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Another Monster from IntelFour heads are better than two |
By Dan Frincu, Hardware Editor
10th of April 2007, 07:18 GMT
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Or was it two heads are better than one? I don't know, in this technologically advanced era that we are living in, what today is new, tomorrow is old, and what we know now, might not be as important in the near future. In order to stay ahead, you have to be in the line of fire, make a stand in front of others by being the news, not just reading them.
Such is the case with Intel
, they are constantly trying to showcase that they deserve the place they are at right now, as the leaders of the x86 processor market. And being the first means nothing if you don't have something to back up your statements. That's why Intel released their twelfth quad-core processor, the QX6800. It runs at 2.93GHz, same as the Intel X6800 processor, except the two extra cores it has available. And it seems that people aren't quite buying the whole "you need four cores for your computer to run" routine, so the next logical step is to get somebody, besides their processor specialists, to come out and say that you NEED their quad-core processors.
There have been many participants to Intel's processor showcasing, including the ones that emphasized the need for multicore processors- included game and software developers. Game titles such as Crytek's Crysis, Gas Powered Games' Supreme Commander and Flagship's Hellgate London were used to convince people of the things mentioned above by stating that serious modifications have been made to them so that they could take advantage of "more than two processing threads."
Phil Taylor, Flight Sim Program Manager, Microsoft Game Studios said that: "The latest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator* X, Service Pack One (SP1), due out later this month, is a great match for the extreme multi-core processing delivered by the new Intel Core 2 Extreme quad-core processor. Flight Sim X SP1 greatly increases multicore utilization and will scale as more threads are available leading to reduced load times as well as frame rate improvements and greater visual complexity during flight. The Flight Simulator team at Microsoft is pleased to work with Intel to provide our end users with a great gaming experience."
The processor has been put to work in a series of tests to demonstrate the performance upgrade from a dual-core X6800 processor to its quad-core version by mentioning that the QX6800 "is up to 65% faster than the (...) X6800 on video encoding." We now have what is commonly known as video cameras, efficient devices which can record and then display images through a little window (crowd goes "wow") and have the very interesting feature of recording whatever you want directly onto a hard drive. And if by any chance you want to record your favorite TV show, well guess what, TV tuners now have hardware encoding and decoding capabilities, which means that you can record a show onto your hard drive in real-time while doing something else.
Eric Kim, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Home Group said: "The performance and technology leadership we are delivering with our enthusiast quad-core processor lineup is a direct result of the reliability provided by Intel's manufacturing and engineering strength. This translates to user benefits such as better gameplay with more intelligent computer-generated opponents and less wait time for demanding high-definition media editing."
The processor sports 8MB of L2 cache, and a 1066MHz FSB, being built on the 65nm process node. The price tag however is of $1199 and I believe that that price is given only with the purchase of 1.000 units. If you do the math, a TV tuner and a more powerful video card will yield better results than one four-cored processor will, but, hey, how am I to stand in the way of progress?
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