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Intel's Core 2 "Quadro" on the horizon
Just when we were getting excited about the Core 2 Duo chips that have become standard in everything from the 24-inch iMac to new Dell laptops, we've now got quad-core fever. Yes, Intel already has the shown them off before, but Tom's Hardware has a very thorough investigation into the nature of these four-headed beasts -- what Tom's is dubbing the Core 2 Quadro. (Of course if this really is the name, Intel may have to chat with NVIDIA first, as it already uses the name Quadro in a set of graphics cards.) So how'd it turn out? Not surprisingly, video editing and rendering are everyday tasks that took advantage of all four cores: "Test results with the software packages Main Concept with H.264 encoding and the WMV-HD conversion make this very clear. We noticed performance jumps of up to 80% when compared to the Core 2 Duo at the same clock speed (2.66 GHz). A Core 2 Quadro at 2.66 GHz and higher is the answer for HD video (editing and rendering) at full HD resolution (1920x1080)." However, Tom's also noted also that the Core 2 Quadro requires 167 W of power in idle mode, which is the same amount that a Core 2 Extreme demands at full capacity, and attributes this to an "incomplete implementation of Intel's SpeedStep technology at this stage." That said, maybe once Intel reaches 32 cores (as it's said previously would be possible), the new chip name will be Core 2^5 Insanely Awesome.[Thanks, Mack S.]
Intel goes multi-core crazy for "Keifer" server line
We've been seeing the multi-core trend oncoming for a while now, but it seems Intel isn't just kidding around with the idea. The word on the street is that they have plans for a 32 core chip line named "Keifer" in the next few years to bust on those server tasks, which will no doubt be as boring and onerous as the processes of today. The good news is that while those chips will be fairly low on GHz -- about one third of the fastest Xeon CPU currently available -- but they'll manage 15x the performance with all those cores working in parallel, running a total of 128 threads. Based on a 32nm process, each Keifer should have eight processing nodes holding four cores, with a total of 24MB of cache between them. It appears Intel is most worried about keeping up with the multi-core efforts of Sun's Ultra Sparc chips, with little fear for AMD's Opteron roadmap, but with these Keifer chips being due around 2010, we're wondering how long it'll take for all this crazy multi-core action to trickle down into laptop chips for 32x (or 15x, as it were) the portable fun. The biggest hurdle of all, however, could be a consumer Microsoft OS that can fully help software take advantage of multiple cores, a task which Vista isn't quite up to.
