With an economy in distress, and huge numbers out of work with little hope for an early recovery before 2012, I wonder how well their sales will run for them. $900 after tax and shipping is a lot of money in anybody's book, I suspect.

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I have a core i7-860, which is a quad core part, 2.80 GHz with HT and I have not found anything that I can throw at it to actually tax it properly. If anyone buys a 6 core processor clocked at 3.0 GHz+ for home use, they are wasting their money.

So what makes me qualified in stating the above?

** Ran a Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V virtualizer on the core i7-860 with 4 window 7 VM's, 3 Windows 2008 servers, 1 MS SQL server 2008 with reporting services and business intelligence enabled. It was using all four cores but only about 15% utilization.

** Visual Studio 2010, MS Expression studio 4 on a Win 7 box -- maybe 25% on the 4 cores when compiling.

** Adobe Premiere CS4 -- the ONLY application that managed to use all 4 cores AND the 4 HT for a total of 8 threads.

** Games -- no game is using all 4 cores, and the two cores it uses, are maxed out.

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Result: Unless you are doing video editing or scientific computation, for home use a quad core is MORE than enough. It is the I/O that is the biggest slowdown. Instead of spending $800-900 on a new processor, spend $400 on a good SSD and you WILL see the difference...

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I can't find anything less than 100% true here. It's a total waste. But buying an AMD 6core is even more of a waste WAHAHAHA.

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I think I wil benefit from a x6 core CPU, since I do a lot of password cracking, as well as rainbow table generation.

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A Core i5 760 with two cores clocked at 2.9GHz will also be released, priced at $205, alongside a lower powered Core i5 870s with a selling price of $351.

sense make not does this. So the lower powered one is $150 more?

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Who knows....maybe they'll offset sales of uberchips with the introduction of CPU's costing as little as $53 for the masses (The same information is in the Digitimes link -excluding the typo that reads "920" where it shoiuld read "970").

I doubt Intel have misread global economic indicators to the extent that hexacore Core i7 will be the only Intel CPU option available from Q3 onwards.

Correct.

The "S" chips are especially binned for being able to reach stock frequency at a lower power requirement. It's not much different from say, binning for core frequency (Speed), hence the Q9400s usually also retails higher than the stock Q9400.

Where it gets interesting is that the Core i7 950 is likely to be only marginally more expensive than the 930, likewise the 875K (for all intents and purposes an Extreme Edition CPU) currently retails lower in most markets (i.e. $330 ), than the identically clocked (and locked multiplier) 870 (at $580)

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Why only 6 cores when it's obvious that they can easily do the 8 cores?

So that you will buy the 8 cores after you bought the 6 cores.

.....It's how they make money.....

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The pricing of the 950 made me cry a little since I just got my 930 a few days ago. Oh well, I guess I'm used to it after 20+ years.

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Yep me to I got a lot of neighbors that I need to crack the wifi password to. I don't want to wait a week for that. I want to be able to do it in 4 hours. To make them quit changing the password and realize it useless to fight the power.

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Don't forget that you live in a capitalist society/market. They will milk it where they see fit.

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Guest

on July 5, 2010

10:54 PM

"Why only 6 cores when it's obvious that they can easily do the 8 cores?

So that you will buy the 8 cores after you bought the 6 cores.

.....It's how they make money..... "

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