Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX6700: The Multi-core Era Begins
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 2, 2006 2:14 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
Before we can really start to embrace greater than dual-core CPUs we'll need to have heavily threaded software, and thankfully it's looking like that software is well in development. Windows Vista and applications that ship for the new OS will be some of the first developed for a largely multi-core user base, not to mention that there are many game titles under development with support for multi-core. These days you almost have to try to avoid a dual core CPU when building or buying a new system, and it wasn't much more than a year ago that we were debating the merits of single vs. dual core. The debate begins anew with the release of Intel's Kentsfield core, although now we're talking about two vs. four cores.
The problem with gaming benchmarks is that they often lag behind the hardware. All of the games we're testing today are at least a few months old, and while it would be nice to have more titles that can take advantage of at least dual core processors, the challenges involved in building a game engine that can truly take advantage of multiple processor cores are difficult to overcome and require a lot of time. We are aware of at least three companies that are working on engines that will benefit from CPUs with more than two cores, however, and hopefully more companies will follow suit in the future. The "dual core revolution" is not yet two years old, and the majority of modern games require more than two years to design and develop. There has been a great focus on improving game graphics over the previous decade or more, but it looks like we may finally be reaching the point where other aspects of gameplay are becoming important, and in order to flesh out those other areas (physics, artificial intelligence, particle systems, number of entities, etc.) multiple processor cores have a lot of potential.
If you're the type of person that likes to participate in projects like Folding@Home, or if you do a lot of video rendering, 3D rendering, or some other task that can be easily parallelized, you might already be running a dual socket configuration with dual core processors. Quad core takes the benefits of such an offering and packages it into a single socket, and in the near future dual sockets will be able to move up to eight cores. The gaming results clearly didn't show any advantage to multi-core processors right now, beyond the moderate speed up a couple games gained with dual cores. However, there are plenty of gaming companies that are working on re-architecting their software in order to take advantage of not just two or four cores, but potentially any number of cores. Will they succeed? We have an upcoming article that will look at one company's work in the very near future, but suffice it to say there's definitely a lot of potential in multi-core platforms.
If you're stuck between choosing a Core 2 Extreme X6800 or QX6700 at $999, we'd obviously opt for the latter. Both give you incredible performance, but one is a bit more future-proof. And, as we said earlier, you can always overclock the QX6700 but you can't add more cores to the X6800. The best CPU buys are still going to be the E6300, E6400 and E6600, which are unfortunately "only" dual core solutions. Despite being only dual core offerings, all three are still some of the fastest performing desktop CPUs money can buy today.
With only a single $999 part, and even taking into account January's $851 Core 2 Quad offering, quad core is not going to be mainstream anytime soon nor are most applications ready for it. It's also worth mentioning that there's no point in waiting to upgrade to the Q6600, after all the difference in price between the $999 QX6700 and the $851 Q6600 isn't that much, especially when you consider that you'd have to wait an additional 2 - 3 months before the Q6600 makes its debut. Now if the street price of the QX6700 ends up being much higher than its 1Ku pricing then the Q6600 may end up being worth waiting for.
Looking towards the future, gaming will be going multi-core partially because of the fact that if you want to get good CPU performance on the next-generation consoles the developer needs to make good use of all available cores (consoles breed efficient programmers). From the descriptions that Remedy and Epic have given us, it looks like dual cores are a clear winner in the next generation of games, and quad core may be what's necessary to get that extra level of smoothness or detail when it comes to terrain or physics simulation. We don't expect dual or quad core to be necessary for gaming anytime in the next 9 months but before 2007 is over expect to see some very enticing titles that make good use of that second core. Four cores will eventually be utilized, but it's tough to say to what degree until the time is upon us. Our expectations put quad core as being a fringe benefit in 2007 but more of a tangible ally in games by the time '08 rolls around.
Workstation users can rejoice however as most workstation apps are very well threaded and because you can now build an extremely powerful workstation using nothing more than desktop parts. You get CPU performance that used to require a very expensive motherboard and registered memory in the same machine you use for everything but work. Obviously the new target for workstations will be eight cores through two sockets, but if you don't quite want that much processing power there's this new category of home workstation PCs that's created by Kentsfield.
And what about AMD? As expected, 2006 has turned out to be Intel's comeback year, and it won't be until the introduction of Barcelona in the middle of 2007 until we really see a performance competitive AMD. Of course AMD's 4x4 has yet to launch, and while it will be a monstrous platform, it will be even more of a niche product than Intel's $999 Kentsfield. While Kentsfield will work in many currently shipping Core 2 motherboards, 4x4 is an entirely new platform using Socket-1207 (not AM2) CPUs. As much as AMD wants 4x4 to succeed, what we're really waiting for is Barcelona.
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Staples - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
I will eventually be buying an E6600 but I was hoping we'd see a price drop when these quad cores came out. Now they have and we see that the cheapest one is over $800, the price of the E6600 will probably not drop for a while because these processors are not in the same market.rqle - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
Price doesnt really interest me as much, the fact that i have a very hard time getting a lot of low end Athlon64 around 2.8ghz, mines seem to max out at around 2.7ghz. Seem like most athlon for some reason like 2.3-2.4 and sometime lower while a whole group at my lan party have no problem push a E6300 past 3.1ghz.Brunnis - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
The article seems to state that Kentsfield is more efficient that Conroe. This conclusion comes from power measurements of complete systems. This is a little misleading, since a large chunk of that power is consumed by the rest of the system. Since the CPU only makes up a part of the power consumption, but accounts for a very large performance increase, the efficiency is bound to increase when looking at system power consumption.The Kentsfield CPU itself shouldn't be any more efficient than Conroe. That said, there isn't anything wrong in looking at system power consumption and drawing the conclusion that the computer is more efficient with the quad core. I just don't think that the article was very clear on this, though.
smilingcrow - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
The power efficiency figures would look different if a lower power PC had been used as a test bed; the use of dual X1900XT cards distorts the figures to a degree. These CPUs are currently only particularly useful for areas where Crossfire setups are not generally relevant.I used the Anandtech data along with my own C2D data from testing low power systems and came up with the following. The extrapolated figures show the efficiency of each CPU as a percentage of that of the QX6700, which is the most efficient in these two tests:
CPU/Anand PC/My PC
3dsmax7
QX6700 – 100/100
Q6600 – 92.3/92.9
X6800 – 74.7/80.7
E6700 – 69.7/75.7
DivX 6.1
QX6700 – 100/100
Q6600 – 98.4/99.01
X6800 – 92.5/99
E6700 – 87.4/94.4
The PC I used for a comparison uses ~60W less at load than Anandtech’s setup which results in:
130W v 189W for the E6700
172W v 230.5W for the QX6700.
System - Asus P5W DH Deluxe, Nvidia 6200TC, 2 x 1GB DDR2-667, Samsung P120 250GB SATA.
The one thing that was missing for me was the power consumption at idle, as I’d imagine that the dual Dice Kentsfield would take a big hit here. Xbitlabs have figures showing idle power consumption, but they are measured with C1E & EIST disabled which makes them a bit pointless in my eyes. Kentsfield gets a spanking in this comparison although it matches an FX-62.
EnzoM3 - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
I can only make assumptions, without any test beds here. Since Quad core is simply two dies of Conroe as this article pointed out, the power consumption of the Quad core should double that of Core Duo. If you use that assumption to compute performance per watt, regardless of what the actual numbers are (as long as Quad uses twice the power of Duo), then Quad actually has lower performance per watt than Duo across the board.Sunrise089 - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
If you could isolate the CPU only, you're certainly correct, and PPW will decrease with each additional core due to diminishing returns from scaling. Fortunatly CPUs are part of an entire PC, so when the choice can be painted as quad-core versus two dual-core machines, then the numbers look much better.ATWindsor - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
Yeah i agree, the more the rest of the system uses, the more "flawed" the numbers will be, lets say, for arguments sake, that a CPU uses 50 watts, and a twice as fast one uses 200 watts. Tut the rest of the system uses 300 watts, then the total system will use 350 watts in the fist case, and the twice as fast one will use 500 watts, so if you take the whole system numbers, the more power-hungry core will seem like it gives more permformanve per watt, but if you only look at the CPUs them self, the picture is diffrent, the less powerhungry CPU has twice the performance per watt.JarredWalton - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
You are right that we could be more clear. You can think in terms of efficiency that we're looking at two dual core systems vs. one quad core if you'd like. If we could isolate just the CPU power draw, we could get real CPU efficiency, but doing so is very difficult.PrinceGaz - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
Some sites have indeed isolated the CPU power draw by modifying mobos so that current draw as well as voltage on certain pins can be measured. It is, as you say, very difficult however and each platform you wish to test needs its own modded mobo.One simpler way to at least get a rough idea of actual power comsumption (which could be easily calibrated to provide more accurate figures), and a quite accurate measure of relative power consumption would be to measure the heat given off rather than the electricity going in.
The most obvious way to do that would seem to be with a modified water-cooling setup where instead of the heat being dissipated by an external radiator into air, it is instead transferred into a *large* insulated tank of water with an accurate digital thermometer monitoring the water temperature. This tank of water is not circulated through the water-cooling system, it is there merely for the heat to be dumped into. You then measure the rate at which the temperature rises which provides a good guide to power consumption. You might start at 20C and could probably run the tests up until the water reaches about 40C without any problems, probably 45C would still result in the CPU being kept within safe temperatures.
With a 10-litre tank, you would have 10Kg of water, and each Kg requires about 4.2KJ of energy to heat up by 1C, so it would take about 42KJ to heat up that tank of water by 1C. 42KJ is equivalent to 42KW for 1 second, or more realistically, 42 watts for 1000 seconds (about sixteen and a half minutes). You can probably see where I'm going here: a processor using about forty watts of power would heat up the tank of water by about 4C per hour. Eighty watts would be 8C per hour, and so on. Although not all the energy used by the processor will be dumped in the water due to heat being lost elsewhere, the vast majority of it will be and it will be consistent between different processor models.
If you want an exact figure for power consumption, or rather heat dissipation, then the system could be calibrated by connecting it to a CPU shaped heater element fed with a measured amount of power. Take measurements of the rate of temperature rise at twenty watt intervals up to say two hundred watts (I suspect the line will be fairly linear above about 40W) and you can now say with a good degree of accuracy how much power a given CPU is actually using.
As I say, that's one way you could do it and one which in theory should work very well.
Furen - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
Wow, that's a insanely round-about way of measuring power draw. You can also measure voltage and current draw at the CPU voltage VRMs. Regardless, CPU power draw truly doesn't matter with this product since it is two of the older products packed into a single package, no new silicon or anything of the sort. What this means is that theoretical efficiency should be the same but in the real world it'll be slightly worse (due to threading inefficiency). That said, measuring power draw for the whole system does measure the system's ability to make the most out of its power draw.