Whats the scoop on dual core?

[HybridSquirrel]

I just purchased an opteron 148 a few months back, very happy with it and love it. but ive read around and heard about dual cores moving out to be replaced with quad cores?? is this true i was looking at some hardcore upgrades this summer, like an opty 170 and 7800 when they drop a little bit more but when i heard this it kinda broke my heart am i that behind on technology? lol

 

[Furen]

Huh? There wont be any quad-cores until Q4 2006 at the earliest (If either AMD or Intel rush their products in order to be the first one with a quad-core). These will end up being Xeons or LGA1207 Opterons so you shouldn't worry about it.

 

[BrownTown]

Yeah, Clovertown is supposed to come out for Intel in Q4 06, dunno about AMD, but im sure they will have to wait till they know they can get good quality 65nm silicon. Whenever they do come out they will be server chips, and probably support FBDIMMs as well as other stuff that is good for severs, but not good for other stuff like games. Also, 4 cores will of course cost an arm and a leg when they come out and few non-server applications will benefit. Dunno when the first quad core desktop chip comes out, but it may very well be at 45nm. Either way, for now its worthless.

 

[BrownTown]

meh, i was just thinking about 4 cores being worthless, but i was wonder what else you could do with some of that die room. Andways, you can just throw out 1 core and put in 128meg of embedded DRAM acting as an L3 cache. That close to the cores you could run it at an insane speed since you don't have to worry about driving the signal 2 inches across the mobo and threw the DIMM, but now it is sitting just millimeters away from the cores. That would be able to get rid of alot of the currennt huge gap between memmory and CPU speeds, and would probably give you alot mroe benefit then another core, especially on stuff which isn't very SMP aware (which is pretty much everything these days.)

 

[Furen]

I dont think AMD will be too eager to add more stuff to its chips. It's been trying to lower the die sizes and adding a second core pretty much unmade the gains of the 90nm shrink. I'd expect perhaps more L2 but nothing too fancy.

 

[RussianSensation]

I wouldn't worry about quad-cores. Even if they did come out, it'll be 1.5-2 years or so before games start to truly utilize dual-cores, nevermind quad cores. HT has been available for 3 years now and not 1 single developer provided any significant boost in games for it. Dual cores have been up for 6 months or more and Quake 4 is the only game that benefits from them. Quad cores will come overpriced to begin with and provide almost no benefit. We have now entered the graphics dependent age where an A64 3000+ and R580 will beat A64 6000+ and 7800GT at basically any modern game.

 

[darkdemyze]

If you're thinking about getting dual-core now, you might as well just get it. Dual-core hasn't been out that long and people are already talking about holding off untill quad? Just goes to show it's meaningless to wait cause as soon as quad core comes out, there will be something else on the horizon that will look better. So are you just going to wait untill it's not possible to get any better before you finally upgrade?

Again not to remention, but I will anyway, the fact that dual core is just starting to catch on..who knows how long it will be before quad-core even means anything?