Thinkpads Forum

Do you think we are going to see a quad core W500 any time soon ?

Unlikely. The W500 can barely handle the 35W dual-core. An extra 10W for quad-core is unlikely to work. See my other posts.

Some time after new year I guess (and hope)
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intel-Pl ... 8310.shtml

It looks to me like the article on says that the dual cores will be 35W - not the quad cores.

This link is better:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/displa ... ktops.html
img]http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/news/200 ... specs_.png[/img]

What can it barely handle about the 35W CPU? Mine runs nice and cool, even with the CPU and dedicated GPU maxed out. Left half of keyboard gets a little warm, but I think it would live with another 10W of heat, especially with the fan speed bumped up a little.

comptiger5000 wrote:What can it barely handle about the 35W CPU? Mine runs nice and cool, even with the CPU and dedicated GPU maxed out. Left half of keyboard gets a little warm, but I think it would live with another 10W of heat, especially with the fan speed bumped up a little.

Have you checked the CPU and GPU temperatures? Mine gets up to 87C or more at full blast in an air-conditioned room. Substantially hotter if docked. Lenovo informs me that this is normal.

Aleq wrote:This link is better:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/displa ... ktops.html
img]http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/news/200 ... specs_.png[/img]

Those are desktop chips, of course. It would be great if the Socket P products are introduced at those prices and specs.

I haven't checked the temps, but I will do that later. I doubt it gets that hot, however, as the machine itself isn't normally all that hot under load.

Specs for sure. The prices is however something different as we know...

No way, as long as with that small fan built in, the Quad heat would burn 500 to fire

I personally disagree. It's about the wattage and it's now obvious Intel can make 25 and 35W CPUs. I bet in 2009/Q1 W500s with quadcore are available

its all about Intel

i believe 2Q 2009 we could see W500 with quad core

Bashar wrote:its all about Intel

i believe 2Q 2009 we could see W500 with quad core

Are these quad core processors for notebooks Socket P - or are they just desktop processors (S775) crammed into notebooks?

I could really use a quad core, as long as I can actually load all four cores without a meltdown.

period3 wrote:

Bashar wrote:its all about Intel

i believe 2Q 2009 we could see W500 with quad core

Are these quad core processors for notebooks Socket P - or are they just desktop processors (S775) crammed into notebooks?

I could really use a quad core, as long as I can actually load all four cores without a meltdown.

IIRC i read somewhere in a thread that talks about laptops quad cores not desktops

i'm not 100% sure though

The more I look at that chart, the more I think it is inaccurate. Some of the parts marked 35W are versions of parts (like the P8600) that we know are 25W parts. I'll bet that others - like the Q9100 and the QX9300 - are in fact 45W parts.

The Q9000 is an interesting introduction. Intel might be able to do a 2GHz quad core at 35W using current technology. They can do 1.86GHz at 17W TDP. On the other hand, how many notebook apps are there that will do better on a quad core at 2.0 GHz than a dual core at 2.8GHz? A few - but not many.

Yeah, the 2ghz quad core would only help for video and virtualization, same places where 4-8gb of ram helps.

Last I checked, the W500 was a WORKSTATION class notebook.

If you've ever done software development, compiles can take a long time. It's trivial to get parallelism from build as well.. I could probably make 64 cores cook at 100% for a long while running unit tests or make. Welcome to UNIX, where multi CPU has been the norm for 15+ years.

Rendering, especially raytracing, can take all the cores you can throw at it.

I count about 20 apps open on my desktop machine and all of them are doing things. With plenty of cores, waiting for execution time is never a problem and responsiveness and latency are maintained without cutting into throughput due to scheduling.

So please, dear Lord.. you folks need to stop telling me/us what we need based on your light workloads.

As for fitting a quad in the 35W power envelope, I think it is easily possible and wouldn't be shocked if we see it on the next iteration from Lenovo. And that is when I purchase my next ThinkPad...

Just to join kev009, let´s also not forget that a plenty of sci applications for raw computation, simulation, visualization etc. are designed to be run multithreaded, the more cores, the better I know, if you want to run such things, better get a workstation, but desktop workstations are not really a solution for people who travel a lot and need to be mobile, flexible with their work.

A side note: For that reason I very much like the idea of (nVidia) CUDA and that it starts to be available with mobile gpus (nVidia). GPUs are really an amazing source of computational power (especially for multithreaded apps).

Off topic: I heard about a guy undervolting his W700 with quad-core for better battery life...

The problem is that many of these applications (admittedly not all of them - but most) will saturate the FSB on the W500 - so more threads/cores may not mean much more performance.

Hm, that´s an interesting point. So, we will need faster FSB (or just another platform than the current one) to catch up with the performance potential of the additional cores. I can hardly imagine doubling the FSB within next few months (on the mobile market) Anyway, even if doable, that´s definitely not the nearest future of mobile Quad-Core implementation. Another point: even with saturated FSB, if parallel-processed, the task would be accomplished faster cet. par., right

Well, the endgame is to completely remove the FSB from the equation. AMD has been doing this since 2003 with the Opteron, and Intel just now decided it was a good idea with Nehalem. From the roadmaps I've seen, we wont get this in notebooks(Centrino) until Q3 2009 with codename Calpella.

According to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fu ... processors

the next quad will be 45W TDP. This is interesting, because it is clocked slower than the current quads (though higher FSB). Looking at the price (~$348), intel intends this to be a mainstream CPU. I'd bet that they could get the same chip in the 30W region but the yields would not be great therefore cost would rise and demand fall like current extreme products. There still may be some confusion on what is a desktop part or not, so I'm not making a call until the products come to market this January.

kev009 wrote:Well, the endgame is to completely remove the FSB from the equation. AMD has been doing this since 2003 with the Opteron, and Intel just now decided it was a good idea with Nehalem. From the roadmaps I've seen, we wont get this in notebooks(Centrino) until Q3 2009 with codename Calpella.

According to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fu ... processors

the next quad will be 45W TDP. This is interesting, because it is clocked slower than the current quads (though higher FSB). Looking at the price (~$348), intel intends this to be a mainstream CPU. I'd bet that they could get the same chip in the 30W region but the yields would not be great therefore cost would rise and demand fall like current extreme products. There still may be some confusion on what is a desktop part or not, so I'm not making a call until the products come to market this January.

The Nehalem based quad core processor has a higher TDP because it includes the memory controller, whereas Core 2 Duo's have the memory controller part of the NB TDP. The actual system power consumption should be lower.

"20 programs running and all doing something"

I do not think so. Even if you did you would be a very rare case indeed.

@Greg Gebhardt
20 apps isn't even that many... I'm running 10 apps+background tasks on this old T42 and I'm not even doing development ATM: Thunderbird, Explorer, foobar2000, firefox *2 windows *20 tabs each, mirc, putty x3, skype, digsby, VMware, photoshop, dreamweaver; soundcard dsp, symantec endpoint protection, ati, active protection, etc,etc. It works, but it is a big PITA when one of them blocks... something several cores would eliminate.

It is much more pleasant to to use computers the way I do in Linux, which is a proper multitasking OS. Virtual desktops keep everything organized. On my dual Opteron workstation, I don't even feel it. I can run a build, with 5 parallel compiles, listen to music, browse the net, and carry out a chat at the same time with ease. Not to mention the Linux kernel is highly threaded and runs virtually everything that matters at kernel level in a separate thread...

Again, butt out and use your laptop as a glorified netbook. Don't tell us what we need from workstation class hardware. That is what the W series is. We constantly push the envelope. Please, don't speak unless you know what you are talking about, and don't tell ME what I DO. WTF..?

@Paul386
Hmm, AFAIK we won't see the integrated memory controllers until Capella platform in Q3 09.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nehalem_%2 ... chitecture
4 core (8 SMT), 8MB cache, DDR3 mmmmmm