What can six cores do?

[Rob Williams]

Intel has the answer:



Ironically, that image is the 1,337th attachment uploaded to the forum!

 

[TheCrimsonStar]

Lol @ the post #.

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

You know, I think this ad really works. I can`t believe I`ve made do with these measly 4 cores all this time ....

 

[Rob Williams]

Intel has the best marketing, I swear. I love this one. It's cute.

 

[Doomsday]

Hehe, very nice!

 

[marfig]

Do you guys remember Intel's Blue Men Group commercials back in the 00s? I loved those commercials!
Been a fan of the group ever since.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1K0_JWwi0k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D0m2_7qNzU

And here's something epic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=So5eEjwjLLM

 

[Kougar]

I loved most of those BMG commercials! They ended around the time the Athlon64 showed up and began crashing Intel's party, which was probably a good thing...

I saw one of their performances in person.. Blue Man Group is one of those groups best to go see live!

 

[Kayden]

LOL, that was good but still not going to jump on six core, especially when I think 8 core is around the corner next spring.

 

[Greg King]

It's shit like this Intel...

I am very aware of my computing needs. I do the same things on my machine daily. It's unfortunate that my desires have no idea whats going on because I want one of their six core procs very badly.

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

Any idea where this will stop? I know super-computers have hundreds of cores. I wonder where it will end. Maybe it won't.

 

[Rob Williams]

Any idea where this will stop? I know super-computers have hundreds of cores. I wonder where it will end. Maybe it won't.

It's hard to speculate on this sort of thing. Die-shrinks can happen, but I think there will be a point when the physical die is too large to remain efficient (could be too power-hungry). GPUs get away with having hundreds of cores because they are mostly fixed-function and have nowhere near the capabilities of an actual CPU core.

I think Intel could continue to add in more cores as the die-shrink decreases, but I think what it's doing now is just focusing on overall performance of each core (a lot of people don't -need- a million cores) and possibly adding in extra silicon for specific tasks (instruction sets).

I don't really see 10-cores on the desktop happening for a while, though it's hard to say. We -will- see eight cores next year, and servers already have 10-cores. I know I'd not turn down a 10-core! On the six-core i7-990X it takes about 8 hours for me to transcode a Blu-ray into an archival 1080p video. Almost makes me want to build a Xeon dual-socket server