At this rate we may start seeing 128bit operating systems popping up

Edit: Reply to #97

The last picture shows why we don't use glossy screens.

Nom nom nom. I want a desktop variant of this?

Poor AMD, waiting on their 6 core Opteron. :(

The tables sure have turned quickly in the server market. Competition is great and all, but this is more like murder.

And it still can't run Crysis ;)

nice and awesome cpu by intel, however that monster cpu will not be able
to fully flex it's muscles until fitted with a ssd. hdd's simply are too much
of a bottleneck on high end systems thus limiting the other high computer
components. remember, a computer is only as fast as it's slowest
component and the slowest ram memory, video card and cpu are
all much faster than the fastest hdd.

"proprietary RISC-processor based systems"

Not a lot of those left these days. I guess they have to be talking about POWER, or do people still buy SPARC systems?

Anybody know how this compares to POWER?

But can it put the kettle on and bring me breakfast in bed?

24MB L3 cache and four memory channels !!

It looks to me that this update is much more that adding four cores

Question: "Intel Scalable Memory Buffer" chips? Is this going to be another FB-DIMM situation or???

Only starting at $2999 for the intro version and $5999 for the medium. The flagship cost $9999 however.
Pre-orders start now. ;)

It's like that scene from Half Baked when the guy gets that thing for the scientist.

It's Intel at it again and most software will not benefit from 4 let alone 8 cores.... they can't improve performance so more will do....

Virtualization on a server with these will be ridiculously good.

I wonder how well it folds.... Would there be any reason to go this route over some GTX295's on a single i7 mobo?

I didn't know that was a task manager window. Looked like some type of window in a office.

I rather wait for Westmere-generation parts to come.

I wonder if the default Task Manager shipping with Windows can actually recognize this many cores, or will it freak out and throw some "overwhelmingly powerful computer exception" error?

Edit: grr, meant to reply to #8.

That task manager picture is hilarious.

This question is inspired by UG's #16 post: Suppose you have a trivially parallel task that is compute-bound. Does anyone know if OMP scales well to 128 threads? Or is it likely you'd have to do something in addition to OMP?

I assume it still would be more cost efficient for typical HPC centers to get 4 times as many 2 socket nodes (per one of these 8 socket nodes), and then rely on something like MPI. But I'd love to hear an more educated opinion.

Of course Tukwila isn't the only design looking over its shoulder. AMD is well-positioned with Istanbul vs Dunnington this year, but they're going to be at a disadvantage once Beckton is available. Lower IPC, fewer memory controllers/bandwidth, less cache, lower interprocessor bandwidth also.

Magny-Cours might be a decent stop-gap, at least for loads where more cores matters more than anything else, but AMD needs to take the next architectural step to ultimately keep up at the profitable high end.

Adding to Itanium woes -- Tukwila is delayed until Q1 of next year, so Beckton will ship first, too
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13556_3-10246293-61.html
Of course Tukwila at least gets to share some of the infrastructure with x86 this time around, which may keep the OEMs (HP at least) on board for at least a while longer.

(Only folks familiar with Seattle will appreciate this, but considering this design was first talked about over five years ago, I don't think anybody would've predicted that light rail would reach Tukwila the city before Intel shipped Tukwila the chip)

That TaskMan photo is classic.

Boy, one of these paired with todays virtualization tech...

IT today sure has a lot more power and useability per square foot available for new "environment designs". Gotta love it.

*droooooooooool*