Why Eight Cores?The system Intel presented has a bill-of-material cost of $4,500, without display. Here's a look at the specifications:
When it comes to scaling performance, the name says it all: multicore. It can mean two, four or more cores. The path to more performance used to be deeper pipelines with cranked up clock rates, but the model now is to go wider with more cores. Each of these cores has better per-clock efficiency (instructions per clock, or IPC), so lower clock rates actually can yield better performance.
Multicore gives a multiprocessor (MP)-aware OS like Windows XP or Linux more cores to work with, where the OS’ scheduler can divide up work to be done by different applications across the cores. This makes your system feel more responsive, even when many tasks are in flight. This experience scales with additional cores, where you can have even more tasks being executed, and still maintain the system’s responsive feel.
Many applications are already multi-threaded, meaning the work the application does gets divided up into smaller pieces, and can be executed on different cores, and then reassembled. Some applications are written to have a specific number of threads, while others use an “n-number of threads” approach, where the application spawns as many threads as there are cores. So, a dual-core system would have two threads in flight, whereas a quad-core system would have four threads being worked on. An n-threaded app could put eight threads in flight simultaneously on this eight-core beast we're showing you here.
Intel says this sytem has a read bandwidth of 21GB/s and a write bandwith of 10.7GB/s. Here are some more pictures:CPUs: Dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor X5355 CPUs running at 2.66GHz Motherboard: Intel Workstation Board S5000XVN motherboard, with the Intel Chipset 5000X System RAM: 2GB (4x512MB) of FB-DIMM DDR2-667 RAM, giving 21GB/sec of read bandwidth, and 10.7GB/sec of write bandwidth Graphics Card: nVidia 8800 graphic card. Storage: 1.3-terabyte RAID array, five disks (RAID 0) (7,200RPM Maxtor DiamondMax 6L30050 SATA drives) Optical Drive: TDK 420N DVD burner Case: CoolerMaster CMStacker 830 case Power Supply: Enermax Galaxy DGA1000EWL OS: Windows XP Professional with SP2, DirectX 9.0c
Looks nice but it's not really the ultimate rig for gamers.