Haswell-E 8 cores finally 2H 2014

[EXCLUSIVE] Intel 2014 Haswell-E to pack 8 cores, DDR4, X99 PCH and more - VR-Zone

It will be on a different chipset and maybe socket? I have been waiting for this upgates since Nehalem.

But this probably means intel wont bring out 8 core mobile chips for a few years after that. Maybe mainstream 8 core chips in 2016 and mobile in 2018?

 

They've been testing 8-core CPU's for a couple years now, with the rumored introduction of a 3980X this year, which was replaced with the 3970X. I'm sure there will be an 8-core CPU late next year, perhaps Q3 2014.

 

Yeh, but this is the first semi official looking road map i've seen. I hope one of the 8 core chips will be in the $500 range. It would really me off if they keep it to the $1000 flagship.

Looking at it from another angle. With cloud rendering services becoming more common, the days of needing your own render machine might be over. If they released it this year i would have bought it. But late 2014?.........All you need a decent quadcore laptop to do low res test renders then offload the finals to render farms over the cloud.

 

I'd actually expect 6 and 8-cores to become mainstream in 2014, with AMD pushing that market pretty heavily.

 

ah yeah amd, the only thing that really counts on more cores for amd is opteron, which is way past 8 cores for quite sometime

 

Yeh. Xeon and opterons have had 6+ cores for a couple generations now. But Intel seems very reluctant to let it filter down. Haswell - E is enthusiast class, so to protect that segment they will need to restrict 6-8 cores for atleast 1 or 2 generations.

Sad, since by then i think the PC martket will become even less dependent on cores.

 

If AMD 8 core were to actually run competitively with current Intel offerings this may be the case. At the moment though they do not so there is not too much to worry about here. The 6-8 core Intel CPUs will be enthusiast only for quite some time as there is just no need and with present software there are diminishing returns for just adding more cores compared to base clock over the quads...............

 

I want to see a hexacore mobile processor. Would be nice... I'm sure we will soon enough. I predict that one day desktops will become obsolete (for personal use) as mobile computing technologies accel beyond anything we could imagine today.

 

What about games, can they not profit exponentially from more cores? I know that the Total War series and the Witcher 2 are extremely cpu intensive

 

nope. aside the extremely hard coding on those cases, TW as a example uses 4 cores, 1 at 100%, 2 at 70-50% and it goes down as the core number goes up. Thats one of the reasons that people dont recommend amd cpus for tw games, single threaded performance is just abysmal

 

With the new consoles from MS and Sony using 8 cores (even though they are AMD variant), I think then we will see the push for 8 cores standard, starting of course from the top end and down. If consoles are going to be developed on PC architecture then the supported hardware needs to come with it. The most exciting part is due to consoles being based on PC architecture, we should see some pretty big jumps in PC gaming performance when it comes to pumping up the resolutions and details settings.

 

Designing programs for multiple cores becomes very difficult as you increase the number of cores. That is one of the reason the Core 2 Quad products did not do so well. Average customers were done in by the FOUR CORES!!! marketing and expected to see a huge performance bump. Unfortunately for them, XP, Vista, games and other software was written for Core 2 Duo that had been around for a while. People saw no performance bump and were disappointed. The Quad was then converted to Core i, the architecture changed and this gave software developers time to design their programs for up to four cores. I think we will see something similar with the 6 and 8 core laptops that, if they do become mainstream, would require a year or two before software makes full use of them.

We currently use the 3960X to do some massively parallel computing and (don't tell me boss) the games that I occasionally (very very occasionally) play on that machine don't do much better than when we are playing at my friend's place who has a 3820. Same GPU. On the other hand, our software that we specifically wrote for 12 threads is miles apart on his desktop vs the 3960X.

 

Do you think much of your parallel computing can be offloaded to cloud servers in the next 5 years? I think that is where things are going in the professional market that traditionally required all that processing power.

For gamers, of course eventually games will be coded for multicores. But when that time comes cloud gaming will also be ramping up. So when these affordable 8+ core CPUs eventually come to market there will be even less need for them. And im sure intel is keenly aware of that. That is why they are concentrating on the xeons which will be the basis of all these cloud services.

 

You still need local machine for debuggibg before sending it off, at least untill cloud is cheaper than electricity and hardwate cost.

 

The kill joy of the C2Q was the fact they were two C2D's on the same CPU. Because they were not NUMA enabled they choked on the scheduler to the point of at least 10% performance hit per clock of non affinity set single threads. Since not everything is optimized this also ate into optimized threaded apps. With windows 8 and the new scheduler that was fixed when they addressed the non NUMA AMD Bull Dozers.

The C2Q faced another issue as well, massive heat. Without a great cooling system you could easily end up with a CPU that throttled itself constantly. Most systems just could not cool these off properly..............