Conroe XE versus Kentsfield...Four cores worth waiting to upgrade for?

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Mako360

Limp Gawd
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Pat Gelsinger demonstrated the Kentsfield quad-core desktop CPU today at IDF, which is a Q1/2007 product most likely (call it six months later than the Conroe's arrival to market).

Kentsfield is essentially two Conroe dual-core CPUs at 65nm linked together, the desktop version of the Clovertown (Xeon) for those who haven't had the time to catch up on the latest info.

It got me to thinking about my own upgrade path for this year and just how important quad-core processors will be over the next three years...or not...with the launch of Vista coming in the Fall. I've read the better articles that are online which benchmarked dual-cpu Opteron and Xeon platforms (2 physical CPUs, four actual cores), and my conclusion is that there's a benefit to going beyond dual core in a very limited way currently. Most apps don't even support any multithreading, and when they do, it's dual-core only. That will obviously change over the next year as Vista becomes adopted by the performance segment, and developers adopt multi-threading as more of a standard.

My question to the board is whether you believe quad-core is worth delaying an upgrade for. It's not clear if Intel's 965 chipset is going to support both Conroe and the later Kentsfield, though I'm hopeful it will being that they're nearly identical in terms of architecture. If that's the case, then it's an easy choice, just upgrade to Conroe/965 later this year, then drop in a Kentsfield CPU sometime in the future if the need arises.

Just trying to avoid yet another Intel platform switch when the new CPU arrives, lol. This 975-not-compatible-with-Conroe debacle is bad enough. ;)
 
I have been having the same thoughts . And as usual my better half came up with the solution.

She said build a conroe sytem for me as my gaming system . Than when the 4core comes out build your desk system for that.

As is usually the case I will take her advice.
 
Personally, I don't see 965 having the bandwidth to support quad core. As far as I know there is only 1 1333mhz FSB which I think would cause a large bottleneck. If that's the case I don't see them releasing it on a 965 platform. So I would just go with conroe, which should last for awhile and plan on quad core being your next upgrade in a couple years.
 
I'll get a quad-core when it is four cores on one die, not two cores on two...
 
Poncho said:
Personally, I don't see 965 having the bandwidth to support quad core. As far as I know there is only 1 1333mhz FSB which I think would cause a large bottleneck. If that's the case I don't see them releasing it on a 965 platform. So I would just go with conroe, which should last for awhile and plan on quad core being your next upgrade in a couple years.
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Your kidding me right . Intel may go with dual fsb for kents. and how much are M/B and in 2 years intel will have a new memory controller 3D gates leakage problem is solved and 45n tech. The only waiting I am doing for intel anymore is the next 2-4 months after that its buy whats available. I will still wait on the R600(R620) but I can install a X1900xtx with Xfire on an intel M/B on my wife's gamer. Dam MS get Vista out the door PLEASE!
 
$BangforThe$ said:
Your kidding me right . Intel may go with dual fsb for kents. and how much are M/B and in 2 years intel will have a new memory controller 3D gates leakage problem is solved and 45n tech. The only waiting I am doing for intel anymore is the next 2-4 months after that its buy whats available. I will still wait on the R600(R620) but I can install a X1900xtx with Xfire on an intel M/B on my wife's gamer. Dam MS get Vista out the door PLEASE!
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you're telling an Intel employee about Intel's plans? I did that before and felt like an idiot :D I don't think that they will necessarly use dual independant FSBs for the Kentsfield. That would require a lot of backward compatiblity and somehow a way of dissabling the other FSB. Also, their 45nm process does not seem as exciting as they made it seem. 30% less power and 20% increase in switching speed. Does not sound like leakage fixed.
 
Duke3d87 said:
you're telling an Intel employee about Intel's plans? I did that before and felt like an idiot :D I don't think that they will necessarly use dual independant FSBs for the Kentsfield. That would require a lot of backward compatiblity and somehow a way of dissabling the other FSB. Also, their 45nm process does not seem as exciting as they made it seem. 30% less power and 20% increase in switching speed. Does not sound like leakage fixed.
Click to expand...

Well for an Intel employee to say wait a couple of years for quads does't sound good to me.
30% less power than Conroe in less than 2 years sounds pretty fricken good to me.

20% switching speed on top of a new memory controller sounds very impressive to me.

What exactly will these CPU'S be running at in GHz by than on 45n tech . I to use to work for a large corp and was highly regaurded but I didn't get told everthing.

Lets just say a conroe in 2 years running @ 4ghz. on 45n tech using 30% less power and a 20% increase in switching performance and a new memory controller. That sounds really freaken sweet to me. < than 2 years
 
$BangforThe$ said:
Well for an Intel employee to say wait a couple of years for quads does't sound good to me.

BLAH BLAH BLAH

< than 2 years
Click to expand...


Where did I say that quad core was 2 years out? What I said was, and this was purely speculation, that quad core will probably not be that impressive on it's initial run if put out on 965, which a launch date of Q1 '07 will probably be 965. And with that I would go with Conroe and give that about a year and a half before going to quad core at which time they should have a new chipset designed for it... hopefully with a way to reduce what would seem to be a bottleneck. Maybe it'll come out kicking ass..... or maybe it won't. But one thing is for sure, somebody upgrading to Conroe would not be dissapointed even if quad core comes out a few months after.
 
Poncho said:
Personally, I don't see 965 having the bandwidth to support quad core. As far as I know there is only 1 1333mhz FSB which I think would cause a large bottleneck. If that's the case I don't see them releasing it on a 965 platform. So I would just go with conroe, which should last for awhile and plan on quad core being your next upgrade in a couple years.
Click to expand...

Were did I say you said quads weren't coming out for a couple of years. I said wait a couple of years didn't I

Your an intel employee post a chipset roadmap for Intel . I am sure you can find one at the inquirer.
 
Duke3d87 said:
Also, their 45nm process does not seem as exciting as they made it seem. 30% less power and 20% increase in switching speed. Does not sound like leakage fixed.
Click to expand...

That's actually much better than what I'd imagine and I'd go out on a limb and say it's about as good as it will get. I did a little bit of work on plasma deposition(as it was called then) some years back. When you get down to this level, there are just too many uncertainties. It's not an easy task for one company to undertake with a frontier science. If those numbers turn out to be true, they are impressive.
 
Ya I worked with vision add sorters with the 386 back in the early 90's I can't even beginn to imagine the power of those machines now.
 
Bao01 said:
That's actually much better than what I'd imagine and I'd go out on a limb and say it's about as good as it will get. I did a little bit of work on plasma deposition(as it was called then) some years back. When you get down to this level, there are just too many uncertainties. It's not an easy task for one company to undertake with a frontier science. If those numbers turn out to be true, they are impressive.
Click to expand...
according to Intel, they are true and from the 90nm to the 65nm, they had a 30% decrease in power and 20% increase in performance. A complete review of the processor does not feel right w/o some ocing!
 
wait for Core Ocho

if you've seen dodgeball then youll know why thats funny :p
 
conroe is going to be replaced by Penryn on 2007 :)

the market will be bombarded with new processors almost every year. the empire is going for the K I L L
 
Hey Poncho my friends hot little sister needs a cig....

seriously though conroe is gonna smoke,,, I can't wait for it.. can someone please tell me what motherboard CURRENTLY on teh market will be able to run conroes... I'd like to get the asus one that has 2 PCI-16 slots 800ddr and PCI-X but I dont know if I want to shell out $300 for a mobo when it might become obsolete in merely a few months.. I love intel products dont get me wrong... personally I am currently runnin the best 32 bit processor runn with an AGP vga transport bus or whatever its called... so what 975 are most likely to support conroe... tell me my camel smokin friend
 
empoy said:
conroe is going to be replaced by Penryn on 2007 :)

the market will be bombarded with new processors almost every year. the empire is going for the K I L L
Click to expand...
is that why Intel had like 20 dual core projects goign on at the same time?
 
FreedomFGHTR said:
Hey Poncho my friends hot little sister needs a cig....

seriously though conroe is gonna smoke,,, I can't wait for it.. can someone please tell me what motherboard CURRENTLY on teh market will be able to run conroes... I'd like to get the asus one that has 2 PCI-16 slots 800ddr and PCI-X but I dont know if I want to shell out $300 for a mobo when it might become obsolete in merely a few months.. I love intel products dont get me wrong... personally I am currently runnin the best 32 bit processor runn with an AGP vga transport bus or whatever its called... so what 975 are most likely to support conroe... tell me my camel smokin friend
Click to expand...

This is something I stumbled across:

http://vr-zone.com.sg/?i=3220


Looks like I might be waiting on the new revision.
 
When do you think will software designed for regular desktop use will benefit from using four cores? Who needs even two cores for office, internet and multimedia. Games won't be as much cpu limited anymore due to inventions like ageia physics processor and except from "pro apps" I can't really see the benefit of having four cores other than bragging rights. I must also mention it is very difficult to develop truly multi-threaded games, I can quote Tim Sweeney on this if you want.
OK, I am not against SMP or anything I have a quad-core (dual dual-core) system myself but it just seems like the next marketing thing for companies who can't push clockspeed any further to justify buying a new processor in the first place. Would you upgrade from a 3.2GHz northwood for 3.6 Prescott, I wouldn't. I notice how so many people buy dual-core systems to stay at the cutting edge of tech although most of these systems hardly put the second core to any good use. Most of my friends have upgraded their gaming rigs to dual-core processors (I haven't) and they always tell me stupid things like I can listen to music while gaming or I can surf the web while encoding dvd-divx, it just makes me think people don't really understand what dual-core is and under which circumstances (like software that supports smp in the first place) they will benefit from dual-core.
IMO, people switching to dual-core are less prone to suffer from poor multitasking capabilities of Windows (such as slowing down when moving two files from two folders at once, really if you do this one at a time it is much faster for some reason) and due to this they swear by dual-core and think it makes all the difference. Again, software is the bigger issue, not hardware.
Once again, I am not against multi-core, if companies are going to sell us these processors at a small extra cost, I am fine with it, but if they charge too much for a little extra performance for the "average" user and market it as the next big thing and sell these to ignorant people (like my friends) who expect so much out of them, I am not happy about it. How many people benefit from 64-bit as of now, not much, dual-core, not much either... Why? Because software needs to catch up and it has been trailing for the past 5 years imho. Even a pro app such as Maya that I use most often don't make use of the 3 of the 4 cores I use when modelling, it even doesn't take advantage of my sli'd quadro graphics cards. Hardware is nothing without proper software to back it up and so far we haven't got much to show for our dually 64-bit systems. Please don't throw senseless benchmarks at my face, I am talking about the day to day performance increase a dual-core 64-bit system provided you with, for the big money you paid for it.
I would actually like to see people trash my claims with logical claims of their own, I have to renew my faith in multi-processor(core) systems somehow. I guess I was pissed at my stupid gamer friends who (when combined) have the logic of a chipmunk and say 2>1 so I should buy this.

thanks to anyone who read through all of my angry reply, I know I should take my pills more regularly from now on ;)
cheers :)
 
Good post uniwrap, there's nothing anyone can legitimately argue against your comments at this point. Very true.

I will say this though:

1. Vista launches in the Fall, and places an emphasis on multi-threaded support for its apps.

That's a biggie, if there were no Vista this year, I'd be more inclined to say "fk it, dual core is overkill, let alone quad core". But with a massive OS change in the pipe, developers will adopt multi-threaded support sooner rather than later as they update their existing apps to support XP. Makes sense to do dual, quad, etc, now, rather than have to update your app again in a year at more expense.

2. At IDF, Intel is realllllllly pushing multi-threading as a basic part of any app from any developer.

Different from even their dual-core hype build up, this time it's a serious effort, and apparantly based on the results being taken extremely seriously by external parties.

Dual core might have been an experimental fluke a year ago, but now it, and quad core in the future, are a legitmate platform that is a certainty to the industry moving forward. It's just a different mindset, it's "the future" so to speak, and every knows it. When dual core arrived, devs, and consumers for that matter, didn't know if it was just going to be another Intel boondoggle mistake. ;)
 
Thanks mako360, I truly and sincerely hope that these hardware innovations are fully supported by upcoming software therefore I am looking forward for Vista as well. It's funny how most people look at a new OS and say, "it doesn't look that different from the last one." Lets hope Vista is as every bit good as they say or I am going to bend and buy a Mac, games alone don't cut it for me anymore. I expect more from Microsoft this time as last year alone I purchased 5 WinXP Pros and I need an excuse to upgrade them all and get my Open Licence.
 
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