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AMD Athlon MP 1800+ Processor Review
Lars Olsen writes: "Amdmb.com has posted a review of the new AMD Athlon MP 1800+ processor -- a big speed jump for the dual Athlon processor family with the new processor running at 1.53GHz. There are also 1600+ and 1500+ Athlon MPs available as well right away at stores around the World.
Dual AMD Goodness is now running just as fast as its desktop counterpart ! Here's a quote: 'Those of you who want to jump into the dual processing Athlon world will finally be able to do so with the knowledge that your processors are the top speed that the Athlon family has to offer. And for anyone who already has a Tyan Thunder or Tiger MP board and a pair of Athlon MP processors, you may just want to pop a couple of these new Athlon MP 1800+ CPUs in your system to boost performance.'" Some of the comments following yesterday's "dream system" article addressed dual-Athlon complications, so make sure you read before you buy.Update: 10/15 15:14 GMT by T : Check below for LinuxHardware.org's take on this chip, and Athlon MP systems in general as well.
Augustus writes "LinuxHardware.org takes a look at the Athlon MP platform under Linux and the newly released Athlon MP 1800+ is included. Covered in this article is not only the technology and performance of the AMD-760 MP chipset and the Tyan Thunder K7 motherboard but we also look at why anyone would consider a multi-processor system."
A few points:
Have you ever
a) done audio editing
b) done video editing
c) applied a filter to a 50MB+ image
d) compiled X
e) done any ray-tracing
etc, etc.
Any of these things can suck up vast amounts of horsepower and beg for more.
Also, 2.4 is getting somewhat more sane in recent releases.
Chris
I missed the part in this article that said everyone should have one in their home.
High-speed CPUs are very useful to our clients who run large database implementations with voice-recognition data-entry systems, FYI.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Note to web programmers, MySQL doesn't like it when it runs out of connections. Try increasing the connection pool size. Also, instead of having the page try to open the connection just once, and fall all over itself if the connection fails, try putting the connection request in a timed loop with a timeout of around 5 minutes, and a sleep(5) in the middle to help throttle a little. Your MySQL server will thank you, and your web page viewers will thank you.
Wow, your right.
New, faster technology is being brought out just to make programmers dumber. Its an evil conspiracy against us all!
Seriously, though, what is your definition of "bloatware"? Lets say I'm writing Quake4. I want to use C++ and lotsa nice OOD that's easier to write, easier to read, easier to expand, easier to debug, and easier to maintain.
Is that "bloatware"?
Sure, I coulda used assembly on the whole thing and it woulda been efficent and fast! You wouldn't need the super hardware!
Hope you don't want to mod it, or me to fix any bugs, though.
Maybe us developers like faster systems so we can implement software with better techniques to make technology grow? Sure it requires a little more hardware, but I wouldn't call it some evil conspiracy.
It doesn't matter what technology is out there, there will always be crap (bloatware).
BTW - You might want to buy this shirt.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
It always happens... you jump in and build your dream system, and immediately it's out of date. Oh well, a duallie 1.2ghzMP isn't anything to laugh at! Glad to hear that the TigerMP supports the new chip speeds out of the box, anyone know how high it will go?
A few notes on the TigerMP though: VERY picky on RAM, very picky on how it's seated (read: install memory before board is in your case, so you can wedge it in on a flat surface!), but since getting past that, it's been ROCK solid! Beautiful system I must say!
MadCow... always 500mhz behind the curve.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Why don't you take a look at the AMD Processor Roadmap to see more on their processors.... http://www.threecom.de/artikel/amdround1/ ... though the site is in german.... translate it with babelfish: http://babelfish.altavista.com
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
From your tone I'd expect you woudln't buy AMD anyway. However, if you did any research, you'd find the AMD's new numbering plan is actually conservative. Independant benchmark reviews have shown that the AMD 1800+ is actually more of an equivalent to the Pent 4 2GHz chip. But AMD chose a conservative threshold. Granted, the new Intel cores will boost performance a bit, but even then the AMD numbering plan is expected to be on target. Honestly - who cares what they call the chip - anyone with half a brain can find out the MHz value. But to what end? Me? I want to buy teh system which gives me the most performance for the least $$$ and right now that is an AMD chip hands down when you account for other CPU specific system costs and impacts (chipset, memory type needed, etc)
I honestly think AMD did what it HAD to do - their chips are faster at slower clock speeds and Intel managed to get folks thinking MHz was king. Now AMD has ot try and chance that thinking.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
While it's true that AMD CPUs are, uh, sensitive to cooling, I don't see that as a show-stopper. When you buy the parts to build your own Athlon system, as I did recently, you get plenty of warning to NOT TURN THIS ON WITHOUT A HEATSINK (yes, they shout, as they should).
Other CPUs are also very sensitive. What's rather surprising is how well Intel's P4 thermal shutdown works. I suspect AMD will get around to doing something similar. But in the meantime, I've attached a nice quiet (3800 RPM, not the 7200 RPM version) ThermoEngine to my Thunderbird, and it cruises at around 100 degrees F. Some newer/bigger heatsinks bolt to the motherboard, rather than clip on to the socket, which I suppose helps if you're really paranoid about its falling off. I use Motherboard Monitor to keep track of the temp via the Win98 system tray, and wish Linux distros would include similar capability out of the box (yeah, I know there's a way to build it in yourself...).
But then I do admit to using a 1 GHz Tbird rather than a faster one because I don't want that excess heat or power consumption.
Computer games are the ONLY applications that tax a home-users cutting-edge machine... At the moment, systems are a little ahead of gaming technology, but in a few months that won't be the case. Just because your parents don't play Dark Age of Camelot or AquaNox, don't assume Joe User doesn't want to.
But the kicker is that these games really don't need such horsepower. I'm willing to bet that if there were any pressure to get any of these games running on a more resource constrained system, like a game console, then lots of unnecessary internal fat would be trimmed right away. But there's no pressure to do so otherwise. And even if a game that could run just fine on a PII 400 requires a 1GHz processor, certain people seem to _like_ the justification for upgrading.
Hey all you /. people with a fab, here's a fun idea to piss off intel and AMD. Make the clock/speed irrelationship totally obvious.
:)
Imagine an x86 compatible processor that runs at a clock speed of 50ghz? That's right, fifty BILLION hertz! Now, that clock only ever hits a counter that lets the 8086-compatible processor cycle once every half to full second. You could get a whopping 1-2 IPS
You'd be able to make millions selling 8086's that use the first 640k of a bunch of 128 meg chips, and the first 40 megs of a 400 gig hard drive. Think of the possibilities!
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
Things like SOAP are a classic example. CORBA is a perfect way to get computers communicating, it uses IDL to describe the services, it works on any platform and works using a binary protocol which can be tunneled via HTTP if required.
SOAP is an ASCII based RPC mechanism, when was that a good idea ? So you can _read_ computer to computer transactions ? This is possible because we have cycles to burn and so doing two sets (or more) of textual conversion isn't seen as a bad thing(tm).
Outlook, Netscape 6,
XEmacs used to be considered the worlds largest piece of bloatware... its 4.2meg, its got email, news, web-browser, editor, mayan calendar and the kitchen sink in there....
Mozilla appears to be 16Meg at least (IE was 100Meg when I installed everything!) Is it 4 times as functional, 4 times as reliable... nope.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
A console is a very different environment. You can tune exactly for the hardware because there will be no variances. A PC game has to allow for 30 different graphic cards using APIs that supposedly make the different cards look the same to you but fail miserably. By the time you get done tweaking for the current morass of cards, a new generation of them is present with their own damn bugs. In the console world you deal with 2-3 environments IF you are allowed/it is practical to port given the current state of exclusive games. Also, if you've ever developed for a console, its very different, with a PC you have a lot of freedom to build how you want and what you want, in the console world you pretty much have to build around the hardware. This means you are constrained to build the same kind of engine for most every game you build on that console. If you don't you are just looking for different ways to cull the scene down to fit into the same miniscule space.
.</RANT>
The two environments are very different, and most of that fat can't be trimmed by wishing it away or blaming on programmers
As for bloatware, start modelling cloth, hair, IK, bump maps, and the hardware gets used again. The reason the games aren't doing it now is because they want the comfortable sales window.
Honestly pushing ultra-high-end features that cut your market to 4% of what it could be isn't a big selling point - good luck convincing your publisher to bring the game to market - and trying to build an engine to scale between low and high-end aggravates the bloat of PC vs. console problem even worse.
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
For your convenience, here is a list of other things you should avoid buying because they have "fatal flaws":
I am constantly amazed by people who claim that faster hardware leads to bad code as if we've been living in the Golden Age of quality code for the past few decades.
With current hardware, people are still writing code a lot of code in C and C++ for performance reasons which has lead to buffer overflows, segfaults, core dumps, general protection faults, and blue screens becoming generally accepted aspects of computer programming. Now that the hardware is finally becoming fast enough, maybe we can wean ourselves from C & C++ and move over to writing apps in Java or even C# instead of still dealing with the same issues that were solvable problems 20 years ago. Programmers have shown that it is practically impossible to deliver significantly problem free C/C++ code in a decent timeframe while programming environments like Java have shown the opposite. Once hardware creeps up enough we can rid ourselves of the problems of C & C++ once the performance gains are not worth the amount of bugs one has to deal with, which is already happening in lots of server applications.
Also once, hardware creeps up enough maybe some of the stuff that has been in research labs for the past 20 years can finally see some use. For instance microkernel are generally seen as a superior way to design an OS but have had difficulty taking hold due to performance reasons (although Windows NT is based on a -kernel architecure and MacOS X is also built on the Mach -kernel) which wil change once hardware advances make it possible for the performance difference to become acceptable.
A.I. being built into applications as well as the OS is another place where hardware performance and memory availability would play a big part in helping come to fruition.
How about voice recognition and face recognition being built into the applications you use?
How about bringing virtual reality to masses?
Or do you think that a 1 GHz CPU and 128 MBs of RAM is all the power a computer user will ever need?
Before AMDMB went splat, I read enough to see that in some tests (most notably memory), the Athlon XP (yes, SINGLE) beat the dual Athlon MP setup soundly. This is because the XP tested in a VIA KT266A motherboard, which has the edge in performance over the standard AMD760MP.
I think the Athlon MPs are awesome, but having a much cheaper, single-processor setup beat out a dually in some tests throws a bit of cold water on my upgrade lust.
shut up man
You're right, they could cut their polygon count down to a quarter of what it is now, precache almost everything (quadrupling the amount of hard disk space used) and probably use 50% of the CPU they use now. Game developers really are into severely optimizing their code, especially those programmers dealing with graphics; They're usually trying to find ways to optimize every single action.
On the other hand, as others have pointed out, the only way to really optimize the hell out of something is to write it in assembler. That makes any large codebase pretty much unusable.
The biggest thing game developers could do right now to improve game performance is to use really excellent multi-res in a game. Multi-res is a process where, when used to its fullest, lets you start with very high polygon models for everything, and the game engine will reduce the polygon count one vertex at a time, in some cases all the way down to a single polygon. When done right this will let you draw amazingly complex scenes without slowdown; The computer can tell more or less what you're looking at and decide what needs lots of polys.
Unfortunately, even those games which are using multires are using a low-rent version where they pre-reduce the vertex count, so you still "pop" from model to model. It's getting better, though.
The best thing about multires of course is that you don't have to precompute things, like BSP-based schemes, and that it will make the best use of your graphics hardware, while still running well and looking good on lower-end hardware. On the other hand, your graphics card had better handle lighting pretty damned well. Since you can get a GEForce MX400 card for less than $100 (Or a GF2 for about $150) that's really not much of an issue these days.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As a side note - an Intel motherboard will short out of you let the floppy drive slide onto the board whith the power on. Pouring coffee into a laptop makes interesting smells. Putting a CD-ROM in the microwave for 10 seconds if you want a real show.
Seriously here, you are missing out if this kind of thing actually sways you away. The biggest flaw, IMHO, is the AMD cores chips way too easy. I would really like a coating of nickel or copper like the Intel chips have. As an early adopter of the Chrome Orb (rev 1), the hard part was safely getting the heat sink on.
I've found that an AMD CPU will give you warning signs like lockups, kernel panics, and other goofy things when you loose a fan. My mainboard will shut down 5 sec after the post if the CPU fan is not spinning fast enough! Since they are good up to ~100C, using a motherboard monitor prog will go a long way to making sure it runs safely and shuts down before it gets into deep weeds. A copper heat sink goes a long way to passive heat removal as well in an emgerency situation.
This is like buying a car based on how well it runs without oil in the engine. I suspect my BMW would make for a fantastic video if I tried that too. DON'T DO THAT! I would not pay extra for an engine that would - like using synthetic oil to give an extra two minutes of use.
Buying a CPU that throttles back and paying extra for it -- that might be insurance, but I stopped buying retail boxed CPU's with the three year warr.... It would cost me more to ship an old 400mHz CPU back to Intel than to just replace it these days. I paid $99USD for a 1.4G CPU a couple weeks ago. At that price, these things are practically disposable.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Thresh's Firing Squad has a review of the Tyan Tiger with dual AMD Duron MPs, which is probably of equal or more interest to us geeks. For those of you who weren't aware, AMD Durons work in multiprocessor mode as well, and they're very, very close to Athlons in terms of performance (and obviously cheaper.)
What's your damage, Heather?
You forgot "solving systems of 50,000 equations." People always bring that one up, as unrealistic as it.
(Note: I'm not talkig about home use here) Actually, 50,000 equations is a rather small system. Any idea what weather prediction looks like? Something like 10 equations per grid point, with a grid that's something like 200x200x50=2,000,000. So you end up with a 20 million equation system. Also, many CAD software (eg finite element simulations) also need to solve *huge* systems. The faster the computer, the more precise the simulation (because you can afford more grid points).
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
In short, no, nor will 99.99% of the world's serious computer users, ie. those for whom a computer is a tool to be used rather than an end in itself. The 0.01% who do will likely not be doing it on a regular basis (eg. a couple of semesters of maths lectures). The 0.01% of those who do it on a regular basis (eg. maths professors/postgrads) can go out and get a multi-processor mobo and umpty-GHz CPUs - or more likely, will get their uni department or company to buy it.
In other words, no-one needs this unless they (a) need to compile mega-programs or (b) do heavy maths work. So no home user and most business users have no need.
I speak as someone who switched from a P233 to a Duron 800 only bcos the mobo broke - I refused to spend £80 on a new Pentium mobo when £200 would get a complete new system!
Grab.
Is the latest Athlon processor overkill for any normal computer user? Yup.
Is there any software currently available that requires this kind of speed? Nope.
Is there any sensible reason to upgrade your CPU? Nope.
Is my rational, analytical mind paying the slightest bit of attention to this argument? Nope.
It's all about the megahertz, baby! In an earlier generation, we were the people tinkering under the hoods of our Fords, trying to get a little more oomph out of a carburetor. Most of us don't need it, most of us have no idea what to do with it, but since when has that ever stopped us? More speed! More storage! More bandwidth! I want more!!!
Good job, AMD. Keep 'em coming.
My id is sneaking up behind my superego with a rock...
Here's the low down on the dual Athlon. It is incredibly fast for any server or workstation application. Of course the app has to be SMP capable which is why your seeing the new KT266A chipset single CPU system beat it out in some apps, but those are only non SMP capable apps. It is apples and oranges. Yes, I would like to see some chipset improvements to the 760MP. The latency is too high. Perhaps the 760MPX will address some of this. I would very much like VIA to commit to their dual Athlon chipset, but they have not as of yet. Another issue is heat. While they do use the cooler running Palomino core, they are still quite hot for say a 1-2U rack. The shrink to .13 micron early next year will eliminate that issue and should hasten adoption by larger computer makers. For the time being though it is a relatively cheap solution for those who need it, and is a blazingly faster web server for those who know how to set it up. Check out my review for more, my site is still up, and we didn't copy anyones site idea.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
The only thing that matters is as follows (in rank order):
1. Bandwidth - face it, email and the web are king. Unless you're a gamer.
2. Video Card - if you're a gamer, you're better off spending your money on this and making sure it has tons of cache.
3. Sound Card - if you're a gamer, you're better off spending the rest of your money on this. The rest of us don't care, so skip this.
4. Memory - more, more, more. Yes, even more.
5. Bus speed - more channel so those CPUs can actually send more data.
6. Hard disk - you really should have more RAM, but once that's crammed, get better seek and access times here.
6. Chip speed - WAY DOWN HERE! - yes, if you maxed on all the above, then you MIGHT notice the difference between a 1GHz and 1.8GHz system. Otherwise, unless you're a graphics artist, YOU SHOULDN'T WASTE YOUR MONEY!
Naturally, when people review systems, they compare older systems with slower bus speed, less RAM, slower HD, and cheaper cards to new systems with faster H/W. Buy the motherboard and cards yourself and pop in a slower chip and spend the extra money on RAM - you will get way more bang for your buck that way.
Aside - I own AMD shares, so sure, go buy these speed demons! But don't do it because you have to, do it because you know you just like BIG NUMBERS.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?