Eight cores, or last warning

On Friday, Moscow officially congratulated Intel Xeon 5600 and 7500 series processors on their birthday. There were a lot of good people and companies, literate and clever words were spoken. The main report was heard from the mouth of Intel's vice-president Kirk Skaugen (Kirk Skaugen), and it was decorated with (a report, not Kirk), small demo sessions performed by Alexei Rogachkov. I listened and did not believe my ears. No, you just imagine - the six-core Nehalem (Xeon L5640) fits into a 60-watt heat pack! This is two times less than that of the Pentium 4 Prescott with one core! Yes, the core frequency of this Xeon model is relatively low (2.26 on the passport, 2.66 with Turbo Boost), but is it worth specifying that the trichigahertz Prescott is even less powerful by an order of magnitude?

The top model in the 5600 line, operating at a passport frequency of 3.33 GHz, has a heat pack of 130 watts, but this beast is permissible. The same with the EIGHT X7560, and I just have no words to express delight from this miracle of technology with a 24-megabyte third-level cache. When I remember about the eight-core L7555 with a heat pack of 95 watts ... No, you cannot write all these tenderness here, otherwise you will misunderstand me.

I was pleased that for server applications the problem of multi-core support in principle does not exist. Four cores, eight cores, two processors, eight processors, sixteen - as much as you give, we will load as much. There, the primary difficulties are others - energy consumption and heat removal. But the new Xeons are the forerunners of the Core i7. More precisely, the X5680 is already slightly trimmed and sold under the name Core i7-980X. You do not need to be a prophet to predict the appearance of an eight core in the very, that is, in the foreseeable future. Probably, Alexey Rogachkov already comes up with the script of the TOI presentation, but, admiring it beforehand, I cannot hide the alarm.
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After all, quad-core models are no longer what is available - they have finally moved into the category of middle-end, and many are already looking forward to the Pentium Quad-Core. Buying a new computer with two cores is already considered a sign of unhealthy conservatism. Meanwhile, the share of software and even games with the full support of the four cores remains, to put it mildly, insufficient. Even very eminent developers, without knowing it, follow a pattern of behavior that is beautifully described in Grebenshchikov’s song:

My friend is a musician,
From just waiting for the right day,
To take your bow
And play something for me.
And our whole world
Then dry up on the vine,
And if not,
That world is a big pig;
But today is an extremely thoughtful day,
And yesterday it was raining, laziness was playing.
Maybe tomorrow; Yes, for sure tomorrow;
To the glory of music
Today we start with brandy ...

That is, tomorrow - certainly. And today forgive me ...

And now there are the first users of six-cores. There are not many of them, because processors for $ 999 cannot be massive, but with the release of the eight-core model, the price will fall sharply, if not earlier. And what, tens, hundreds of thousands of computers around the world because of the pretty laxity of software developers will have to work not at full speed?

And most importantly, where does this slowness come from? Does anyone really believe Intel will return to single-core solutions with astronomical frequencies? Well, or in the appearance of a unit in the computer, which, as a person from Kemerovo, will come and fix everything?

I really want to believe that the entry into the six-core solution market will be the last bell, after which even very lazy guys will understand the logic of the industry’s development and will urgently work on improving their creations in this very direction.

Because to continue in the same vein is simply indecent.