First Intel Sandy Bridge E CPU Has Only 6 Cores, Enthusiasts Disapprove


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That's because apps like encoding tools are usually almost always multi-core optimized by their developers,

The point I was trying to make with those programs is that they do not need to use special multi-core optimized versions of the encoders e.g. LAME-MT. A quad core processor will run more single-threaded programs concurrently than a dual core processor will. :)

they are not regular apps. :)

What makes an app, a regular app?

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They should really say "Windows doesn't know how to use more cores" because Linux and BSD definitely can, and properly for that matter (as well as OS X).

Thanks for playing troll. Try Again

maybe it is just me but i do not see the need for more then 2 cores

i have a dual and a quad and see no difference at all

this time next year we will have AMD 26 core 256bit cpus lol

Yep, its just you. If all you do is hop on facebook, then NO you wont see a difference.

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As a Enthusiast, I am honestly disappointed. One being that we have six cores out there already, look at the Core i7 970. 6 Core processor, 500 bucks, it's been on the market for awhile and will be discontinued once these come out. Forcing us to move to the new platform. But since there will be Socket 1366 Intel Chipset X79 motherboards, there is NO reason why this should be done. All the benefits, and it costs less.

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Intel does not need to sell a desktop 8 core CPU. The current Quad-Core i5/i7 are already faster than the new AMD Bulldozer. So a 6 core Sandy-Bridge is all Intel need to shine and still be the king of speed.

And unless you run VmWare/VirtualBox on your desktop PC, not so many apps really need 6-8 core. Desktop PC are NOT servers and are not running Oracle or SQL Server database or used as reendering farms. If you do, then get a XEON CPU inside your PC.

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And unless you run VmWare/VirtualBox on your desktop PC, not so many apps really need 6-8 core. Desktop PC are NOT servers and are not running Oracle or SQL Server database or used as reendering farms. If you do, then get a XEON CPU inside your PC.

This is a chicken and the egg problem. There's no mainstream software making use of it because no one has the processors and no one has the processors because theres no mainstream software to use it.

At some point you have to break the cycle and release one of the products to spur the growth of the other. Also I would disagree that there isn't software that can make really good use of these extra processing cores.

1. Video encoding and decoding is multi-core now and has been for years

2. Transcoding songs from FLAC to other formats can all be multi-threaded by converting 1 song per core

3. Browsers like Chrome spawn separate threads for each open tab, these can all be placed on their own core increasing performance. This is incredibly important going forward where the browser becomes an application delivery system where web apps increase in complexity and client side processing duties. You need to think about this like running an application and not running just a web page.

4. Video editing, photo manipulation and audio composing all benefit greatly from multiple processing cores

5. Games, AI, Physics, Netcode, Sound, VoIP, Post-Processing effects. All of these can and are handled on the processor and having multiple cores helps.

And finally maybe the biggest benefit is just being able to run many more demanding tasks at the same time. Lets say your a creative professional and you're coding a website you may have Photoshop open to tweak or create icons, you may have Dreamweaver open to write the app you may have four browsers open to test your sites compatibility. Maybe your site also has some video clips and you want to edit those and make the video fit seamlessly in to your sites design. Now you don't need to close any of these apps you can keep them all open and running without diminished performance.

Make no mistake people currently buy Dual Socket processor systems with 8 and 12 cores. They fly off the shelves in to the homes and work places of creative professionals but these systems use XEON processors and they are extremely expensive when compared to the consumer orientated Core i3/5/7 lines. I'm a creative professional and I use the fastest CPU I can get a hold of with the most cores available to me. I'm also an enthusiast and the fact that Sandy Bridge E is shipping on day one with a six core processor does disappoint me because I've had a six core processor on the older 1366 Socket and I wanted 8 cores, because Intel is not delivering that I won't be upgrading.

You have to look at this from my perspective, I already have a really fast 6 core processor the new Sandy Bridge E will probably offer about a 20% performance boost if I get the 6 core model. Why am I going to pay £500 for the CPU + £350 for a new motherboard just to get 20% more performance? Now if the performance was 50% which is what would have happened had they added two extra cores then I would have upgraded as that 50% would have been worth it.

There really is no need to defend this decision by Intel because even if they offered an 8 core or not it doesn't affect you, they still sell i3, i5 and i7 in Dual, Quad and Hex configurations. Consumers that need less would have that and us that need more would have that too everyone would win.

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If you have ever used Foobar2000 or dBpowerAMP to encode music you will know this is not quite true. The more cores you have, the more copies of Lame.exe or NeroAACEnc.exe you can run simultaneously. Then you have multi-process apps like Google Chrome...

lol wut.... The more cores you have the more copies of an EXE you can have running? Not sure if srs.. or...

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lol wut.... The more cores you have the more copies of an EXE you can have running? Not sure if srs.. or...

I think what he means is dBpowerAMP will launch multiple instances of LAME (1 per core) and dedicate the encoding of one song per instance per core. This speeds up the overall transcoding. If you only have two cores dBpowerAMP only launches two instances of the LAME encoder and would split all the songs between those two instances. Thus more cores = Less time to encode.

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What it comes down to is the fact that some operations just can't be done in parallel.

Example 2*2*2*2 can be split into (2*2) and (2*2) which can be run in parallel, then (result*result) you can't do the same with 2/2/2/2 because each calculation depends on the previous result.

You can optimize for multithreading as much as you want but at some point you just will not be able to use more cores since one core will be waiting on the result of another core. This of course only applies to a single process. If you have multiple processes that are each doing their own, unrelated work you can benefit from multiple cores.

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Okay, so I get the point but the next question to ask is : What is the % of enthusiasts/power users? The answer to this is probably why Intel is quite fine shipping a 6 core CPU for now.

Sandy Bridge is a "for everybody" CPU. Even if the "-E" stand for enthusiasts... With that in mind....

How many people out there go on encoding/recoding video file or extract songs with LAME? How many professional video editor? How many people care that Chrome spawn multiple threads? I could go on and on about the "how many use X software" and the truth would probably be "not that many". It would be nice to have real stats to really see what most people do with their PC. And Intel is there for the people who needs more with the XEON and it's too bad if they cost more, it's the price to pay to be a real power user I guess.

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I thought Windows 7 was designed to be scalable enough to handle up to 64 cores?

The operating system is not the issue - the applications running on the operating system are the issue.

For example, most productivity applications (even the x64 ones, such as Office 2010 applications) are single-core - while the x64 applications commonly multithread, very few of the x32 applications (and don't even get me started on browser add-ons/plug-ins) do so. The same is true of most games - primarily because of legacy single-core P4s running Windows XP.

Sandy Bridge-E is aimed at that niche crowd for whom i7-2600K (the bang-for-buck champ among Intel CPUs today) isn't enough, but for whom a Xeon makes no sense. Basically, it's a niche CPU.

Lastly, from what's been seen out of BD so far, it's *barely* a threat to i3, and isn't one to i5 non-K, let alone i5-K or i7-K.

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Okay, so I get the point but the next question to ask is : What is the % of enthusiasts/power users? The answer to this is probably why Intel is quite fine shipping a 6 core CPU for now.

Sandy Bridge is a "for everybody" CPU. With that in mind....

How many people out there go on encoding/recoding video file or extract songs with LAME? How many professional video editor? How many people care that Chrome spawn multiple threads? I could go on and on about the "how many use X software" and the truth would probably be "not that many". It would be nice to have real stats to really see what most people do with their PC. And Intel is there for the people who needs more with the XEON and it's too bad if they cost more, it's the price to pay to be a real power user I guess.

+1

I willingly admit - for what I do (a mix of games and virtualization) a quad-core (even a Phenom II X4) would be plenty, as long as I have enough RAM and GPU. However, even for bareboards, Sandy Bridge is a better bargain than AM3+ (BD) - even comparing i5-K to Phenom II X4, let alone X6. While AMD CPUs are less expensive, the motherboards are more expensive - worse, for general productivity, let alone gaming, BD, let alone the other AM3+ CPUs are underpowered compared to i5 non-K, let alone i5-K. (i5-K+Z68+8 GB<$400 retail, including tax).

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I've been fine with my Q9550 for awhile but I got dual 6950s now and need better cooling/power so figured I'd upgrade. I am personally disappointed as well that I can't jump to a high performing 8 core yet. I've been using a quad since the Q6600 several years ago but the leap to Sandy Bridge @5GHz should be good enough for now. I'm just tired of my overall performance bottlenecks running 3 monitors on old DDR2 800MHz ram. It probably won't be til 2013-2014 until high performing 8 cores become more affordable/mainstream (though I'd consider one in the future @ $500 if its an 8 core with hyper threading and can overclock to 6-7GHz) so a solid performing SB system should suffice til then.

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