Aiming at the peak of the high-end gaming market, Intel on Monday introduced two new six-core processors: the Intel Core i7-3960X processor Extreme Edition and the Intel Core i7-3930K processor.
The new entrants mark the first six-core processors in the second-generation Sandy Bridge family. With more than 2 billion transistors, Intel claims its latest client processors offer the processing power equivalent of approximately 365,000 Intel 4004 processors.
The new i7s target users and developers of advanced applications, such as content creation, 3D rendering and high-end gaming. Intel promises the additional cores, large CPU caches and new quad-channel memory support will offer better support for these applications.
Look Out, Nvidia
Based on Intel's 32nm manufacturing process, the new CPUs run at base speeds of 3.3 and 3.2 GHz with 15 MB and 12 MB of L3 cache, respectively. The Intel X79 Express chipset that supports this new LGA 2011 socket platform makes possible 6Gb/s Serial ATA ports and additional PCIe 2.0 lanes to allow expandability for high-end desktop platforms.
"To render our uniquely textured worlds, RAGE uses a very compute-intensive real-time process to transcode texture data from highly compressed form on disk to a compression format the GPU can use directly for rendering," said John Carmack, technical director at game maker id Software. "With two more available cores, a six-core system can transcode over 50 percent more texture data per second during game play than a four-core system, bringing new surfaces to full resolution quicker."
Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, thought it was interesting that Intel used quotes from the likes of Carmack as part of its industry marketing efforts. He said id Software makes some of the most visually demanding gaming applications on the market.
"That's the type of developer and those are the types of customers that Intel is aiming at here," King said. "It will be very interesting to see how Intel pursues this market. In the past, the company has tended to rely more on GPU specialists like Nvidia to handle some of the high-end processes, but with this new system they are pressing forward with their own GPU capabilities. It looks to me like Intel is making up for a lot of lost time."
AVX's Warm Reception
King is talking about the new Intel Advanced Vector Extension, or AVX, instructions which benefit 3D rendering and physics. AVX allows companies like Maxon Computer, a developer of professional 3D modeling, painting, animation and rendering solutions, to offer faster physics simulations, according to Maxon CTO Harald Scheider. That, he said, means faster previews and final rendering, and the ability to create even more complex scenes with more objects, more effects and higher resolutions.
The warm reception of AVX may not be good news for Nvidia.
"Intel is not a company that you like to have behind you. The company has a lot of resources, whether it's engineering talent or manufacturing capabilities or liquid assets that they can invest in new efforts," King said. "They have a lot of ways to make up lost ground and any number of companies have learned to their chagrin what it is to be pursued and overtaken by Intel."
