“Intel is expected to announce the ‘Dunnington’ processor later this month, the first six-core processor and last of its Penryn-class chips,” Brooke Crothers reports for CNET.
“Intel on September 15 is expected to roll out the Intel Xeon 7400 series Dunnington processor targeted at the server market, the final member of the “Penryn” family of processors, according to sources at server vendors. Penryn will be followed by the Nehalem microarchitecture, due to appear initially as the Core i7 processor in the fourth quarter,” Crothers reports.
“The Xeon 7400 boasts significantly better performance due to its large 16MB cache memory and half a dozen cores,” Crothers reports.
More in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “M.” for the heads up.]
Yikes! That’s speed baby.
mmmmmMmmm…. Mac Pro please
How about allowing the market to full use of the current chip technology before announcing new ones?
A lot of people have been scalped by unscrupulous box assemblers under the pretext that a bigger processor equals a faster computer.
to make full use!
I would have to agree with Crabapple. I have the first 8-core Mac Pro and there isn’t much optimized for it. So I have a supercomputer that does the work the same as a mac mini. Software please!!!!
?? 6-core ? ? ?
Oh. “Monolithic”. They make an 8-core monolithic chip then disable two of the cores, only having to throw away those few with more than two bad cores. An easy way to salvage a whole lot of slightly flawed chips, that.
And, did they say “shared cache”? Some processes use a great deal of cache, compared to others. With shared cache, each core has more available without having to give each way more than it will typically use.
Headed for the Xserve?
@MacOSXguy
It’s coming. That’s what Grand Central in Snow Leopard is about.
….Software please!!!!
Snow leopard will came to the rescue!!!!
Throw that in the Mac mini. Or at least the next MBP. If not, they gotta put the 4-core in the MBP. And the mini. I like the mini. Heck, put the 4-core in everything. Prepare the market for the multiple-threads-optimized Snow Leopard. Prepare the fields now.
The problem is this…
…multi-core processors are worse than having multi separate processors in the same box. Why?
With multi-processors, whatever you have running on the other processors (threads) has it’s own separate bus and memory controller. Thus it’s able to access the hard drives, video card etc without using a SHARED bus like with multi-core processors.
With a multi-processor machine a program can delegate a portion of the work to another core, knowing it will exit to the hard drive, video card etc without a bottleneck of a shared bus like in multi-core processors.
With the PowerMac Dual G5, there was a 1Ghz bus per processor, for a combined 2Ghz of Bus, thus Apple saying “bandwidth to burn”. Now the Dual Core Intels have only 800 MHz bus shared for two cores! That’s only 400 Mhz PER CORE!! How the fsck is the processors be able to work at maximum capacity if they have a bottle neck at the bus?
Most of the time all multi-cores/processors allows one to do is run MORE applications at the same time. Having the OS on one core gives a slight performance boost for the app running on another core.
There are large operations, take for instance using iVolume for leveling your huge music collection, that will open a MP3 file on each core, to get all the work done faster.
Some 3D rendering and large operation processes can be split amongst other cores, but with a multi-core processor, get bottlenecked at the shared bus. Imagine a six core processor sharing a 1Ghz bus!
Most of the time programs are dependent upon “what happens to A affects B” so “B” can’t be worked on or sent to another core and by the time it does, core A could have had it finished already. So there is no time saving’s or if there is any, it’s so slight that no one can tell the difference.
What multi-cores allows one to do is multi-task, if the need calls for it the cores are there. So it’s nearly impossible to split a single thread amongst other cores.
If Intel gave a 1Ghz bus to each core of a six core processor, we wouldn’t need another general use computer for 20 years! Not to mention computers are already more powerful than most need anyway.
Programmers have been told to bloat their code to drive hardware sales, notably Microsoft with Vista, but that can only go so far.
Most people still use the same word processing, spreadsheet, web, email, photo, combination they did 20 years ago.
Until some new necessity comes along to spur general use, computers are WAY over powered for most people.
Well, that means NOTHING at all until we have the software to catch up and not have whiners complaining about backward compatibility.
We probably won’t see anything good out of this until Snowy Leopard comes out.
Even if individual apps available today can’t take concurrent use of multiple cores as they don’t lend themselves to a multi-threaded operation, like MS Word for an example, a busy user can still take advantage of multiple cores when they are running multiple programs at once. Say a few programs downloading stuff, iTunes handling a podcast, Mail or Entourage checking periodically for new e-mail, Safari sitting there while I read this stuff and downloading some updates from versiontracker.com. When I’m working on web sites, I can easily have more than 12 programs running at once. While a appreciate Snow Leopard’s better system support for multi-threaded future applications, I think the OpenCL which takes better advantage of the GPU is more important for most single threaded applications we will continue to use in the future.
@ Raving MacHead
Good comment. I get your idea.
/@
What a ridiculous name for a processor, though! ‘Dunnington’ sounds like the name of the England’s Midland prison camp for German POWs in WW2.
I’m thinking printing and scanning. My OfficeJet g85 (or whatever model it is) software uses lots of cpu when printing and scanning. The more cores the better.
OGWAB is right.
“These things must be done delicately, or you hurt the spell.”
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@Raving Machead: agreed. Just one question. On what do you base the “code bloat” issue where hardware assemblers told developers to overwrite their code to sell more hardware? Just curious.
Check for an update @Bradley for HP’s software. It can still be a problem but it is better now than it used to be a year or two ago.
Did i miss it or nobody already outlined the fact that might make our system… Snappier ?