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Xeon vs i7?
- Thread starter Macpropro80
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How can anyone justify any price difference when discussing $30 games? How about that the machine made me enough money to buy the mostest awesomest gaming box on the planet?? - every month!! No?
You point is again?
My point was that for gaming purposes a 8 core is a waste, this is the point u had a go at me for. If you mostly game, get a 2 core
8 core is great for heavy grunt work, if you make money out of video/music get a 8 core.
You income is irrelevant, my MBA makes me heaps each month... who cares! ..... why would you want to buy the mostest awesomest gaming box on the planet when you have your almighty 8 core??? could it be that its lacking in gaming....????
Depends on the specific parts in question.
If you compare Core i7's with the W35xx, clock per clock being equal, only ECC is added to the W35xx parts. But if you're comparing the bottom 2 Core i7's with the W3570, then Yes, the QPI speed is different. As well as an unlocked multiplier to make it easier to OC the sucker.
Yeah, I think you'e basically right. But just to be clear I wasn't really having a go at you. I was while writing the 1st 1/2 of the message till I saw the word "game". I forgot to reshape the message till I was reminded again by someone - (after posting).
I wanted to say that there is a huge difference between 8-care and 2 or 4 core systems as a blanket generality and was using your post as a jumping in point. As i read here in the past several days (since the new releases) I'm reading a lot of people who are missing this very accepted bit of fact. Sorry if it sounded like I was singling you out on it. Not intentional bro!
Depends on the specific parts in question.
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As well as an unlocked multiplier to make it easier to OC the sucker.
Oh, Sweet!
Thanks!
Yeah, I think you'e basically right. But just to be clear I wasn't really having a go at you. I was while writing the 1st 1/2 of the message till I saw the word "game". I forgot to reshape the message till I was reminded again by someone - (after posting).
Sorry if it sounded like I was singling you out on it. Not intentional bro!
Thanks!
Hey No Probs
We agree on the same points.
QFT.
/Thread
It's not like they're "marketing" it, it just happens to be a rather underwhelming mobo. Apple dropped the ball on the single cpu Mac Pro.
I hope nobody doubts that the number of cores improves performance in heavily multithreaded processes. However, what's at issue here is the belief that the Nehalem Xeon's are better performing chips than their desktop counterparts.
I was one of the dudes at AMD that designed Opteron/Athlon 64. From the start, it was designed so as to permit multiple cores - the "core" as a separate unit from the "northbridge" (which provides the hypertransport links, equivalent to QPI). We then had different variations with multiple numbers of links, multiple cores, etc. In theory we could have just mucked about with the I/O's and northbridge and left the core the same.
When we taped out a new chip with more (or fewer) hypertransport links, we always changed the core, too. These changes were not typically major - we'd fix things like bad timing paths (to allow a better clock speed distribution), minor bug fixes, sometimes we'd tweak an architectural feature, or improve an electromigration or IR problem for improved reliability or speed.
So, almost certainly, something changed in the core. And, almost certainly, it is nothing too important in terms of performance. (One other thing - I'm pretty sure we never disabled links to sell higher end chips as lower end chips. The links do take up a fair amount of die space and complicate packaging.)
Thank you for your very interesting reply. Really good to hear from someone who really knows their stuff.
Working on that first Opteron was a lot of fun - making up x86-64 as we went along, thinking about power consumption for the first time, and grappling with physics we hadn't seen before.
Sadly, after 9+ years at AMD, I left and am now a lawyer. :-(
I just wish things hadn't gone so horribly wrong at AMD - we were way ahead of Intel for quite awhile, but squandered the whole thing.
Sadly, after 9+ years at AMD, I left and am now a lawyer. :-(
I just wish things hadn't gone so horribly wrong at AMD - we were way ahead of Intel for quite awhile, but squandered the whole thing.
They are marketing it as an 8GB limit. It should support the 4GB DIMMs that are available on the 8 core and it will likely support the upcomming 8GB DIMMs.
My gaming pc is from the Pentium 4 (Pre HT) era, But its no longer for gaming, its now my Ubuntu box.
Im Sorry I asked this question, This became a gamer vs mac user attack-fest. Plz close the thread!
Everyone here keeps saying that the 55xx series has a significant advantage over the i7 and 35xx series. Again, where is the proof in the pudding, as far as I can tell they are the same aside from one supporting multiple GPU's while the other cannot.
The extreme i7 also supports the high speed QPI which has been shown not to offer that much of an improvement, this all seems like snake oil to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehalem_(microarchitecture)
The extreme i7 also supports the high speed QPI which has been shown not to offer that much of an improvement, this all seems like snake oil to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehalem_(microarchitecture)
Did you think that it would be anything else?
Sorry to see that it did degenerate; there are non-gaming reasons to talk about Bloomfield, sure, but it is apparent that no one here touting its benefits gets them.
I choose Xeon
I just ordered the new Mac Pro five minutes ago. I'm a gamer on the side and like to play games like Crysis, Far Cry 2, and FEAR 2. Though I think having a mac has more benefits then running a pimped out gaming computer. I like having my cake and eating too.
I just ordered the new Mac Pro five minutes ago. I'm a gamer on the side and like to play games like Crysis, Far Cry 2, and FEAR 2. Though I think having a mac has more benefits then running a pimped out gaming computer. I like having my cake and eating too.
You should write a few short stories around this topic. I know of others besides myself who just love to read 20 to 30 pages of tech history and the angst of dealing with monsters outside of our control.
Dave's "The Deathbed Vigil" stuff springs to mind as well as a few articles on something similar - to do with holographic memory development back in the 80's.
I would suggest that you do not start a thread in the future bashing PC users within a valid question. You even mentioned gamers.
* PC users: also known as suckers or lacking knowledge
** They also told me mac sucks, instantly making everything they told me untrue.
Come on Fair go..... I use both so that got me biting.
I believe we had a valid discussion here. The Mac Pro using Xeons is a superior beast for intensive CPU grunt work, as long as that is what you want to use it for. The i7 is a better solution if you just want a stock standard desktop/gaming.
Tesselator's comparrison where really useful.
No on is attacking mac users here. We are all mac users.
I don't see why this has anything to do with Mac vs PC at all. Both sorts of systems can use virtually identical hardware. Sure, Apple released Nehalem Xeon systems before anyone else. But, it won't be long before you can buy a similar system from just about every system manufacturer. Even more, you'll soon be able to build a faster system yourself when DP motherboards get released and we can properly overclock the things. What's more, once we get some benchmarks from the people that bought quad core 2009 Mac Pros everyone will see that a similary configured i7 system performs the same. Why is that? Because the hardware is pretty much the same. The question is "Are Xeons better performing chips than their desktop counterparts at the same frequency?" The answer is simply 'NO'!
And that was perhaps the dumbest thing I've ever read. If somebody said to you "Obama is the current President of the US" and then followed that statement by saying "Mac sucks!", does that mean it's untrue that Obama is the current President of the US?
Go look the Floating point number for the Xeon 3520 vs a similar i7.
Not the same at all. So there is some change between the two.
Core i7 = GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 26 Stepping 4
3500 Series = GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 26 Stepping 5
5500 Series = GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 26 Stepping 5 (same as 3500)
i7 920 is toast
Yeah, looks like the Xeon 3500 is eating i7 desktop chips for lunch. So much for the "they are the same chip repackaged" idea. Sounds like a 2.9gHz Quad core with a 4870 would be a sweet gaming rig.
Yeah, looks like the Xeon 3500 is eating i7 desktop chips for lunch. So much for the "they are the same chip repackaged" idea. Sounds like a 2.9gHz Quad core with a 4870 would be a sweet gaming rig.
No information is available yet from Intel on the 5500/3500 parts.
The current Core i7 series is C0 stepping, and a D0 is due out soon as I understand it. If I had to guess, the Xeon parts are D0 already. But I would like to see the part information. Intel's processor finder page is quite handy.
Isn't D0 just a change on labelling on the processor?No information is available yet from Intel on the 5500/3500 parts.
The current Core i7 series is C0 stepping, and a D0 is due out soon as I understand it. If I had to guess, the Xeon parts are D0 already. But I would like to see the part information. Intel's processor finder page is quite handy.
There's obviously something wrong with that Dell. Nice try, but you should really look a little harder next time. I promise, there's no magic dust in the Xeons. Give it a rest.
http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view/101885
http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view/105385