8-Core Dual Xeon "V8" Test Rig Performance

MojoKid writes "Back in January at this year's CES show, Intel was giving the press glimpses of a rig in their booth dubbed the V8. It was essentially a dual-socket workstation platform outfitted with a pair of quad-core Xeon processors for a total of eight cores — hence the "V8". The enterprise platform that this box was built around is based on Intel's 5000X chipset, aka Blackford, and it supports up to 32GB of FBDIMM serial memory. HotHardware has a component build-up of a more current Intel V8 machine here, with preliminary benchmarks, pictures and more details on this 8-core dual Xeon powerhouse."

Re:So what're they gonna price 'em at?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Mac Pro doesn't support PCI-X cards, only PCIe. This is one downside compared to the Dell 690, which is one of the closest analogues in the Dell line. The 690 supports PCIe and PCIx.

I suppose for the price difference, you might be able to afford to replace even some of the very expensive PCI-X cards you might hypothetically have and might still be less than a 690 with thee most similar specs. One thing I do like about non-Apple workstations is that you can buy with one socket populated now, and buy the second CPU & heat sink later when the chip gets cheaper and when more of your software supports more cores. With Apple, all systems are sold with both sockets populated, so the original purchase is a little more prohibitive, and any later upgrades are harder to justify.

Re:So it's a Mac Pro?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Sounds a lot like a high-end Mac Pro (shipping for months)

The eight core Mac Pro was released exactly three weeks ago, Wed. April 4, not months ago.

Re:FB-DIMMS suck for gameing

[Matimus]

Blackford has two separate FSBs. One for each quad core. Now, the quad core shares the bus among the two converged cores, but I think you meant something else.

Re:this isn't that new...

[modecx]

Well, Dell will only ship Server 2003 with their server products, and that is a $800 expense.

I think that XP should be able to support an 8 core, dual socket setup, though. XP is limited to two sockets, but should be able to support at least 8 cores, I think.

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Re:Also known as...

[Tom Womack]

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=x53 55&page=3&cookie_test=1 [gamepc.com] says 450 watts peak power consumption, for a system with two quad-core processors and a crazy nVidia graphics card.

That's with 2.66GHz quad-cores, and it's possible that the 3GHz ones use up to 25 watts more each, but 500 watts is still a pretty pathetic space heater.

A test with 3GHz dual-cores of a server-like machine (http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2892&p=10 ) used 325 watts peak; the nVidia graphics chips do not seem to be as active at shutting down unused parts of the chip as Intel's processors are, and I think that explains most of the difference.

Re:this isn't that new...

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't mean to imply nothing can use that much power. Just imagine how many Exchange and IIS servers are going to be installed on those things though.

Depending on workload, exchange can be cpu-intensive. Although, according to microsoft, exchange won't work well with more than 8 cores.

Sql server can be very cpu-intensive, and scales well to multiple cores.

Re:So what're they gonna price 'em at?

[NatasRevol]

Soon?

http://www.apple.com/macpro/ [apple.com]