X-bit labs

Started by: 22 | Date 10/23/04

Comments: 3 | Last Comment:  10/25/04

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1. Why would you need HT when you have two cores doing the same thing? (and better)

10:1 that WinXP Home can use dual-core. (It'll probably think its HT).

Its not surprising that they won't sell them as clocked like their single core brothers.

I think Smithfield is gonna be as fast as today's Xeon setups...Hmmm, its not worth investing in Smithfield...Maybe the 2nd gen? When Intel have had time to step back and start on something fresh? Something like a Pentium-M variant for the desktop/workstation. :)

Well... why NOT include HT? It helps to keep the pipeline full... the pipeline hasn't gotten any shorter. Sure dual cores will be faster than 1 core, even 1 core with HT... but dual cores with HT will be faster than just 2 cores.

My guess as to why they didn't include it is not all operating systems can support 4 logical processors. I imagine they will probably enable it later on as an awesome new feature to increase sales.

The more important question I would think is why use the Prescott core? It's already pushing the limits of practical cooling solutions. Now they're going to double up on the heat output, and sure the surface area will be larger to dissipate hear through... but that still doesn't change the fact that you'll have up to 200 watts of heat being dissipated.

I've been saying this for a while and I'll say it again... I sure hope Intel has something up their sleeve because it looks pretty bad from this side of the table.

2. Not including HT might be a sign they've shortened the pipeline... there is nothing to say they haven't.

Cancelling HT though would place support of it into "orphan" status however, and that wouldn't be good.

The heat is still a serious issue, and there are no promises from Intel that it's changing that tune. Worse, cooling solution manufacturers are saying there is nothing but upside on the heat output future as well. This is truly not good, as that heat also lowers the lifetime of other components, like the motherboard, which typically used to be a strength of Intel solutions. Intel durability crumbling? And worse, they are silent on all of this, either because they don't know, or being honest with their consumer base isn't in their best interest. That just makes things worse.

Anand's article conflicts with a lot of rumours and that's indicative of it being right, so fyi, but the news looks grim.

And top it off, LGA775 packaging is secure, but 925 support is not. THAT is totally awful, for those who spent serious $$ on 925 boards.

I guess the only counter is that the 105W limit on AMD motherboards doesn't seem very forward looking so they might have to be changed in the future as well. AND top that off that there are reports of bugs, non working boards going to reviewers, all adding up to basic issues with the NF4 products. So its not like the other side is offering a great solution either, if you feel PCI-express is a must have going forward. However, its easier to fix boards with BIOS updates than CPU's that don't function and harm the lifetime of your system.

Not good on all fronts!

$.02

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