8-Core Intel Xeon 'V8" Sneak Peek - Dual Quads

dayum! i'm looking forward to the article! 8-)

OK this thing is fast, no doubt, but what's going to sepperate this from just building a dually xeon?

Also, with the growing trend of people moving towards laptops as a complete replacement for desktops, do you see multiple CPU sockets as having a permanent place in high-end rigs from here on out; Chances are good laptops won't be going dual socket any time soon :D

Well, this is just a dually Xeon setup. It just happens to be the most cutting edge currently available.

As for laptops becoming more popular, I see that trend continuing for casual users, but there will always be a place for more powerful desktop machines. What do you do with a laptop if the motherboard or screen fails? In most instances, you replace the whole machine. That's a big shortcoming and one of the reasons why I think some users will prefer full-sized rigs.

Follow-up question: Do you think that Intel releasing what seems to be direct competition for the Quad FX (aka Quadfather) might be a sign that the era of multi-core on the desktop is really starting to kick in? Is multiple sockets for high-end a trend you see going forward or is this just a short-term arrangement? Of course your logic would be good to have too, but if you can't share due to info embargoes or something...

I wouldn't call this setup a direct competitor to QuadFX, but Intel is obviously trying to get the point across that if you want a dual-socket Core-microarchitecture powered system, the options are already available. If they come up with an enthusiast class board, with multi-GPU and overclocking support, that doesn't require special memory or Xeon processors, then I'd say they're reacting to Quad-FX. For now though, consider this a show of force.

As for multi-core "arriving" on the desktop, it's still going to be some time before applications catch up and can use all this horsepower. But, multi-taskers or content creators could really benefit.

In the future, do not link to images using a weird script, it prevents people from middle clicking to open the images in new tabs. Thanks!

We'll see what we can do and I deleted all that wonderful html you dropped in there.

I am having a MacPro modified to run Vista. So far the testing suggests no problem with installing Vista and eliminating the Mac OS entirely.

We are still testing it.

Only minor issue so far is that the DVD drive does not have a button on it to open and close the drive. So we added an icon on the screen to do that. (Needed to do this since we are tossing out the Apple keyboard.)

It will be interesting to see if the speed varies from the test bench marks in this article.

Who's we? Care to share your results with us here? We can publish them for you in an article if you like. Contact me directly: davea@hothardware.com

Thanks!

I have a system engineer responsible for all our computer, server and network systems at the company I own.

I told him I wanted to see if we could take the 8 core MacPro and turn it into a native Vista machine and drive the Apple Cinema 30" monitor.

So far so good.

IF this works well, I will ask him to write up the process he went though and his experience since I suspect there will be some people interested in the idea.

Sounds good! Keep us in the look please!

Thanks,
Dave

Hello, yes great stuff ... looking into it for my own company, yet:

couldn't help but gawk at the third test (third picture) for the memory ... it seems the results for this Beast is maybe half of some other AMD platform.

what's up with that?

I mean, would this mean that maybe with 16GB of memory this XeonBeast would have better results thant this other AMD??

Also with many programs being able to manipulate the data directly from RAM, doesn't this mean that the other AMD would actually perform comparable/maybe-better??

When I say AMD I mean the second option for the SiSoft third test, for memory the one in GB/s where the Xeon seems to fall short. It's a bit of a mystery to me ... can someone care to enlight??

many thanks,
a

You're correct in your observations for sure Alberdell. FBDIMM memory at DDR667 speeds are definitely going to fall short, especially when you consider latency settings are currently running around CAS 5 for these modules. FBDIMM DDR800 should be coming soon with lower latencies but currently it is definitely the achilles heel of the platform. However, the processor cores and the larger on-chip caches of Intel Xeons quad-cores help compensate in overall performance a lot.

i have much better memory bandwidth result with my 2*quad 5355, supermicro x7da3 and 8* 2gb kingston ddr2 667. I had replaced intel 5000xvn mainboard with supermicro x7da3 because blackmagic decklink refused to work. In my opinion Supermicro is the best for quad xeon.

here are specs and results:
http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/5479/systemjo5.jpg
http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/2982/161004ie1.jpg
http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/615/152rp7.jpg
http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/5674/430wk5.jpg