Submission + - Intel's Core Architecture Stumbles
An anonymous reader writes: For the last year, the Intel Core 2 Duo architecture has been unstoppable. Recently, FiringSquad took a look at a 3GHz 8-core Xeon system. They show how 8-core improves performance across a wide range of applications, including Excel 2007! However, in several "embarassingly parallel" real-world applications, memory bandwidth is a significant limitation, with 8 cores offering minimal improvement over 4 cores. In that same benchmark, an AMD Opteron continues to scale well to 16 processors!