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.
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.