its been a core war for a while now. AMD has been working with a processor that has some insane amount of cores, something like 32... Obv, the clock speed isn't that great or it would be on the market, but still. When processor manufacturers can't increase clock speed so easily anymore they turned to cores. Just a way to keep investors and the bottom line happy...temporarily.
Honestly, I am sick of it. They need to bite the bullet and put more R&D into electron cooling so we can get some faster clock speeds.
I will say, the work being put into efficiency with processors is warmly welcomed by myself, and some great work is being done. There just hits a point, and it somewhere around 4 to maybe 8 cores, that everything beyond is useless to 99% of us.
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"Fix it 'til it Breaks."
Jacob - EiC & Director of Technology Mac Pro Quad 2.66 - 4GB RAM 160 GB SATA RAID 1 - 650 GB Storage Quad 19" Widescreen LCDs Accessorized to the Hilt
I would rather have a 6GHz dual core CPU than a 2GHz 6 core one, I just don't do much multi thread stuff. And a while ago the latest thing on the news was intel coming out with a 80 core CPU or something that was going to come out in 2010 or later. I have not seen any of that lately.
987687, yea, thats the thing though, they can't get any faster than current clock speeds b/c of the temperature it generates. They have to find out a way to either transfer data over the chip in a different fashion (ie, laser), or, find a micro cooling solution such as the electron one I mentioned. What this does is have two poles on opposite sides of each wire that travels over the chip and as electrons are charged on one side, they are a attracted to the other, which helps to pull the heat off the processor.
Anyway, there is ALOT of R&D left before we can get to this point, and honestly, I don't see it coming soon. Right now, Intel and others are struggling to put out this false image of innovation. Processors that came out 2 years ago aside from energy efficiency are basically the same as those today. Its a shame...
_________________________
"Fix it 'til it Breaks."
Jacob - EiC & Director of Technology Mac Pro Quad 2.66 - 4GB RAM 160 GB SATA RAID 1 - 650 GB Storage Quad 19" Widescreen LCDs Accessorized to the Hilt
I think we all sort of agree on this subject to an extent. six-core? that is alot of multi-thread, and a guy commented on the actual article, about speeding up the hard drives. I think intel needs to run something steady before they start jumping into new stuff. just my opinion. ;D