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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.
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.
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 I were AMD I'd stick to Hammer. Hammer says: I'm hip, I'm happening; I can kick your a$$. I'm tough; I scare the hell out of the porkiest, poorly optimized code. Grrrrr Opteron says: I ware glasses.
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
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
I believe that the new naming scheme is something like this:
Duron becomes Athlon Jr.
Athlon XP becomes Athlon
Clawhammer becomes Double Athlon
Sledgehammer becomes Bacon Double Athlon with Cheese
That was classic intercourse!
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
"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.
you've got to wonder what intel isn't doing to optimize.
:)
:) At least in the eyes of some optimizing guys. heh
FYI, we had a teacher in a processor architecture course that worked with optimizing algorithms and had worked for Intel. He left and started working for AMD instead. He openly said that Intel sucked. Guess what PR that gives when it's from the mouth of an insightful teacher.
So they must do something wrong over there.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
"Do you know what they call the 'BaconDouble Athlon with Cheese in France ?"
"What, they don't call it the 'Bacon Double Athlon with Cheese' ?"
"Nah, they got some sense, they call it "Le Hammer"
"Le Hammer, sh*t"
(well , actually we'd pronounce it "le ameure" (no 'H' at the beginning and the usual adding of an 'e' at the end))
"We're french types-ah , why else do you think we have this outrrrrrrageous accent for ?"
-- don't discount flying pigs until you have good air defense
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
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!