Never before in the history of computing has computers been so fast, for so cheap.

Early last year, Intel announced that they were coming out with a new product in the start of 2007, Q1 that would be called Clovertown. Clovertown would change a lot of things, primarily, the number of processors that you could have on one chip, then double the amount that one board could handle. It’s more important than just that however, since Clovertown is based on older core technology, and as a Xeon style product it has a lot of distribution for datacenters: it’s cheaper.

Clovertown wasn’t the only chip on the block however, as many of you know, the QX6700 was released by Intel as a Core 2 Extreme, but is now coming out with a Core 2 Quad.

Running a QX6700 will no doubt provide better performance than a single Clovertown such as the 5310, but when you start to escalate up to two 5310’s, there should be a difference that makes more sense to go with the dual Clovertowns. The Core 2 Quad however will consume even less power than the QX6700, with the Clovertown getting the same treatment as well.
771 was to be the socket of choice for Intel to release the Clovertown, and the QX6700/QX6800 is a socket 775 chip, so the following features must be kept in mind when building a system with either processor:

1. You are dealing with a single cpu that has two dual core chips mashed together
(The Q in the Intel names are not to be mistaken for the X6700 which is a dual)
Two Woodcrests=1 Clovertown
Two Clovertowns=1 OctaCore System
Two Kentfields=1 Qx6700
Two Conroes=1 Qx6800
2. Current 775 socket northbridges do not allow for a dual cpu architecture, you must go with 771

3. Current 775 quad core chips are limited, with the production runs on the 65nm process seeming to be sparse and producting really, really expensive chips

4. Not until the next chipset, Clarksboro will you see the data contention of the chipset be alleviated, and even then it’s a new chip as well, the Tigerton.

These chips come in a variety of different cache options, and your application will of course dictate how much cache you want. This is the same issues as the Celeron, with some applications doing better with less cache, and even some operating systems doing better with less cache because of locking issues with more cache (?).

The benchmarks are clear, that when you stack an 8 core system against a 4 core system, there is just too much concurrency to deny a lead for a multi threaded application. Making the Freebsd kernel, or the linux kernel are very important tasks that show the incredible difference that cores make on a build.

I won’t deny however the naysayers of their two cents that some parts of the build process are not able to be built concurrently, and you must wait for one dependent library to finish before the rest can be spawned.

In short, there is a large difference for price in which market you go with, and varying levels of performance to boot. Intel won’t deny that using 2xWoodcrest will eat up more power than the single chip Qx6800, but there is more performance for multithreaded apps.

The difference is real, with two systems built for profit (and for mistakes made):

4 Core 775 system=$2,600
8 Core 771 system=$2,400