Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX6700: The Multi-core Era Begins
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 2, 2006 2:14 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Power Efficiency Through Better Software
We've just established that more cores can give us better power efficiency and performance, but there's one giant requirement for that: software must be written to take advantage of the many cores at its disposal. Being multithreaded alone is not enough, as we saw from the Quicktime and iTunes encoding tests; both benchmarks are multithreaded, but we only saw an increase in performance and power efficiency on dual core CPUs, not on quad core CPUs.
Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista and associated Vista applications will begin pushing for better performance on multi-core systems. Even Microsoft's Office 2007 is multithreaded and of course anything encoding related is generally well threaded these days. Apple's OS X and its applications have also been well threaded for quite some time, and it's very possible that Apple itself may want to embrace Kentsfield in order to drive costs down on its Mac Pro line of systems.
And what about gaming? Even our multithreaded Quake 4 benchmark doesn't show a performance increase when going from two to four cores, and it's one of very few games that actually takes advantage of multiple cores. Without significant re-writes of today's games we're not going to see the sort of power efficiency improvements that we need in order to drive performance forward. Remember that AMD and Intel are banking on heavily multithreaded code in order to actually drive CPU performance ahead in the coming years; without the appropriate software, CPU performance would effectively stagnate.
Thankfully it looks like 2007 will mark the beginning of threaded games making a significant impact on the PC market. Back at this year's fall IDF we spoke with Remedy's Markus Maki and Lasse Seppanen about the engine behind Alan Wake, and were surprised to find out that currently the game isn't even expected to run on anything less than a dual core (or single core + HT) platform.
Remedy's Alan Wake
As we mentioned in our IDF coverage, Alan Wake currently spawns five independent threads: one each for rendering, audio, streaming, physics and terrain tessellation. Both the rendering and physics threads are heavy hitters and those two alone have the potential to eat up a dual core CPU, but the additional threads are what may improve the gaming experience on a quad core CPU.
Unreal Tournament 2007, based on the Unreal Engine 3, will utilize multiple cores
Given that Alan Wake is clearly targeted for multi-core CPUs, we wanted to hear from another developer for a bit of a reality check to see where some of the next-generation of PC gaming is going. With their highly anticipated Xbox 360 title, Gears of War, on the verge of shipping we were lucky enough to get some information on Unreal Tournament 2007's thread usage from Tim Sweeney, Founder and President of Epic Games.
We asked Tim to tell us a bit about what threads UT2007 will spawn, and he responded with the following:
"Currently Unreal Engine 3 runs two heavyweight threads all the time: one for gameplay and one for rendering. In addition, there are several helper threads to which we offload all of the physics (using Ageia's multithreaded PhysX library), streaming, and several other tasks.
We plan to extend the threading support further in time for the release of Unreal Tournament 2007 next year, to further exploit multi-core PC CPUs. Major opportunities for multithreaded optimization include particle systems, animation, and terrain. Also, since UT2007 uses very extensive vehicle and ragdoll physics, we expect that at peak times during gameplay that we'll have no trouble fully exploiting 4 threads at the maximum detail settings.
There are lots of other interesting prospects. I expect we'll be able to exploit as many cores and Intel and AMD are able to ship in the foreseeable future."
It looks like by the time UT2007 makes its appearance on the PC it will be juggling, at times, more than two CPU intensive threads. Tim added one more comment that was particularly interesting: UT2007 will not require a dual core CPU, meaning there's still life for single core in gaming, even in the 2007 - 2008 timeframe.
Despite the relatively gung-ho attitude by Remedy, Epic and other ISVs on being able to use more than two cores regularly, the fact of the matter is that neither Alan Wake nor UT2007 are coming out anytime soon. And it's tough to say how long before other titles actually show a noticeable performance or experience difference between two and four core CPUs. Our pragmatic side can't help but point out that if you're building a high end gaming PC today, going quad-core will help in the future, but we can't really say precisely when that future will be.
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Staples - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
I will eventually be buying an E6600 but I was hoping we'd see a price drop when these quad cores came out. Now they have and we see that the cheapest one is over $800, the price of the E6600 will probably not drop for a while because these processors are not in the same market.rqle - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
Price doesnt really interest me as much, the fact that i have a very hard time getting a lot of low end Athlon64 around 2.8ghz, mines seem to max out at around 2.7ghz. Seem like most athlon for some reason like 2.3-2.4 and sometime lower while a whole group at my lan party have no problem push a E6300 past 3.1ghz.Brunnis - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
The article seems to state that Kentsfield is more efficient that Conroe. This conclusion comes from power measurements of complete systems. This is a little misleading, since a large chunk of that power is consumed by the rest of the system. Since the CPU only makes up a part of the power consumption, but accounts for a very large performance increase, the efficiency is bound to increase when looking at system power consumption.The Kentsfield CPU itself shouldn't be any more efficient than Conroe. That said, there isn't anything wrong in looking at system power consumption and drawing the conclusion that the computer is more efficient with the quad core. I just don't think that the article was very clear on this, though.
smilingcrow - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
The power efficiency figures would look different if a lower power PC had been used as a test bed; the use of dual X1900XT cards distorts the figures to a degree. These CPUs are currently only particularly useful for areas where Crossfire setups are not generally relevant.I used the Anandtech data along with my own C2D data from testing low power systems and came up with the following. The extrapolated figures show the efficiency of each CPU as a percentage of that of the QX6700, which is the most efficient in these two tests:
CPU/Anand PC/My PC
3dsmax7
QX6700 – 100/100
Q6600 – 92.3/92.9
X6800 – 74.7/80.7
E6700 – 69.7/75.7
DivX 6.1
QX6700 – 100/100
Q6600 – 98.4/99.01
X6800 – 92.5/99
E6700 – 87.4/94.4
The PC I used for a comparison uses ~60W less at load than Anandtech’s setup which results in:
130W v 189W for the E6700
172W v 230.5W for the QX6700.
System - Asus P5W DH Deluxe, Nvidia 6200TC, 2 x 1GB DDR2-667, Samsung P120 250GB SATA.
The one thing that was missing for me was the power consumption at idle, as I’d imagine that the dual Dice Kentsfield would take a big hit here. Xbitlabs have figures showing idle power consumption, but they are measured with C1E & EIST disabled which makes them a bit pointless in my eyes. Kentsfield gets a spanking in this comparison although it matches an FX-62.
EnzoM3 - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
I can only make assumptions, without any test beds here. Since Quad core is simply two dies of Conroe as this article pointed out, the power consumption of the Quad core should double that of Core Duo. If you use that assumption to compute performance per watt, regardless of what the actual numbers are (as long as Quad uses twice the power of Duo), then Quad actually has lower performance per watt than Duo across the board.Sunrise089 - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
If you could isolate the CPU only, you're certainly correct, and PPW will decrease with each additional core due to diminishing returns from scaling. Fortunatly CPUs are part of an entire PC, so when the choice can be painted as quad-core versus two dual-core machines, then the numbers look much better.ATWindsor - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
Yeah i agree, the more the rest of the system uses, the more "flawed" the numbers will be, lets say, for arguments sake, that a CPU uses 50 watts, and a twice as fast one uses 200 watts. Tut the rest of the system uses 300 watts, then the total system will use 350 watts in the fist case, and the twice as fast one will use 500 watts, so if you take the whole system numbers, the more power-hungry core will seem like it gives more permformanve per watt, but if you only look at the CPUs them self, the picture is diffrent, the less powerhungry CPU has twice the performance per watt.JarredWalton - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
You are right that we could be more clear. You can think in terms of efficiency that we're looking at two dual core systems vs. one quad core if you'd like. If we could isolate just the CPU power draw, we could get real CPU efficiency, but doing so is very difficult.PrinceGaz - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
Some sites have indeed isolated the CPU power draw by modifying mobos so that current draw as well as voltage on certain pins can be measured. It is, as you say, very difficult however and each platform you wish to test needs its own modded mobo.One simpler way to at least get a rough idea of actual power comsumption (which could be easily calibrated to provide more accurate figures), and a quite accurate measure of relative power consumption would be to measure the heat given off rather than the electricity going in.
The most obvious way to do that would seem to be with a modified water-cooling setup where instead of the heat being dissipated by an external radiator into air, it is instead transferred into a *large* insulated tank of water with an accurate digital thermometer monitoring the water temperature. This tank of water is not circulated through the water-cooling system, it is there merely for the heat to be dumped into. You then measure the rate at which the temperature rises which provides a good guide to power consumption. You might start at 20C and could probably run the tests up until the water reaches about 40C without any problems, probably 45C would still result in the CPU being kept within safe temperatures.
With a 10-litre tank, you would have 10Kg of water, and each Kg requires about 4.2KJ of energy to heat up by 1C, so it would take about 42KJ to heat up that tank of water by 1C. 42KJ is equivalent to 42KW for 1 second, or more realistically, 42 watts for 1000 seconds (about sixteen and a half minutes). You can probably see where I'm going here: a processor using about forty watts of power would heat up the tank of water by about 4C per hour. Eighty watts would be 8C per hour, and so on. Although not all the energy used by the processor will be dumped in the water due to heat being lost elsewhere, the vast majority of it will be and it will be consistent between different processor models.
If you want an exact figure for power consumption, or rather heat dissipation, then the system could be calibrated by connecting it to a CPU shaped heater element fed with a measured amount of power. Take measurements of the rate of temperature rise at twenty watt intervals up to say two hundred watts (I suspect the line will be fairly linear above about 40W) and you can now say with a good degree of accuracy how much power a given CPU is actually using.
As I say, that's one way you could do it and one which in theory should work very well.
Furen - Thursday, November 2, 2006 - link
Wow, that's a insanely round-about way of measuring power draw. You can also measure voltage and current draw at the CPU voltage VRMs. Regardless, CPU power draw truly doesn't matter with this product since it is two of the older products packed into a single package, no new silicon or anything of the sort. What this means is that theoretical efficiency should be the same but in the real world it'll be slightly worse (due to threading inefficiency). That said, measuring power draw for the whole system does measure the system's ability to make the most out of its power draw.