing with many independant particles, alot of stuff can be done in parallel, and thus can done using multiple cored CPUs.

for example, explosions with "live" dust and particles flying all over the place.
Traditionally, explosions were done using a pre-rendered animation.
But now they can be done in real-time with the real dirt & particles in the game.

also the complex physics of water particles and fluid can be done on the extra cores.
so unless you like playing "flat" games, you'll want to get a mult-cored cpu.

[skoreanime]

Don't bet on that. I doubt Nvidia just going to take that lying down. There's reason why they bought Ageia.

[tuanming]

Originally Posted by PCXL-FAN

Really what exactly do the e8000 or e9000 series offer over the e2000 to 85% of the regular users who don't play games or 3d rendering etc?

Whether its faster clocks, more cores, more cache, improved instruction sets, more efficient pipelines computers are losing their need to improve. More and more the hardware manufacturers will be grasping at straws trying to validate the need for more proccessing power.

Videogames are moving farther and farther away from PCs and more towards hybrid consoles with web browsing, hdds and movie playback abilities.

Good point. Well this part of my comment might not be on topic, but whatever. The truth of matter is that human are addicted to speed and that could be anything that involve being fast or faster.

The arts of perfecting speed closer to Quantum computing. Imagine real-time translating Japanese to english while talking online, that's just one example. This is the direction where Intel want to be and other too, including us.

[cottonvibes]

Originally Posted by skoreanime

Don't bet on that. I doubt Nvidia just going to take that lying down. There's reason why they bought Ageia.

it will be much better for the coders to actually use the CPU instead of the graphics card to do Physics.

if the coders goto the graphic's card for physics, then they will need to learn nVidia's API and also ATI's API, or their game will only work for one brand...
unless DirectX or something somehow utilizes a standard physics library for both cards...

if they do it on the CPU, they just need standard x86 or x86-64 programming.

[skoreanime]

True. But Nvidia has always been quite nifty with their ideas. In most likely hood, they'll come out with something renovating and will have AMD and Intel groveling at their feet for what they have.

[runawayprisoner]

Note: multi-core physics still... quite frankly, SUCKS.
Example: PS3 Cell BE.

So what does that mean...?




...nothing. Just that we have something to talk about. New hardware doesn't necessarily mean we will have better games, or better performance, until we can actually code. No offense, but multi-core or multi-threaded computing still sucks so much up until now thanks to coders' inexperience (for the most part. Not all coders suck, though, but most of them kind of do now). Dual-core support is barely implemented.

My conclusion: hardware is just "improving" faster than we can actually use them. And when we do, we just find out that... it's just the same thing manufactured to be a bit better for one aspect or another. I learned my lesson with Intel Atom.

[Phil]

Yes PCXL. Nehalem has been on the back develepment burner scice 2003.

And Physics will still be a GPU aerea. why? video caed companies are in the business to make MONEY, not help out developers.

[skid]

Originally Posted by tuanming

Seems like we need more "skilled" programmers/developers. I read an article or something like that and they said programmers and developers are all taught in a traditional fashion/way. And the result? Hardware are outpacing softwares...

The article that you read was not exactly right. I was taught in university, 10+ years ago, how to code multi-threaded, parallel processing apps.

The thing with parallel processing is, the developer needs to think or find parts of the app that get repeated over and over without much dependent data between the threads. Examples: brute force password finders, folding, graphics rendering. The number of real world, parallel processing apps is limited which is why we are not seeing the performance benefits that we had with the clock speed race.

Originally Posted by Thanakil

it's trying to sync everything.
You lose power (and it takes a lot of time to code) by trying to make sure everything is working like it should. It's easy for things to go wrong with 2-cores, it's even easier (and harder to make goes right) to go wrong with 4-cores.
Not all the CPU power goes to the task at hand, since part of it is being used to make sure stuff don't go wrong, so while you get more cores, part of that power is still being held back/used for other stuff.

Yup, yup. This is much closer to the mark.

[mudlord]

Exactly, which tuanming, for the time being, makes 8 core CPUs useless.

Curently program like video encoding, and other application alike and sooner or later pc games.

They must be pretty badly optimized to require 8 cores....