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AMD Opteron "Hammer" Preview
Melvin Tong writes "Hardware Extreme has posted a preview of AMD's 8th-generation processor that AMD is currently developing with a few exclusive pics of the mechanical sample. AMD Athlon processors based on Hammer technology are expected to ship in the forth quater of 2002. The preview is located over at HW Extreme."
What the heck is a forth quater?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
How hard would a little editorial oversight be?
Does anybody know how much drag a carflag puts on your car? How much MPG does it cost you?
It's a pretty safe bet such systems are already in use in some TLAs, we just don't know about it. Opteron/Hammer will be a nice step forward but obviously it's not meant as competition to big iron from Sun and others for quite a while, if ever. AMD has years and years to go before they can enter such markets successfully, they are relatively small and have to concentrate on the desktop and small to mid sized servers for the
forseeable future, plus have yet to prove themselves in the higher end, attract the appropriate support and build an image they don't yet have when compared to Intel, Sun or IBM.
It also looks like they have their work cut out for them already, with not as fast clock/rampup on 0.13 micron as expected and a tight line to get the Hammer line done properly as they are pretty strung out on cash compared to Intel, while the latter seems to have no trouble in increasing clock all the time (by throwing huge gobs of money at it of course).
Strom Thurmond; the dean of the US Senate...
the deadest fart on slashdot.
I particularly liked this point:
"The AMD Opteron is designed to be scalable, reliable and compatible, which can result in lower total cost of ownership."
Gee, the whole article sounds like a lame press release. I want the real low down, not a marketing piece!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This article just reiterates stuff that we've all heard before about the Hammers. However, there is one new piece of interesting information: if the pictures are to be interpreted at face value, the hammers will finally get the heat spreaders that the P4s have had for a long time. Don't get me wrong, I'm an amd fan all the way, but athlons (aka fires waiting to happen) have needed these for a long time.
Tough crowd.
Have a Happy.
Slashdot: establishing gibabytes of comments about other people's spelling errors.
A picture of a pure copper CPU mock-up, and then a picture of an evaluation opteron. And about 4 pages of months old regurgitated AMD press releases. I wouldn't really consider this news, since AMD's been showing off the evaluation chip for a few months now.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
As a side bonus, you can find SPEC benchmarks for Itanium and Itanium IIs on that chart (search for the word Itanium - Dell and HP have both submitted results).
Either way, It would be funny if Intel ended up having to license AMD's x86-64 technology. Even though I don't think that would happen, I suspect Intel would rather fork the 64bit platform with their Itanic (part 2) than license from AMD... but you never know!
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
This in not meant to be a troll. However, I sure as hell don't trust "sneak preview" tech specs full of typos in a article written by rumor-mongering hardware freaks half a page down from a picture of someone hitting a CPU with a giant green inflatable hammer.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I was very happy to see the nickel cap on their new CPU. After crushing a couple of AMD chips, I became very weary of removing the heat sink after a successful mounting. More so than I probably should be, but after chipping the edge off of some $100+ CPU's, I was very nervous about picking up any of the cutting edge processors.
I look forward to lapping the cap to a shinny mirror finish!
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Hardware Extreme has posted a preview of AMD's 8th-generation processor that AMD is currently developing...
As opposed to the 8th-generation AMD processor that Intel is developing....
(/sarcasm)
How is this a preview? This is just a preview of the marketing docs! A poorly spelt one at that.
-Spackler
PS: spelt was a joke
whoa.. seems that Hardware Extreme was careless with the chip.. look at the first pic.. the top side is all stratched up.. also on the third page:/ opteron /page3.shtml
http://www.hwextreme.com/reviews/processor
the pins on the left side are bent!!
these have got to be worth about $1000-$2000 right now (actually, $10, if it's beat up that badly)
Clearly a blatant rip-off.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
That site might as well just point to the amd webpage itself. It sounds as though its a bunch of AMD corporate fluff talking employees.
I won't bother to elaborate on what several others have already mentioned, that this is a poorly edited stored pasted together from AMD press releases. The total kicker on this is the very last 'next' link takes you to a pages to buy some AMD Athlon chips!
The boundry between news and advertisement gets more porous each year...
Peace, or Not?
this picture here... on the left hand side... eh wait a minute. Sorry, just a bent pin.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
Look at the picture at the top of page 3 for the review, along the left edge of the chip. Some idiot bent a pin! I'd think they'd be a little less "extreme" with a top-of-the-line, unreleased processor...
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
Did any one notice that the picture of the CPU on pg. 3 has bent pins!
I would hate to be the person who did that one. heh
Usually these previews are riddled with canned PR hype that may or may not be true. The fun part is seeing which promises come true when the product eventually hits the market, and which were totally off base.
Mmmm... nostalgia.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
So where's Intel's response to all this? Will the Hammer be of much concern to players like Sun, who also offer cheap Sparcs nowadays? How does Hammer live up to Motorola's G4 (what's taking the G5 so long anyway??). I had expected a LITTLE more depth to a story like this.
This is just a poorly cut/pasted buch of marketing speak. So ok, the new athlons will have heat spreading.. No need to waste so much space on that.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
I hope THIS mask rev of hammer chip will be faster than January 2002 PowerPC G4 chips.
Currenlty, according to the RC5 benchmarks AMD is far slower than dual cpu macintoshes (half as fat). (source available for cor rc5 loops for most processors)
The Mac Dual 1 Ghz g4 is faster than all existing dual AMD motherboards in RC5 benchmark by almost 100%.
21,129,654 RC5 keyrate for dual 1 Ghz g4 system !
A dual 1800+ AMD MP get only HALF! 10,807,034 rc5 keys !
Funny "Mhz myth" there showing itself I guess... Apple now is selling even FASTER machines but with smaller caches and less fast read-write ram (it now uses DDR on newest boxes).
The mac uses a 2 MB L3 cache and no amd mp dual cpu boards I know about have any L3 cache at all, so maybe that is whay some common macs are over twice as fast, its not just altivec meager tweaks to rc5. AMS have similar , but less mazing vector ops.
Another reason the mac might be over twice as fast as an amd dual mp board is not just the 2MB l3 cache but the fact that mac can read and write to a cold page of memory simulatneously FASTER than any AMD MP designs which are biased for linear access and streaming. Many memory scatter benchmarks show this too.
So basically, will the new Hammer systems be able to get close to speed for RC5 and other crypto tasks as the RISC based Powerpcs?
I really want to know. And I am so sad to see Slashdot reduced to fanboys moddign down anything discussing tech subjects like this as "flames" all the damned time. This post is all informatinve and factual and my reason for asking is genuine.
I have to wonder about the lifespan of a CPU that has an integrated memory controller of any type - not just DDR, but RDRAM, or FOORAM, or NARFRAM. What happens to the family when a new RAM interface comes along?
Now, for high-integration CPUs designed for embedded style apps I can see it, but for a main-line CPU it seems to me that tying the memory controller to the CPU limits the lifespan of the design.
I realize that should POITRAM become the new speed king that the RAM controller block of the CPU can be redesigned, and I understand that putting the RAM controller in the chip can increase the memory bandwidth to the CPU.
But it does cause me to think....
www.eFax.com are spammers
These guys are designing Opteron servers, including dual Opteron 1U servers (web and render farm goodness) and quad Opteron 3U servers. Very impressive specs. The management is dominated by senior IBMers, plus a senior marketing weasel from Dell. Hmm, Dell skipped the Itanic2...
Somehow, I suspect their designs are going to get licensed by some very big vendors. Call it a hunch.
I would like to get more pics of the AMD Hammer processors. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
That was the longest advertisement i've ever read.
AMDZone wrote a FAQ which was a good read.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Opteron-Hammer Kicking shit out of intel P 4 eats my balls
And you won't have that problem. Hell I sanded my slug down like an old celeron and have a 1.6a northwood stable at 2400mhz. It could go higher but its the limit of my SD7-533 mobo. Lets see AMD release a chip where overclocking gives you an extra 800mhz!
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
HWExtreme.com is known for plagiarism. BTW, the integrated memory controller can be disabled and the one that is with the chipset on the motherboard you own can be utilized instead. HWExtreme sucks. They are dumb...WTF is /. doing posting something written so poorly with (IMO) has left important segments that are obviously misinforming the consumers?
The NDA isn't quite up until 2400 USA (eastern? pacific?, don't ask me i don't know) time, but look at, Here
Expect reviews from the usual suspects.
AMD have modified there ratings a little so as
to keep the model numbers fair compared with
the newer faster Northwood pentium 4s. So while
the old rating system would have had 2400+ as a 1933MHz Athlon, and 2600+ as a 2066Mhz Athlon, in
fact the 2400+ is the first 2GHz Athlon while the
2600+ clocks in a 2133MHz.
We can expected newer Athlons to be released later
with 333MHz Front Side buses, and later 512MB of cache. Even when Hammer comes out, AMD will still to selling Athlons for around a year afterwoods, the Athlon will move done the low end to replace the Duron, and thats going give the celeron a real kicking. In fact Intel seems to have blown
there wad completely, with nothing to compete with
the Hammer until there Prescott strink of the
P4 in Q4 2003.
Pentium is shit
Celeron is bigger shit
Intel is just shit
is there any preformance gain if not then what?
On February 28, 2002, AMD announced the support of SuSE Linux for the Opteron processors. Good news to home computer users, on April 24, 2002, Microsoft has also collaborated to further 64-bit computing.
I'm a home computer user, and I really don't care about Microsoft's announcement. Yet another hardware site that needs to pull their head out of the gutter and understand that Microsoft isn't the be-all-end-all of personal computing.
To be more on topic, x86-64 is gonna knock the socks off of Intel. A 64-bit processor that runs all 32-bit code...Too cool.
Slashdot is a waste of time. I enjoy wasting time.
I want to see what features of Palladium have been implemented, since AMD have declared their support for it. ... the one that comes with a licensed copy of the M$'s latest and greatest.
Will the first series of Opteron prevent me from downloading mp3s, or will that be an optional extra / firmware upgrade?
Of course I expect users will be able to 'opt-out' of these new features for the next year or so, until the US government, in their infinite wisdom, decide that opt-out is no longer an option, and that there will only be one licensed implementation
I look forward to lapping the cap to a shinny mirror finish!
You just keep your "shinny" away from me and my processor (H)elix1, or should I call you Nickelmember?
How are the x86 family processors comparing to other chip architectures these days? Are other chips (ie SPARC, PowerPC) still superior, or is the x86 catching up? "Go intel or go home"? That's catchy, but my quote is far superior: "f*** intel." ;)
That may be, but if you want to take a look at some of the serious articles on ememory & clock latency (from the CPU's perspective) you'd realize why they are adding the memory controller where they are. A 'normal' SDRAM memory controller on a VIA or AMD motherboard for instance can easily take 70+ cpu cycles before returnign the required data... So unless the cpu has other data to process (which fits into the cache) then it just sits there til it has the data requested... With a cpu built-in memory controlelr of this sort (especially if they allow tolerences for faster rated memory within the existing class) could lower the latency down to say 6 cycles...
This is great for memory intensive & system intensive tasks (from gaming to high demand servers)...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I call dibs on the name "Octaron" for the 8-processor Opteron configuration!
Sigh... if only that weren't the way copyrights work.
Ryan Fenton
On February 28, 2002, AMD announced the support of SuSE Linux for the Opteron processors. Good news to home computer users, on April 24, 2002, Microsoft has also collaborated to further 64-bit computing. (Emphasis added.)
Yet another article implying Linux is not for the home. People read enough of these articles and they will conclude a priori Linux is not to be used in the home and never try it for themselves.
Note I'm not saying it's completely ready for home use, especially by people with extremely limited computer knowledge, but people should decide for themselves. If everything they read says or implies Linux isn't for the home, they won't even consider it an option.
Do you notice the Hammer Opteron processor's core looks like Intel Pentium 4? Don't you think AMD is like 'following' whatever Intel is doing? If you remember, when Intel uses Slot 1, AMD introduces their AMD processor in slot form, and when Intel changed to the socket form - the 370, they follow - Again! Well, I just got a XP2200+ and because of not installing the heat sink properly, I burnt it! All my other AMD processors are cracked too! It's really nice to see they improved the core following Intel, hopefully they won't crack so easily. They should improve on their "heat" too. They are running too hot, especially when I am running SETI@home / RC5!
I hope they dont ship them like this! (Note the bent pins on the left corner :))
CPU designs are pretty modular. It shouldn't be hard at all to swap in a new controller when the time comes. If the internal hardware interfaces weren't very clean, design would take a lot longer.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
Just don't sand off any DRM bits, or it's your ass in the slammer! The DMCA is watching you, punk.
This is only the hood, there's nothing to look at under it!
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
So they post an thinly veiled advertisement pretending to be news, and they still have the nerve to describe it as "kick-ass"? Wow.
How often do you upgrade the motherboard and the RAM but keep the CPU...?
As new (faster) memory becomes available, they'll simply update the memory controller on the (new) CPUs (just as they updated the FSB from 100 to 133 to 166 to 200 to 266 and soon to 333 or 400).
RMN
~~~
What happens to the family when a new RAM interface comes along?
You'd just drop in a new memory controller. Keep in mind that new memory interfaces don't come around all that often. You might get speed bumps like PC100/PC133 and the various flavors of DDR. But a single model of controller can often handle multiple speeds. Think about how many flavors of PIII/Celeron came out that used the PC66/PC100/PC133 SDR memory interface.
If this gives AMD a big performance boost, which it should, it's a good move.
That has to be the strangest looking Hammer I've ever seen. Doesn't even have a handle. On the plus side, it does seem to come with a lot of built-in nails.
RMN
~~~
AMD versus Intel
ATi versus nVidia
*nix versus Windows
All of these seem to be getting us better products faster, rather than each bleeding us, the consumer market.(E.g intel have been at P4 2.5GHz for far longer than previous Hz when they were struggling to keep up with AMD performance
Submited by Melvin Tong
odly it rhymes.
I read up on this review last...(yes thats correct) and it still way better ..
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1635
then again I think its been listed here before ..or has it??
I am at loss with words...
I was expecting something of substance; for crists sake, we had perliminary benchmarks of the same processor months ago! All I got was a press release and a really badly done benchmark comparison("well, here's how the 800 did. For comparison, lets see what a 400 celeron did!")
Reading this truly was a waste of my time. The ad when I clicked on the final "next" link added to my frustration.
It's been a long time.
The Mac Dual 1 Ghz g4 is faster than all existing dual AMD motherboards in RC5 benchmark by almost 100%.
21,129,654 RC5 keyrate for dual 1.0 Ghz g4 system
A dual 1800+ AMD MP get only HALF! 10,807,034 rc5 keys
...why in the world would they compare the performance of the new Opteron at 800 Mhz to a Celeron running 400 Mhz? They present both numbers as if you can say 'Aha! See how much faster the Opteron is!' when the comparison is ludicrous. The article is just marketing hackwork.
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
Together, AMD's next-generation processors and Windows are designed to provide customers a flexible, compatible and reliable platform.
Windows? Stable?? That'd be something to see... Maybe I'd be more inclined to believe it if the whole article wasn't a mass of hype and advertisement...
OMG... 512MB OF CACHE!!! I can't wait!!
wow, 512MB of cache, and I thought the 8MB on my UltraSparc 3 was good (I know, you meant KB). The problem I see for AMD on the Athlons is that they are already behind, doesn't the 3Ghz P4 ship soon?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Talk about Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Of course on /. "FUD" can only apply to Microsoft tactics or any criticism of the open source movement, I guess.
Generally, if you want to upgrade to a different type of memory, you want to upgrade to a different type of motherboard, and probably a different type of CPU. I don't think it's such a bad thing. "This motherboard is designed for DDR memory and a DDR compatible CPU!"
>half as fat
In today's world, this is a good thing. Sorry you missed out on the late 70's, 80's and 90's. Why not join us in 2k2?
>source available for cor rc5 loops for most processors
cor? Is that what happens when you try to remove the middle of an Apple (haha) with a corer and find it gets stuck on its way out?
>A dual 1800+ AMD MP get only HALF! 10,807,034 rc5 keys !
An English teacher only HALF you brain me good.
>Funny "Mhz myth" there showing itself I guess...
Well, sure. I mean, what do you expect from over THERE in La La land? Personally, though, I find THEIR benchmarks (whoever they are) pathetic.
>Apple now is selling even FASTER machines but with smaller caches and less fast read-write ram (it now uses DDR on newest boxes).
Ow. Is brain English less help fastly! Marge, BEER ME!
>The mac uses a 2 MB L3 cache and no amd mp dual cpu boards
The EnGliSh UseS cAps WherEver You lIke toO! ExCElLenT !
>And I am so sad to see Slashdot reduced to fanboys moddign down anything discussing tech subjects like this as "flames" all the damned time.
Mayeb ist becaues yuo cant' ues englihs properl?y
And don't even think of comparing yourself to CmdrTaco. You are at least 10x worse.
And to think we graduate people like this from high school. For shame.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Read more here : http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/020821/202512_1.html
I wouldn't be suprised at all if they designed it to be modular ... if a /. reader can see that, don't you think that AMD's engineers can too?
I am amused that you did not see the artistic flair I used within my post. I was paying homage to the original citation and its clever, yet cavalier, treatment of words. For example :
"forth quater"
Now that sir, was absolute genius! Pity you cannot digest my post without the mirth and spirit shown among all the other posters here.
Basically the simple fact is that Macintoshes are over 100% faster at RC5 compared to the fastest dual AMD chipsets available. I think your humor receptor is impaired.
Look on page three at the image and it looks like someone didn't insert and remove the chip properly and bent the pins.
Hardware 101 don't bend the pins, you frikkin' 'tards.
[smack upside the head]
Where are the Quake3 benchmarks!?
Hammer is still kind of far away. Check out the new Thoroughbred "B" core, the XP 2600+ over at THG. Overclockable to 2880MHz (3100+)!
Look at that. The quotes in the story title should be around the word "Preview", not "Hammer". I can't believe that wasn't caught immediately.
"but for a main-line CPU it seems to me that tying the memory controller to the CPU limits the lifespan of the design."
and BINGGO was his name-o
gee, then you would have to buy something even more often. Boy I bet they will cry all the way to the bank.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The integrated memory controller of the Hammer series chips can be disabled and replaced with a motherboard-based memory controller. Additionally, the core of the processors were designed to make it fairly easy to swap integrated memory controllers, but "easy" is a much looser term when describing modifying a multimillion transistor multilayer CPU core.
Either way, it will not be a problem.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
And here's a comparison, openssl 0.9.6b (as shipped with Redhat 7.3) running on a 400 MHz
What was that about lies, damned lies and...
Australian? Join EFA
There's already a review on Ace's Hardware which concludes that the Athlon 2600+ has again leapfrogged the fastest Intel CPU. Of course, when Intel releases the 2.8GHz P4 next Monday, it will yet again leap over AMD.
Ad infinitum.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
A factor of four compared over the Celeron is really disappointing. It would be interesting if we know if they run the hand-coded x86 routines against GCC-compiled x86-64 code. It wouldn't be too bad, then.
or read an actual overview of the spec
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
how can you compare an 800 mhz X86-64 bit
with a Celeron 400..
I meen sure, maybe the os and test program
are not complied for 64bit.. but isnt the
advantage of the new amd supsoed to be that
it runs 32 bit jsut as fast if not faster??
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Shep u are a fuckin troll and I want to shoot you out of a cannon into a plate glass window.
Mmkay, so the K7 generation was WWII fighter aircraft (?), then horses. The K8 generation is hand tools. What's K9? Dogs? ;-) Hmm... "Schaeffer" for servers, "Chihuahua" for value market?
IANAL so I couldn't be wrong.
I've had to send back about a handfull of Athlon XP chips this year so far, due to erratic behavior/non-working chips (when placed in several different mainboards just to make sure they are infact defective).
I was mostly interested in the pictures, 'cause the article was terrible -- I think it was bashed together from press releases. I won't even get into the benchmarking, except to say that benchmarks should *not* compare two completely different architectures running at significantly different clock speeds with different software and OS versions. What were they trying to demonstrate?
The big image on the third page was a shocker. Ack. Sure, it's just a mechanical sample, but adding a big page showing that you bent the pins on the processor doesn't particularly add to your breathless and misleading review. Wow. That was a terrible article. If AMD wants positive press in the technical crowd, they should be giving the samples to folks who know what they're doing.
The core will remain the same, and that is what takes the vast majority of the design effort. Bolting on a new memory controller should be an almost trivial task in comparison. Anyway, the performance boost from having the memory controller on chip is going to outway almost any evolutionary progress in RAM speed that happens between now and the next iteration of the CPU.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Look in this picture:s or/opteron /images/7sm.jpg
http://www.hwextreme.com/reviews/proces
Do you see the bended pin at the left of the processor?.
Is it just me, or does anyone else REALLY enjoy frying eggs on their computer? My current CPU isn't quite hot enough, but as soon as I get AMD's new processor, I think I'll give bacon a try... I always hear people calling computers applicances. Consider that mine runs hotter than my toaster, and eats more power than every other appliance in my house, I can see how they might get confused.
;-) ).
Seriously though... Is AMD or Intel showing any signs of reducing the power consumption and heat output of their chips? Or are they just going to gradually reduce the maximum operating temperature until you need to get a dedicated freezer just to cool your computer?
Until they get on the ball, any alternative processor suggestions? I'm willing to pay more for decent equipment, and because everything I use is in source-form, any processor will be fine. The problem is that I've never seen anything but Intel and PPC notebooks... But, even if I've got to use a different processor on a laptop than on my desktop machines, I'd be willing to. It's really time for me to change.
One hot day, I went into my BIOS and checked out the hardware section, only to find that my CPU and case were 256 degrees F, and my CPU fan was spinning at several hundred-thousand RPMs. You might instantly disregard that, but here, where room temp is often 130F, and I'd had several fans croak already, it was a coffee-spitting moment (on a related note, I need a new keyboard too
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I wonder if anyone can tell me the scoop here and what Intel is planning to do to counter Operton. Honestly, if x86-64 is for real and runs decently, I have trouble understanding how IA64 could ever be any sort of arguable answer for x86-64! The idea of a painfree transition to 64bit like that is just too good to pass up!
... "Pentium 4 + 100MHz this month!" is no longer (and never was) sexy new technology news to me.
... If I were AMD I would have been brave and named their new architecture "x86-64Now!" since Intel kept with the Intel branded "Intel Architecture-64" (IA64) naming on their new instruction set. I mean, the gloves were already off a long time ago with that "IA" b.s. AMD should have really stuck it to 'em... I wonder why AMD is so friendly and courteous when what they're doing appears to be something akin to chopping Intel's kneecaps off in the middle of a close foot race, then, looking back, snickering as Intel tries to limp along and keep up!?
If Intel's answer will be, "We will make a processor that runs IA32, x86-64, *AND* IA64." Well, that sounds like one beastly processor, but it might be the answer if it's competitive in speed! Is that in the Intel roadmap right now? I would buy that processor if it comes out on or around the time that Hammer does, because it's getting close to the time that I need to upgrade. I would like to see such developments hyped on the Intel homepage however
And
But the real question that's probably on everyone's minds: what's the BogoMips score?
Rogn
--
no witty sig yet
Is your CPU "fan" really a jet/turbine?
there were rumors about a CMP "chip multi processing" feature of the hammer, like the IBM/POWER4 with 2 cpu's on one die, but now nobody talks one word about this? whats happend? does the intel "CMT" feature wish away everything?
As I said in my previous post, I realize that the memory controller section of the chip can be redesigned. I realize that AMD would rather have a good way to sunset the current chips when a new memory design comes out. I largely wanted to make sure that I wasn't the ONLY one to realize this.
However, look at what happened during the transition from SDR to DDR, or from DDR to RDRAM - all that had to be redesigned was the external memory controller chip, which allowed the release of mobos that supported the new RAM standards fairly quickly. How quickly would they have been supported if the Celeron/Duron chips had not had external memory controllers?
Also, something that occurred to me as I slept - how do they handle memory coherency in a multiprocessor system? Does each CPU have its own memory, and they coordinate cachelines? (sort of a ccNUMA type arrangement) Or do they have a single external memory controller that all the CPUs talk to (and take the speed hit)?
If the former, that would have a pretty large impact on Linux. If the latter, then a SMP machine would take a large speed hit relative to a UMP machine due to the slower memory access.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Given recent trends, the new POITRAM would require a new chipset which would require a new processor anyway. Might as well make it a single chip.
A few years ago, they ceased to be a portal in the normal sense, and since became a categorized advertising engine. Look no further than that crap that came up a while back about them seeding headlines with headline-like advertising links.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Whoops my bad
The integrated memory controller doesn't need to be too closely coupled to the CPU core; as far as I can see, it needs only a bus to tell it which location to handle next, and a connection to the L2 cache to put the new data in.
So it shouldn't be too difficult to graft in a new memory controller if a new memory technology becomes necessary; and if you have to replace the CPU to take account of new memory tech, so much the better for the CPU manufacturer.
With a cpu built-in memory controlelr of this sort (especially if they allow tolerences for faster rated memory within the existing class) could lower the latency down to say 6 cycles.
Not to be argumentative, but this IS slashdot.
I'd like to see these "serious articles" about memeory and clock latency that say that moving a memory controller from off chip to on chip will reduce latency from 70 cycles to 6.
The latency for retrieving data from main memory is an effect of current memory technology, data can only be fetched so fast from DRAM based memory. DRAM uses a capacative effect to store data and it is relatively slow especially compared to the ever faster modern processors. This is the reason for using physically more complex SRAM which stores data in much faster transistor based latches. SRAM is used for cache in modern computers.
The memory controller, which is primarily comprised of some addressing logic as well as analog stages to interface with the memory bus, must be physically positioned in between the processor and the DRAM based memory banks. Whether it is on the same piece of silicon as the CPU or on a seperate chip has only a very small effect on the latency of the CPU making requests to main memory. The reasons for positioning the controller on the die are mostly economic, and it may by a very tiny speed advantage. The IBM POWER4 processor integerates the Main memory and L3 Cache controller on the processor.
I realize I called you on your lack of references, so I should probably provide some. Unfortunately I don't know of any good web links, but I recommend reading some books on Computer Architecture and/or Computer Organization:
The Modern Computer Architecture: A common textbook in Computer Architecture/Organization classes
MC Hammer is probably begging to make commercials for AMD. Come on, he's been wearing "clean room" pants since the late 80's.
I'm wasn't sure which site the article was on... It was either Ace's Hardware or ArsTechnica... Unfortunately I still don't know because I haven't had the time to go check around in back articles on each site...
I do remember they were talking about the way current memory controllers (then on some VIA & AMD boards, the article itself was talking about asyncronous vs synchronous memory) and the path used to reach the memory that multiplied the base latency (those CAS/RAS latencies really) of the whole system...
having the controller on the chip & optimizing the path to the memory you drop the extra cycles it would take as the data moves thorugh the system...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Much easier (and less dangerous) to install and remove than the old clip-on type. Nearly all motherboards accept them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10