Intel Launches V8, counter to AMD 4×4 “QuadFather”
01.08.07 - 09:40pm
I thought I had seen it all when I saw the Quadfather with 4 cores and 4 SLI video cards. I couldn’t possibly imagine someone going further than that in an attempt to cram as much processing power and video churning power into a single case. Then again this is the day and age where going over the top is mandatory and Intel has answered the call with their V8 platform. The V8 platform is meant to be a direct counter to the future “OctoFather” that will launch with the new AMD quad-core Opterons. However, unlike the QuadFather series of motherboards, Intel has simply taken one of their server-grade motherboards, slapped on a few pretty lights and fans, an 8800GTX, and called it the V8. This is supposed to excite me how?
I have a few friends that are already running dual Cloverton rigs and they are great rigs for distributed computing with their 8 cores and loads of RAM but they make for terrible gaming machines. Intel is trying to compete against an enthusiast board with server grade components and it just doesn’t work. The 4×4 Quadfather supports extensive overclocking, standard DDR2 memory, future upgrade paths, and up to 4 Nvidia video cards in SLI. Compare this to the V8 featuring 2 Xeon quad-cores, FB-DIMM support, most likely little/no overclocking support, and no SLI and you begin to see gaping flaws in Intel’s Logic. I know the whole craze lately is to cram as many processors into a package and market it as “faster than the other guy” but when you have 8 cores and no multi-GPU support you run into issues. The 8800GTX is fast but a single-core can feed it especially at high resolutions, I guess the 7 other cores can work on ripping DVDs and other exciting tasks. I sure hope Intel revises their decision and finds a way to support standard DDR2 on their V8 platform and ATLEAST dual-Crossfire support. Seriously Intel, don’t shoot yourself in the foot while you are ahead. Enjoy the pictures, the flashy one is the V8, the plain one is my friends dual-Cloverton(notice the similarities?) and the AMD ones are another friends Quadfather.
Relevant Links
DailyTech Source
Quad FX-70 Build
Intel needs a fan on the memory eh ;)