News Intel launches 18-core Xeon E7 v3 chips

When with this trickle down to an i5 6 core k processor?

 

That's a serious core count, would be wonderful for big parallel workloads.

Speaking of which, I too would be interested in when some of this stuff can be expected to trickle down further into the product stack? I guess that's one of the big problems with not having any true competition right now.

I'm mostly thinking along the lines that if everybody has quad+ cores, we'd be more likely to see software taking advantage of it. It's hard work optimising many things for better parallelisation, the incentive just isn't there if people don't own multicore systems. I mean it's hard to justify all the time and money spent making those changes if it's simply going to alienate a decent chunk of your userbase. I mean look how unhappy some people were when FC4 didn't run properly on dual cores. Now imagine if it runs poorly but can't ever be quickly fixed simply because it's designed for multi-core systems and genuinely needs one?

 

Who on earth games on dual core computers nowadays?

 

I sense an order going in for some of these bad boys for work

 

Er, quite a lot of people? Just look at the Anniversary Edition Pentium K - super popular with gamers on a budget.

 

I do [on a G3258 as it happens], mainly because that's all I could afford at the time, though I'll admit it's starting to struggle with some games...

 

Let's not forget the i3 either, hyperthreading doesn't make it a true quad core. A proper quad core i3 with the i5 being a six core would be grand. Then the standard i7 would be a six core + hyperthreading leaving the enthusiast chips to be 8 cores +

That arrangement would be able to last a few generations at least.

 

When I say an order I mean several hundred of these bad boys aha
We just blew £500K on network switches so if Dell bring out some new Blades in time we can throw them in the DC relocation project