quad core laptop processors

Are quad core laptop processors coming out very soon?I even heard someone say that there would be processors with ten cores in the future.Intresting right?What do you think?

 

i dont know but i seen a review somewhere that said that you wouldnt notice any difference between a quad core and duo core processors

 

I don't think the laptop market will have a need for quad-core for quite some time. 4 proc cores would speed up number crunching or server work, but on a laptop they would just consume more battery life. It'll probably be an option for ubergamers, but I don't see it becoming mainstream anytime soon.

Besides, most software is just being brought up to speed on two cores!

 

Don't forget, if the Quad cores will come (from Intel) then they will be actually 2 Dual Cores glued together. The AMD X4 will be a 'real' Quad Core, not 2 X2 or something.

I do not know if I will buy a notebook with Santa Rosa or wait for the Turion X4 with ATI X3700 PCI-E 2... But now I am more then happy with my X700.

Charlie

 

Intel's first generation quad cores will, like said above, be two dualcores stuck together. This has two consequences. The first is slightly lower performance than you'd get otherwise, the other is massive power consumption and heat output. A "native" quad-core design won't consume much more power than a native dualcore (AMD is targeting the same thermal envelopes for their quad cores as for dualcore chips), but with Intel's approach, you literally have two chips, which means twice the heat.

In other words, Intel's first generation quad core is *not* suitable for notebooks.

 

Intel's multi-core approach is flawed in general, though. They built a multi-core chip, AMD designed one. Intel's may be faster (that's why I have one), but AMD's design will last much longer, and I think they'll scale it much better.

 

laptops don't really use multi-threading software, unless you have a portable business platform designed for workstation applications...that's gonna be the only thing that actually would benefit from having quad core.

as mentioned too, heat is the bane of laptops...quad cores would be insane to put into one right now. :O

 

I think Intel is all caught up in this multi-core business. I don't see why more than two cores is necessary.

 

...what? Laptops use multi-threaded software fine. Or do you not run Java? Many applications any more are multi-threaded, and more and more things are headed that way. Heck, the new Alan Wake game is set to use no fewer than 5 fairly heavy threads just itself. The difference is how the quad core is implemented. In AMD's case, it probably wouldn't show anything heatwise, possibly a small jump in heat and power use. Intel's chips on the other hand... see the arguments above

And 640K should be enough for everyone? (I know it's an erroneous quote, but still applicable to Ludditism) Again, look at the game above. Media decoding and encoding. Virus scanning. Web plugins. There are a ton of reasons for more threads. The only valid one against threads is that it's hard to program, and in that case, you have to decide if your application is worth the work to make it multi-threaded.

 

I understand that, but four?, when there aren't many programs that are even able to use two threads yet? I don't see this for the average consumer who runs PS, AV, and HD video once and a while. I see this for professional video and photo editors who really need that more than us.

 

I agree that four might be over doing it a bit, but then most technologys that have been professional, at one time or another, end up going to the consumer field

 

No one needs half of what they have, but its always nice to have the ability and power to do more when you want to. I don't see quad-cores becoming too popular in laptops too soon, but I guarantee it will happen within the next few years. No one needed a v6, or a v8, or a v10, and now there are consumer cars with v12's. It's just the nature of the beast.

 

aaaaaah, Well in DC you NEED a v6 at least. Just kidding, but honestly you dont want to be caught around DC with an underpowered car. I think as technology progresses we just get used to it and want more.

 

Personally I would never be caught anywhere with anything lower then a V6. I love my 4.3L V6, gets those tires going, and make merging a breeze. But thats beside the point.

You have to look at it like this. I remember when I was in elementry school, and we had just bought a windows 95 system. That computer had a Pentium 2 running at 233MHz, a whoping 4gig hard drive, and probably something like 32MB of system RAM. Now seriously today you cant do anything with that. But at the time it worked, and it worked well for what was being used in 96. Today is 2006, 10 years later, and we have just given up P4's running well over 3GHz, and they are getting slow. Did you really see a 3+GHz P4 being slow 1, 2 years ago? No way. Now today we have dual-core processors, and ones that run equivocally higher then what a 5GHz P4 would have (mine) and it works great now. In another 3-5 years my processor will be outdated and slow compared to whats out then, and for what kind of applications are being used at the time. Eventually we wouldn't think of ever getting anything less then a quad-core CPU for any computer. But thats not today and its definitly not within the next 3 years. But the time will come when a standard notebook will have a quad, and possibly even higher amounts of processing core, but thats a long, long way off. Hell eventually computers wont even be things we use a mouse and keyboard with. They will be implanted into our brains and will interface directly into our minds. You want to type a paper? Think it, then have it sent wirelessly to a printer and there it is. We wont need a monitor, we'll see it in our minds. Now I dont expect this to be in my lifetime at all, and it not even in my children's, but thats the future.

Today dual-core processors are overpowered for the vast majority of users out there like tornclothingblake, and many other people on this forum have said. Quad-core in the next year will be in servers, and for those uber gamers or power freaks. But they will make it in notebooks eventually, and one day they will be the standard, and will be needed for what is being run at the time.

 

i think that two cores are sufficient enough at this moment unless one is doing some heavy encoding tasks all the time.

 

For 99% of the time, one core is enough for 99% of all users.

 

AMD Fusion(multicore, dunno how many, my guess is over 2) coming soon, hope it'll blast Intel away... 2 more years to go(seems like a long time.

 

I agree with this. The whole dual core and quad core developments are just a case of hardware being developed faster than software. What I don't like about hardware being a generation or two ahead of software, is it may lead to crappy software coding as the hardware can pick up the slack. I'd much prefer excellently written and efficient software and a slow, single core processor. Alas, as the engine comparison says above, people want more than they think they need, and we have bigger engines in computers than most people take advantage of.

I do a lot of software audio and video encoding and for multiple-thread encoding applications, dual core processors greatly increase my productivity. Most users as Jalf said will not notice a difference between a single core or dual core processor. The whole "I can open multiple windows at the same time" thing is just a justification of why one spends the extra money on a dual core processor. I'd like to see a blind test between a Pentium M and a Core Duo at the same speed (and general hardware configuration) in a multitasking environment. One should then have to guess which computer has the dual core and the single core based on a bunch of open windows. I bet it wouldn't be easy.

 

Guess i m the 1% that need more than 2 cores...

 

I don't even see a need for dual core. Been there, bought the X2 a month after launch, got the T-Shirt, paid the AMD Depreciation Tax.... Then got a single core laptop in disgust.

It's all just planned obsolescence. It improves multitaking *some* when doing *tons* of stuff at once, but in terms of day to day usage you can get the same responsiveness by adding more RAM, defragging, and removing unneeded processes.

Windows XP doesn't even properly load balance dual core CPUs yet - run one single-threaded task and the two cores 'fight' over the process, loading each core to 55% in Task Manager and introducing a ton of overhead as the processes information gets switched between caches every few clock cycles.

The CPU companies were scared no one would buy new CPUs, since games are mostly GPU limited these days. The last thing AMD did before X2 came out was start killing off the lower-end A64s to FORCE people to buy more expensive, faster single core CPUs.

 

Meh. I do 3D renderings. Multiple cores are nice because I can still use the computer while rendering. Other people have heavy processes like Norton and such chewing up CPU time when they want to play a game. Multiple core CPU's have relevant uses for the general public as we speak.

Oh, and sheff... I've run lots of fun things on older, slower computers like that They use a lot less power than most current machines, and they're a lot less expensive. Stuff like running IRC servers, web servers, etc. It's cheap and easy.

 

Quad-core will pop up when AMD introduces GPU on-die, then one of the cores may be a GPU.

 

Pitabred: Very very few people try to run Norton while playing a game. Those who do fall into the 1% I mentioned.

 

I run Matlab and Simulink and ProE together.. +some anti virus scan...

 

And an even smaller percentage do it voluntarily. Norton likes to do stuff on its own.

I agree that dual-core is not necessary, let alone quad-core. I use a single-core Pentium M. As long as there are enough clock cycles available, I can multitask without any problems. General tasks will show little to no difference between a budget and high-end CPU.

 

We've barely begun to scratch the surface on 64bit computing, despite 64bit CPUs being around now for....3 years. How long will it be before we see real benefits of dual core processing? It takes a long time for any new technology to become 'standard' as developers have to be aware that there are people out there still hanging to antiquated systems, and producers do not want to lost out on potential sales. So instead programmers have the happy job of creating multiple versions of software, or multiple patch releases to satisfy those who do embrace new PC technology.

 

Luddites Norton may do stuff on it's own, but that's my point. The 99% of people who don't frequent these boards just let Norton do it's thing. And every now and then it just brings the computer to a crawl. I run into times at work with my single-core 2Ghz Pentium M that I just have to sit and wait for the machine to start responding again, which doesn't happen with a dual-core. The mouse is also ALWAYS responsive with my dual-core. Can't say that for this machine, especially when under heavy load. Part of it is Window's crappy process switching, but part of it is just that the machine sometimes is doing too many processor-intensive things at once.