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First Benchmarks of AMD Hammer Prototype
porciletto writes "As seen on Ace's Hardware, this article features Quake 3 benchmarks comparing an 800 MHz ClawHammer sample to Athlon MPs at 800 MHz and 1667 MHz, as well as a Willamette Pentium 4 (256 KB L2, 400 MHz FSB) at 800 MHz and 1600 MHz. The benchmark results indicate a 40% performance increase over an Athlon MP for the ClawHammer. Additionally, the 800 MHz ClawHammer manages to tie (actually outperform by 1 FPS) the 1667 MHz Willamette Pentium 4."
They tested some software which had been compiled for 64 bit mode. With the large number of 64 bit registers the hammer has there should be some significant speed improvement.
Expect a massive FUD attack from Intel in the coming months as they try to convince the world that their chips aren't really inferior to those from AMD.
they are supposed to be out somewhere within october - december, but in very limited numbers..(something like 10,000) with early 2003 still being slim on chips. production is supposed to pick up Q2 of 2003. Thats word around the campfire anyways. we all know how definate any of this will end up being.
adventure-today.com
I can't think of a good reason to justify a upgrade to 64bit. Its killing me, not to have a reson to get one... or four.
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
is "Opteron" (see http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma tion/0,,30_118_4699,00.html)
I don't take any notice till i see the notepad.exe benchmark.
I currently have two Intel P4 machines; my laptop (Inspiron 8200) and my machine at work. I would rather have gotten an AMD chip in both cases, but on the laptop, I was shopping for features and had to get an Intel processor based machine to get the other features that I wanted, and with the work machine, I took what they gave me.
Having two AMD machines at home, a Tbird 1400 and an Athlon XP 1700+, I'm seriously underimpressed by the P4 performance. As far as I can tell, the only reason to buy Intel anymore is out of pure inertia; they bring nothing to the table.
ps -- where is the obligatory Beowulf cluster commentary on this??? I am shocked and appalled at this apparent oversight by my fellow /.'ers...
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Why is Quake the benchmark of a good processor? Maybe computers can do something other than cache intense graphics?
Gah.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
If you have problems with that, then put the cover back on your computer. And I don't think you are going to be cooking very much because microwave ovens are designed to put out microwaves at several hundreds of watts. I don't think that's how these processors are designed.
*dread*
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
If you manage to get through the slashdotting, the story in the tecchannel web pages is amazing. The prototype Clawhammer, while limited to 800 MHz, performed shockingly well on the few, but varied, benchmarks they subjected it to. It's interesting that both Intel and AMD teach the same lesson, that MHz doesn't determine performance. Unfortunately for Intel, they demonstrate it by the P4 not running as fast as the MHz would imply, where the AMD chips run far faster than MHz would imply.
I can't wait for these chips to get out there.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Normally I would be a sarcastic dick and say 'about when Mozilla 1.0 comes out', but that won't work anymore.
Don't worry, though. You can still refer to indefinitely long time periods as 'about when the Hurd is released'.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Can that hammer smash a block of itanium without breaking?
$ yes >
AMD has effectively done that, if you've read any of the technical documents to see what they've done. The 64-bit mode has twice as many registers that are completely general-purpose (as opposed to the old CISC design of intel where one was a loop counter etc.) They've only implemented the simpler intructions in 64-bit effectively making it a 64-bit RISC. Since the K6, AMD processors have been superscalar RISC internally with a translation layer which breaks down complex x86 instructions into simpler RISC ones. It's still there for running legacy code, and completely transparent, i.e. it operates concurrently and with no performance penalty with the 64-bit instructions. The x86-32 registers are effectively just the top-right quarter of the x86-64 registers. Go and read AMD's docs. It's all there (and has been for the last 2 years).
Stick Men
the chip was locked at 800Mhz because it's a developer's sample. The actual chips, when they're released, will be at higher clock rates. if an 800Mhz Hammer can spank a Wilhelmette clocked at twice the speed, what will happen when the Mhz field is leveled a bit?
i could live a little longer in this prison
As has been said, Quake is only relevant to the chips concerned in that it only tests the 32-bit compatability of the Opteron. I would have like to see some tests that demonstrated the advantage of 64-bit processors over 32-bit processors. Granted, the reviewers only wanted to show benchmearks that the populous was familar with and they were pressed for time. Let's give them a break for that.
Nahtanoj
Maybe that company was intel? ;)
actually - dunno...
"This is a server chip. Benchmark it using a database, a web server, number crunching, etc."
In case you don't know, Clawhammer is meant for desktops/workstations. Hell, there's even a mobile version of it in the pipeline! Then we have Clawhammer DP (dual-processor) and Sledgehammer that are meant for servers.
Please, get your facts straight before opening your mouth!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Not to take either side...
But if Intel was going to supercede a messy architecture like X86, I wish they'd done something better than IA64. While the jury is still out on the merits of IA64, it has some of the marks of Internal Politics on it. It sounds like a VLIW camp inside Intel sold some management on a renamed version of the basic approach, and the project gathered Corporate Inertia.
At the same time, it doesn't sound as if all of the VLIW problems have been solved on the compiler side, so it's not clear that IA64 is doing any more than a clean, modern architecture cable of OOO execution could have done.
Out of the Hammer series, I'm reminded/hoping for the phenomenon described in "Soul of a New Machine", where they managed to clean and extend the old architecture at the same time. By the time they were done, the old architecture was an ugly wart on the side of a new clean one. The fear was the new being an uglier wart on the side of an already ugly one, and they avoided it.
I don't know enough about Hammer to know what the case is. I have the documents, but haven't made time to read them. I've also heard some rumblings that some of the performance improvements to IA64 involve de-purifying it's VLIW to pick up OOO techniques. I've heard that VLIW was an attempt to sidestep OOO because those prolems were feared, but in the meantime the industry has learned how to do OOO pretty well.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
No, it outperforms the 1600 by 1FPS. Still quite the feat. If this thing releases at even 1200mhz, you're looking at something comparable to a P4 2.4ghz. The site does say they stated they were aiming for 1.6ghz (nice!), but we'll see if that actually happens.
It's nice to see that the industry isn't playing too much of the "more is faster" game, at least as much as they used to. When an 800mhz part is comparable to a 1600mhz, you've got to wonder what intel isn't doing to optimize.
...doesn't have the same ring.
~jeff
As the other guy said clawhammer is the consumer chip. Also Quake 3 is an excellent test of memory usage, bus speed, and in general overall performance of a computer. It uses everything the computer can give it, and more. Hmm can wait to start benchmarking computers with DOOM 3
It's just a sample. AMD released the Clawhammer processor to manufacturers for demonistrations and testing, so they can develop the platform, so that, get this, benchmark results would not be released. Let's face it - who in their RIGHT MIND would benchmark an 800MHz CPU against the latest and greatest processors?
Obviously, these guys did. AMD will NOT be happy about this.
Also remember that the Opteron will be running at MUCH higher clock speeds upon release. I'd guess above the 2GHz range for sure, but AMD doesn't want anybody to know that. This also suggests that this lil' 800MHz sample could be very overclockable.
This is AMD's weapon that can really take a LOT of market share. Microsoft already have a Windows XP build ported to the Opteron/x86-64 platform. The Opteron runs cooler, as well.
One thing that disappoints me - I have not seen ONE PCI64 slot on any of these test boards!! I hope that this'll be worked out before release.
While I agree that there have been some horrible chipsets for AMD CPUs, there are also some good ones. Most chipsets are pretty decent these days. The last couple of AMD based machines that I built, with Asus mainboards (K7V266E) have been rock solid, doing even video capture with a BT848 card (a good acid test of a mainboard) for hours on end without any problems. Some Intel based mainboards can't do as well.
When switching to an unknown mainboard, I go with a manufacturer I know to build good stuff, and make sure I beat the hell out of the mainboard before my return policy time runs out.
I know far too many people who have built AMD boxes - people who certainly know what they are doing - to have them crash and burn on a number of applications and games. The problem is so widespread across the AMD platform that the processor is the only logical point of failure.
I am one of those people, and I tend to disagree with you. I had a machine subject to random lockups and general disintergration of system integrity (on linux!). It was a K6-2 on a FIC-VA503+. The motherboard had issues. My friend who went with a nearly idenitcal system but used an older FIC motherboard with a higher stepping never had any problems, and is still using the machine today, five years later (six?).
I am not saying that the K7 is definitely not to blame, but it is also not the only logical point of failure. The amount of poorly tested crap that comes out for the K7 is a suspect for higher failure rates.
OTOH, the last two AMD machines I have built, a TBird 1.0 GHz on an Asus A7V133A, and an XP 1800+ on an A7V333 have worked flawlessly.
Plus, I don't think I need to bring up the issue of the flaming AMD Athlon in too much detail to get everybody's minds on that Toms Hardware video. There have been rebuttals and claims of inaccuracy from the AMD camp, but for the record:
Removing the heatsink/fan from a P4 chip caused the machine to BSOD.
Removing the heatsink/fan from an Athlon caused it to BURST INTO FLAMES AND MELT
I don't care what the details of the situation were, I have absolutely zero desire to run a chip that has the possibility of catching fire. There's an old saying that I'm rather fond of, it goes "The bitterness of poor quality lasts much longer than the sweetness of low cost." If you buy AMD simply because it's cheaper... eh. Your machine, your loss.
This is no longer a valid argument. If you are willing to shell out the $40 for a quality Mobo, then you are now likely to get thermal protection. If my heatsink falls off with my Asus A7V333, the chip does not fry. However, this fall would crush my All-In-Wonder 7500, which I am more worried about.
Yeah, I remove the heatsink from my machine while it's running all the time...
I saw the video too, and while it's amusing, I fail to see how this could even happen. The heatsinks on AMD CPUs is on so hard you need to work at it to get it off. Anybody who has one "accidentally" fall off didn't put it on right in the first place.
Your car (ANY car) will burst into flames if you remove the gas line from the engine and point it at the exhaust manifold while it's running with the engine hot. Same situation; something that's NEVER going to happen in real life, unless the thing was put together wrong in the first place.
BTW, what I do most is video encoding, mainly VCD and SVCD using TMPGEnc. For that application, the Athlon XP 1700+ (running at 1.47 GHz) absolutely BLOWS AWAY the P4 running at 1.6 GHz. I mean, it's a LOT faster, and the P4 has more RAM and everything so it has no excuse. AMD might finish a job in 2.5 hours and the P4 would take well over 3 hours to do the same job.
Don't ask me about game performance, hell, I don't even have Solitare loaded.
A good, really good intel chip is the 1.6 GHz Northwood. They are ~$137 on pricewatch, and have incredible overclocking capabilities.
Most people are sorely dissapointed with their 1.6a if it only overclocks to 2.2 GHz (stable with standard cooling). Most people can ramp it up to between 2.4 and 2.6.
At that speed, it can smoke everything AMD is offering, and at a low cost. Lots of the OCers are buying the P4 1.6a with an Asus P4S533 motherboard.
Basically the smallest reasonable Athlon multiprocessor machine is 4U.
WTF have you been smoking, I can get dual processor 1U Athlon MP designs from litterally dozens of vendors! Many beowolf clusters of late have been based on this exact configuration, a couple gigs of ram and 2 high speed Athlons in 1U is a sick computation density that can only be rivaled by the new 1U dual Alpha boxes from hpaq, but those cost about $25-40,000 so the Athlons still easily win on performance/cost/space considerations.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'll start this by saying YES, I work for Intel. Hate me...whatever.
/.ers so ignorant on something like the computer scene. I'm talking about all the AMD LOVE and Intel hatred posts that always follows a news article about CPU's.
But its SOOOOO disheartening to see my fellow nerds and
I can understand the love for Linux. A group of people programming for free, fighting a giant like Microsoft. But why should AMD garner the same sort of love and respect? AMD is a giant corporation itself, willing to screw you over. They'd charge you $2000 per processor if Intel wasn't around (and yes Intel would do the same).
Last week Intel dropped the prices of its processors. AMD was forced to follow suit, dropping their prices about 2 days later. Did the Slashdot community cheer Intel?
So along comes this news...AMD Opteron 800 MHz beats a Pentium 4 1.6 GHz by one frame pre second. I guess I fail to see why everyone is so excited?
I'll wager ANYTHING that when it ships, a 800MHz Opteron will sell for at LEAST twice the price of a Pentium 4 1.6Ghz.
Why do I even bother.
Armand Hammer
Cheers,
Jonathan
Yeah, I remove the heatsink from my machine while it's running all the time...
I saw the video too, and while it's amusing, I fail to see how this could even happen. The heatsinks on AMD CPUs is on so hard you need to work at it to get it off. Anybody who has one "accidentally" fall off didn't put it on right in the first place.
Haha... what I worry about is catastrophic "smash the flathead screwdriver through the motherboard while trying to loosen the clip" failure.
or also, catastrophic "heatsink clip breaks off the cheap plastic socket notch upon removal" faliure.
Much more likely...
If anything, I wish AMD would do more in the way of promoting bolted heatsinks rather than the cheesy clips.
A fake newspaper reports:
Senator F. Bar R-51st state announced the drafting of a new technology bill. It requires that all CPU chips conform to a regulated speed quantifier. This will allow all chips to be able to be easily compared with one another to end industry confusion. The unit, abbreviated IHz (Intel Hertz), was developed by the Intel Corporation. They have lobbied to get this standard, which will be controled and policed by a board of independent persons funded by Intel, adoped into Federal law....
ughh..
They had access to the machine for only about an hour. The machine already had Windows XP on it. They had QIII and a couple other things with them. Read the damn article.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
In the real world, where people dont usually just run the few micro-benchmarks Motorola's CPUs excel in, you need high speed execution of long strings of dependent serial instructions ... trying to improve performance by architecture alone runs into diminishing returns awfully fast, only MHz helps there in the end. Thats AMD's bread and butter, and Im pretty sure they realise that.
...
As everything in life you can go overboard of course, Intel might have gone a little overboard to one side (too many pipeline stages) but Motorola is too far overboard on the other side to play a part in the high performance processor buessinuess (which is why Apple will probably have to switch to IBM wholesale in the near future, especially with Motorola giving up trying to keep their semiconductor processes competetive for high speed logic).
AMD probably wont close the MHz gap, but they do not intend to lag it to the same extent as before
Still, I'm eagerly awaiting the ClawHammer release. Every x86 box I've built for the last 5 years has been pure AMD, and I've been quite happy with them.
i just find it weird for the community to really compare the new hammer with the p4 product line of intel. if the main reason behind the hammer is to directly compete in the server line, then it should be the hammer vs itanium2 vs sparc vs pa-risc vs alpha vs powerpc. if you are going to compare it with p4, a professional will not even take you seriously.
why use a some low form benchmark. although i understand that the current systems are in prototype, the benchmark should reflect something of the server world including but not limited to tpc, spec, etc. i would really love seeing the performance of hammer in a oracle/sql/db2 or other database benchmark. i would love seeing the hammer handling ssl transactions and others.
with regards to amd using x86 with compatibility to 32bit, would it be dumb if you would run some non native applications? this means that amd anticipates that companies will not optimize their software to run on pure 64bit platform. this may be an indication that the initial design is not intended for the server product line. running 64bit does not make you compete in the server arena!!!!! the server market is a very different ball game compared to the consumer - cpu is not the prime reason.
and x86 is obsolete. it is not the efficient out there so it is time for a major change in the hardware world.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
6GB has table?
You've better have a *really* big memory, or you'll suffer terrible performance due to pagin.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
As I understand, it's called Yamhill, and it's basically a hedge against the fact that no one paid attention to Itanic and there aren't a whole lot of people lined up to get their hands on McKinley either.
/Brian
As a fellow ECE, I'll give Intel a mark in the "innovative" column on IA-64. But the concepts of predication, EPIC and compiler-time optimizations we're NOT good enough to even make the new architecture competitive when not considering x86 compatibility. And Intel needs to be smacked for all those stupid extensions -- it's funny to see AMD accomodating them with less effort than Intel.
Alpha has always been the "64-bit RISC of RISCs" and they had binary translation techology c/o FX!32 so Linux/x86, NT/x86 and VMS/VAX apps could run on Linux/Alpha, NT/Alpha and VMS/Alpha, respectively. It was not only original, but using binary translation on the same OS, but different architecture, works far better for compatibility in software than general (any OS) architectural compatibility in hardware/microcode! With Alpha 364 at 0.13um would be kicking IA-64 butt. I mean, 3-year old Alpha 264 0.25um processors beat IA-64 at the same clock speeds!
Anyhoo, as a fellow EE/ECE, please read this post I made a few weeks ago and let me know what you think. It is entitled "How AMD and its partners are putting x86 back on the right track ... ". IA-64 was an ideal and novel concept, one that is not so good based in reality where good branch prediction is better than predication, and run-time optimization is just as important as compile-time. The Alpha 364 team predicted the "problems" with IA-64, which came true.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
Apparently you haven't been reading the intel 'roadmap' for CPU performance/temperature. they've estimated that within ten years heat dissipation requirements on a CPU will be in the 1000 watt range. Already a modern CPU is almost double the heat displacment of an Easy bake oven. We've all laughed at the guy who cooked an egg on his Athlon, but you do have a good point. the case on a computer would provide more than adequate shielding, not to mention the heat sink. However, even if a 2400 mhz CPU was kicking out 100 watts of microwave energy it still would be barely enough to defrost a chicken. Most of the wasted wattage is converted to heat, not radio or microwave, so truly this is a non-issue.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
You've been living in a cave, right?
Yes, _some_ Athlon chipsets did have serious problems with early versions of the 2.4 kernel. But this has been fixed for a very long time. I know this, because I'm using one of those chipsets. Be sure that you're actually using a recent kernel, and that you've gotten the latest BIOS updates for your motherboard.
Also, there were never any problems with running Linux 2.2 on an Athlon.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
I bet they thought no one that has more than a dozen brain cells would even consider benchmarking an 800. Wasn't realy a benchmark more of quick peek at speed. a Real benchmarking is concerned with what tunes-it up also. There is probably more that could have been wrung out of the chip, motherboard and bios issues ect. All we realy know right now is that it runs with the big dogs out of the box. A little later we'll find its sweet-spot.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
This is slightly off-topic and a shameless plug, but it might be interesting to people visiting Linux Tag.
I'm giving a talk saturday at 14.00 about the hammer (a.k.a. x86-64), talking about the machine and whats in it. I will also tell a lot about how the port was done, how we worked with AMD and so on.
I worked on binutils, gcc and all sorts of other porting for SuSE over the last 18 months.
If you have any questions related to the hammer on Linux, come talk to me at the show or send me an email.
Bo Thorsen,
bo at suse dot de
Difference being that the ClawHammer will come out at about 1GHz and the Willamette will then be at the 3Ghz mark, and soon be replaced by the 90 nanometer Prescot introduced with a 667 FSB and a 3.2GHz clock speed. AMD has recently run into some performance and heat problems with their next line of .13 micron 32 bit CPU's despite the smaller die and reduced power requirements. The processor (x86) offers little performance gain over its additional Athlon XP line that is at its max potential (as opposed the 10GHz max potential of the existing P4 line). The Itanium 2 benchmarks show a great deal of potential as well. I wouldn't say AMD has Intel's processors beat. I think Intel will pull a sufficient lead on AMD over the next 6 months.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I think it is very honorable (can't find a better word) that you are supporting your company, and I am fully aware that yes, given the choice, AMD will over-charge for their processors too -- BUT:
1) Intel's tactics, previously *and* recently, has not been too wise. one of the most important of this in RAMBUS: Intel basically said that (back in the first days when RAMBUS came out) we are going forward w/ RAMBUS. everyone knows that it's a M$-like move, everyone knows that it's b/c intel is getting a huge chunck of $$ from RAMBUS, and nobody liked it. Did Intel care? no; in fact, Intel stopped licensing VIA for making SDRAM / DDR chipsets; People like me looked around -- who is supporting DDR? well, AMD is...
2) Technically, Hammer makes more sense: sorry but from a user point of view (user as in programmer, IT admin, etc) -- Hammer makes like easier than IA-64; i mean, if you are gonna make such a drastic move away from IA32 (which, i admit, sucks bad), then do it slowly! What is the difference between migrating from IA-32 to IA-64 vs. say, alpha / solaris / whatever? not a whole lot -- pretty much everything needs to be redone. i mean, i still get the Intel sticker, but what's the difference there?
3) sorry but people has an tendency to cheer the under-dog; fact of life... i remember back then everyone cheered for NVIDIA when 3dfx was "king", now-a-days people still respects NVDA, but does not cheer for them anymore because they are now a status-quo -- they are expected to be one top -- but any move of the underdogs: ATI radeon / matrox paphelia (sp? heck, where they come up w/ this anyway) / Kryo(?) gets recognition. it's like a fight - will the new comer defeat the champion? we are geeks -- not much soap opera in our life, so this is the subsitute.
So... yes given the opportunity, would AMD do the same as Intel (rambus, etc)? maybe -- but i actually think AMD CEO is wiser than that -- he is a cool guy, btw -- visit any AMD facility and you can see his indiana-jones parody poster -- it's pretty cool. but we never know; but one thing is for sure -- if AMD ever gets on top, there will be probabbly a lot of cheer for intel for making attempts at the "de-throning"
last point, AMD is not TEXAS based. they are in SAN JOSE, CA. addr is something like 1 AMD lane or something.... get it straight people.
again, I would like to see your counter-arguments, if there are any. it's not fun writing without knowledge that there would be some reply.
-LQ
My life in the land of the rising sun.
But while temping at Intel I got the impression that AMD was no good, not even in giving Intel employees huge discounts on P3's (which at the time was their flagship product) - I even got into an argument with a technician who couldn't understand how AMD chips reduced the prices on Intel chips.
Not to mention such discussions were met with violent disagreement. If you said you had an AMD system in an interview you could kiss that job good bye.
I also got the impression talking to people that if Intel executives had this master button that said "get rid of amd" that no-one would even hesitate to push it. Despite the fact that AMD pushes Intel to move faster (and visa versa). Just compare all the time between the P90 (which I recall coming out in 92 and costing over 900$), PPro, and P2.
Why the worry?
There are geeks like me who have been screwed by intel's buggy processors (somewhere around here I have a 500$ P90 that has an fdiv bug in it - after much haggeling on the phone I never did get it replaced), and their high prices. But I still have Intel systems floating around here, as well as a few sparc, and a few amd machines.
AMD is the underdog - they made X86 compatible CPU's without reverse-engineering (yes its true! do the research), they made intel's cpu's for a very long time and I for one think its kinda neet that a company like AMD despite all the flack Intel has given them has made chips that perform comparibly with Intel's chips - which is probably why slashdotians favor them in discussion boards.
I am a long time system designer
Another reason why i tend to prefer Amd is the cynical marketing processor known as the P-4. The vast majority of benchmarks show that unless your running software thats heavily SSE-2 optimized, the Athlon's spank the P-4. Yet the P-4's are much more $$$$ due to all those wonderful Intel commercials with dancing morons in bunny suits, or some smucks painted up like a martian with a bad head cold. Instend of wasting all that money marketing, use it to improve your designs! Amd spends virtually nothing on marketing, and yet whenever they have a good design, their products sell extremely well. And dont get me started on intel's late ddr support, or the earily 845 chipsets that were sdram only, which had PATHETIC performace.
I guess the point of my whole rant is......I use Intel or Amd, or whoever, as long as they give me a good value for my (or my customer's) dollar. Give me a nice industry standard design. Dont foist some new marketing propierty design on me. If its gotta be propierty, it better be for one of two reasons: Considerably cheaper, or considerably faster. Intel in the past few years has NOT focused on giving the customer value. Amd has. Give me a 1000 dollars, and I can build either an Intel box, or an Amd box thats 20% faster then the Intel box, and just as stable. (I dont buy the Amd isnt stable arguement, it all comes down to knowing your hardware and how to configure it properly for stable operation.)
When Intel returns to delivering a product that is worth the price Intel charges for it, I'll use Intel again. Until then, I'll continue to laugh at ridiculous marketing schemes and do my research on which product is the fastest for the least money.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Because Intel went & built their P4 fab on illegaly expropiated land belonging to Palestinians ethnically cleansed from a village near Gaza .
& have made no offer to compensate those villagers even though as far as the Geneva Convention, the Hague Convenention, the IDHR & the UN are concerned, they (the former villagers) still own that land.
You're probably thinking of [someoneelse]'s Hardware (cough*tom*cough)...
To judge real-world performance, Quake is at least as good as any synthetic benchmark. Personally, I'd like to see benchmarks for 3DS MAX, TMPGEnc or Photoshop (because those are some of the programs I use daily). But between Quake and WhateverMark2002, I prefer Quake (and I don't even play Quake).
RMN
~~~
IIRC, they do exist.t .asp?URL= / ibrary/backgrnd/html/awewindata.htm
I don't know about Linux, but I'm certain that some Unixes has those on 32bit.
For Windows, apperantly it has it from Win2K onward.
Here is the info I dug after a quick search:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/defaul
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
I'll start this by saying YES, I work for Intel. Hate me...whatever.
We should we hate you? You don't even say what you do for Intel. Do you design processors? Do you clean the toilets? Do you work in marketing? Are you director of the Department of FUD? I have nothing against Intel, and I'm sure neither do most people here. But I do have a lot against the P4. It's a fraud. But that doesn't mean Intel can't make good products. Personally I'd love to have a Hammer system with an Intel chipset.
Last week Intel dropped the prices of its processors. AMD was forced to follow suit, dropping their prices about 2 days later. Did the Slashdot community cheer Intel?
Why should we? Intel CPUs are still more expensive, they are still slower and they still can't run in SMP (except for the Xeons, but those are priced in the "hilarious" range).
So along comes this news...AMD Opteron 800 MHz beats a Pentium 4 1.6 GHz by one frame pre second. I guess I fail to see why everyone is so excited?
How about... because it's faster while running at half the clock speed?
I'll wager ANYTHING that when it ships, a 800MHz Opteron will sell for at LEAST twice the price of a Pentium 4 1.6Ghz.
I'll wager anything that you'll never see an 800 MHz Opteron on sale. o_O
RMN
~~~
...which leads to the real problem for this chip... marketing
How is any PC manufacturer is going to turn round to it's customers and say "you know all that stuff Apple was telling you about the megahertz myth? Well, they were right and we were conning you which meaningless speed measurements all this time"?
Moving this chip out of the 'well informed geek' sector of the market will be tough, imho.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Er, AMD have *not* "left behind ancient software and hardware". DOS will still run fast on Hammer :-).
The point is, Quake is something people actually run (BTW, 60 fps? Even on my (poor old) Pentium III I find it hard to have less than 75...). A synthetic benchmark is just that. Good for testing individual aspects of the hardware, but not really useful in terms of judging how the CPU (or graphics card, or whatever) will perform in normal use.
As I said, I wish they'd run some 3DS MAX tests. Even with the "Intel optimizations" added in R4.26, most tasks are still faster on Athlons. With the improved FP units of the Hammer and support for SSE2, it should be very interesting indeed...
RMN
~~~
K5 was the first superscalar x86 processor. And it had extremely high IPC. However the resulting clock frequency was horribly slow, and the overall performance was bad as a result. Which just shows that ignoring frequency for the sake of IPC is as bad as ignoring IPC for frequency. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
That's a bit oversimplified, though. As clocksped increases to modern numbers, like 1.5GHz, other factors come into play in a large way besides just CPU speed. What if the memory bandwidth is great for an 800MHz Clawhammer but is a huge bottleneck with a 1600MHz Clawhammer?
;-)
For a good example, compare an AthlonXP 2100+ in a KT333 board and then in any 133MHz SDRAM board. There will be as much as a whopping 30% overall performance difference, and that's with the exact same CPU!
Life will be very interestng for Intel if the Clawhammer/Opteron scale that well, though.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Er, AMD have *not* "left behind ancient software and hardware". DOS will still run fast on Hammer :-).
"Nobody will ever need more than 18,446,744,073,709,551K of memory!"
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I remember hearing that due to its tiny die size (104 square millimeters) Clawhammer would be a desktop/mobile part. If that's true, I can't wait to get a high-performance 64-bit notebook!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Is it just me, or could the rise of Linux (and thus open source software in general) make x86 significantly less important? On my system, there is only once piece of software (NVdriver) that isn't open source. Thus, in theory, it would be easy for me to move to another architecture with no more pain than simply recompiling my distro (which I'm doing ATM on my other machine anyway ;) Now, if only there were some cheap alternative arch chips that actually outperformed x86!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Now honestly, do you need a computer processor running at 2.5GHZ if all you are doing is typing on /. or surfing for p0rn?
>>>>>>>>>
Just wait until KDE 4 and GNOME 3 come out and ask that question again...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
As I previously mentioned, Alpha was the most anal of RISC designs. RISC is all about minimizing cycles and maximizing number of operations executed -- even if they are simplified so you must do two, three or even more ops per typical CISC instruction. Data alignment is crucial to RISC performance -- especially in designs like the Alpha or 64-bit SPARC. No Alpha has 8 or 16-bit operations, just 32 or 64-bit. Even the original Alpha 21064 could NOT load/store 8 or 16-bit values, only 32 or 64-bit. They changed this in the 21164 and later after extensive requests, but not lightly. When A/V instructions were added, only 5 were added.
IBM-Moto had a design failure in their first 64-bit PowerPC 620. They had to chuck it and refocus -- resulting in a not so efficient/compatible 64-bit PowerPC from its 32-bit siblings. Of all the RISC designs, only Alpha was designed as a 64-bit processor from the get-go. I'm sure this is why the 32-bit PowerPC was "easier" to accomodate 8/16-bit loads/stores/operations than the 64-bit Alpha. At least until Intel IA-64, which introduced EPIC as a "successor" to RISC. But as Intel has found out, Itanium has fallen victim to all the "great ideal, poor reality" predictions Digital's Alpha ream made of it, almost to the letter. And even "McKinley" (now Itanium2) still cannot match a 3-year old Alpha 264 design at FPU.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
Backward compatibility is an unfortunate fact of life. If it weren't we could have gone to flat address spaces 20 years ago, we wouldn't have these noisy and power-wasting AT-compatible cases, and it wouldn't be so hard to break away from Microsoft platforms and applications.
In point of fact, Intel didn't simply ignore backward compatibility with the Itanium. They just thought that they could build a processor powerful enough to maintain it through emulation.