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MillimeterProducts: Intel
Dec 1, 2006 4:15 PM, By Dan Ochiva
Four can do more
Early in 2005, the computing press heralded the ad- vent of a new era of desktop processing as AMD and Intel delivered the first dual-core CPUs.
Now, just a little more than a year later, Intel delivers its first quad-core “Kentsfield” CPUs, with up to a claimed 70 percent performance increase over today's top dual-core chips. Intel's server-centric quad-core Xeon 5300 processor, also new, is said to be about 50 percent faster than the current top Xeon 5100 CPU, which itself came to market just this year, along with Intel's Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme chips. As the quad-core Xeon chips came to market last month, HP was already debuting implementations with its xw8400 workstation and its ProLiant servers and BladeSystem server blades. Dell also took advantage, debuting quad-core-based PowerEdge servers and Dell Precision 690 and 490 workstations, with both platforms offering significant speed jumps and higher performance per watt. Heavily multi-threaded apps such as Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya scale dramatically with those added processor cores — up to 54 percent better, Dell says. And side-by-side tests of Autodesk Toxik on three of HP's workstations showed the quad-core xw8400 leaving two highly competent HP siblings in the dust when it came to realtime execution. (For more on the HP and Autodesk implementations, see blog.digitalcontentproducer.com/briefingroom/category/podcasts.) www.intel.com
