“Most of us have dual-core systems by now, and sitting there enjoying the speed of a Core 2 Duo E6600, one might engage in a little fanciful speculation: What would it be like to have, say, eight of these cores running at 3GHz on dual, independent 1333MHz buses with a torrent of memory bandwidth?If you’re prone to such speculation, you’ll be pleased to hear Intel has concocted an answer to that very question in the form of its “V8″ media creation platform. V8 is Intel’s tentative first response to AMD’s dual-socket enthusiast platform, Quad FX. Like Quad FX, V8 draws on workstation/server-class technology to take desktop PCs to new heights. Unlike AMD’s effort, though, V8 doesn’t involve an enthusiast-class mobo or any sort of processor bundle or discount. If you want to grab a slice of the future now, with eight cores of glory at your disposal, you’re going to have to pay a pretty penny for it. Happily, though, we’ve tested a V8 system against a slew of today’s best desktop processors, and we can give you a glimpse of how the future may look, free of charge. Here’s a hint: it’s ridiculously fast.”
Here are some more Systems articles from around the web:
- PC Buying Guide @ TechARP
- High-End Buyers’ Guide: May 2007 @ AnandTech
- Supermicro’s Twin: Two nodes and 16 cores in 1U @ AnandTech
- Puget Liquid Cooled Gaming Computer @ 3dGameMan
Doing figure 8s around the competition
Those lucky souls over at the Tech Report got their hands on a V8 system from Intel. An 8 core Xeon X5365 3.0GHz, Intel’s S500XVN motherboard, 4GBs of RAM and a whole suite of benchmarks await. As you might expect from a Xeon, you don’t see a huge jump in gaming performance (though a 3DMark06 CPU score of 5584 ain’t bad), but the productivity programs absolutely fly!