Chip News Roundup - Intel’s Four-Headed Beast
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By now you’ve heard all about Intel’s Core 2 Duo chips featuring a processor composed of two cores. The chip maker may do many things, some of them mistaken, but you can’t say it doesn’t look to the future. Lately it’s been showing off a chip with four cores. You really have to ask though, who needs this much computing power? Well, the answer could be you, depending on the kinds of computing tasks you perform.
In order to benefit from this new architecture, you have to be doing the kind of work that can take advantage of all four cores. By this I mean video editing and rendering. You also need a recent motherboard to run this beast: a 965 or 975X chipset will do it, nothing less (though some manufacturers are working on adapting their BIOS).
The four core processor also consumes a lot of power, according to one review of the technology. The Core 2 Extreme X6800, with two cores, consumes 142 W in idle mode and 165 W with a full load. The four core processor, on the other hand, consumes 167 W just when it’s idling, and at full load slurps down a whopping 260 W! Still, considering that we’re talking about twice as many cores, that’s less power than you would expect it to eat. And it’s still less than the Pentium Extreme Edition 840 ate at full load.
Intel’s four-core processor runs hot, which is what you’d expect from something that consumes that much power. In the review I read that tested the chip, the temperatures were given in degrees Celsius, and they were so high I almost though they were Fahrenheit – especially after I did the Celsius-to-Fahrenheit conversion. Can you imagine a chip that peaks out at 150 degrees Fahrenheit with stock cooling?! Perhaps I’m showing my non-techie to side, but to me that sounds like a chip only an overclocker could love.
Speaking of overclocking, the chips work at a minimum clock speed of 2.13 GHz, and will probably also be available at 2.66 GHz. It should be easy to overclock, though; some tests in the review I read indicated that Intel’s four-core processor should run fairly stable at 3.4 GHz.
So, overclockers and video editors will love these new chips when they hit the market. Indeed, some applications may even run twice as fast with a four-core processor. But the key word here is “some.” Until there are more applications that can take advantage of all four cores, the rest of us might not see any serious improvement over what we currently have. I suspect those applications won’t be too long in coming.
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