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AMD Talks About Internal Benchmarks for Opterons
ggruschow writes "AMD's CTO says their 2.0-Ghz Opteron (aka Hammer) beat a 2.8-Ghz Xeon (P4) on both SPECint2000 and SPECfp2000 tests, but was mixed against an Intel 1-Ghz Itanium 2 (details at
ExtremeTech). IBM predicted "conservative" 1.8-Ghz PowerPC 970 scores, which fall in the middle of the pack (sweet for OS X). It's probably not a coincidence that AMD's news comes so soon after Gartner said x86-64 would fail. Even if Intel loses the performance crown again, their upcoming mobile processor is looking pretty spiff with its recently announced 1MB of cache. Sounds like next year might finally bring a worthy upgrade for my 486dx4-160."
Benchmarks are nice and all, but I'm getting kinda tired about hearing how great a CPU benches for about 6 months before I could even buy one with a sack full of money.
Not that I'm not excited about 64bit CPUs on the desktop, I could really find a use for one (I've got something interesting that likes to malloc more than 4GB sometimes).
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
For straight CPU intensive tasks it matters.
But for 99% of normal peoples taskes 10% whont matter.
But it's the edge and it has to be somewhere and it has to move.
My rule is that I upgrade when I can get a cpu that is twice as fast as my old one for about 1000dkr (130$/).
Thats possible right now (I've a 850Mh celeron), but I need a new motherboard, which kind of changes the rules.
TC - My Photos..
Noone cares about few % performance gain anymore. And even if Opteron would be much faster, people wouldn't care much simply because you can't buy it. Pentium4 is better because you can get it *NOW*
If you need new computer, buy it (NOW!), otherwise don't buy anything until you need it.
But people were saying this back when that guy's 160 wasn't laughably slow.
He can browse with it, why does the home user need more? That with linux or winNT and memory would do everything average Joe wants.
The answer is A)marketing B)keeping up with the Jones' and C)Because there IS always something new for people to do.
You won't stop CPU dev, there's always someone who could use it or some Redmond based multinational doing something to make it needed.
No-one NEEDs more than a P100 tops. They CAN find a use for it though and that'll never changed. The reason can be summeried thusly.
"Hey Ma, look at what this fancy computer can do!"
How many people are "we"?
;)
If you are ten people, one of them could be fired, by your argument, without anybody noticing.
Let me turn it around - how many procent do you need before it matters? 12? 15?
But I agree, one can't upgrade everytime theres a 10% speed increase. One has to do the cost/benefit thing carefully first (and then ignore the c/b and just spend, spend, spend - the only way to get the economy back on track
TC - My Photos..
Your forgetting one important factor in the computer-upgrade cycle
microsoft.
Sure, current computers will run word of 2 years time without (m)any worries, BUT, "innovation" has bumped up the required specs for every single windows/office release
Of course its not just microsoft which bumps up required specs, but their the driving force behind most hardware upgrades
As processors get faster, software gets both lazier and "smarter"...
lazier 'cause theres less optimization and "smarter" 'cause, for example, 15 years ago no one would have ever implemented some of the stuff thats present in todays computers (fex image thumbnails in explorer)
I am a researcher, and I must say I would generally appreciate a 10% boost in performance.
Basically, I find that I sometimes get into situations analogous to going to a bus stop. If you can get there in 8 minutes instead of 10, usually it makes no difference, but sometimes you can catch the bus when otherwise you would have to wait for another one.
What this means in my work, is that I might miss out on an open slot in the LFS batch queue. Or for a job that lasts several days, a few hours can make the difference between being able to present results at the meeting this week instead of having to wait until next week.
So I am glad to get 10% additional performance... but if I'm spending my own money on it, I'm probably not willing to spend any more than 10% additional dollars to get it.
I think the point of getting more powerful processors is not just for everyday use, but increasing the overall computing power in the world. Imagine getting back the results from Folding@Home in a week, rather than a couple years... sequencing genomes etc... There are very valid purposes for computationally powerful machines, just because WE don't know of any (in our daily lives), doesn't mean that there aren't any (hehe, agnostic argument).
:-) Good enough reason for me.
If someone were to say to me, that the number of kids on computers today doing the things they do was not directly related to computational power, I wouldn't believe them. The more power, the further the abstraction from what computers really are underneath, hence the broader user base.
If my old computer that my mom uses were 100x as powerful, it would be smart enough to go look online as to why it's having errors printing, and I'd never have to venture out of my cave in the basement
At work I've got a 49000 line Microsoft Visual C++ project that compiles in 5.5 minutes on a 1700 MHz Pentium 4. That's right, about 150 lines per second.
Turbo Pascal used to compile at thousands of lines per second on machines with a clock nearly two orders of magnitude slower that tool several cycles per instruction instead of running several instructions per cycle.
Before you say something like "hey, but moderns compilers have optimizations yadda yadda" perhaps I should mention that this compilation time was with no optimizations and features like updating browser files disabled. With optimization it's even slower.
We're talking about four orders of magnitude difference in efficiency here. It's not all the compiler's fault, of course. The libraries and code use complex templates and multiple levels of definitions that make the compiler work much harder.
At each one of these layers someone probably said "It's OK if this is 10 times slower. It's easier to write and maintain, I'm more productive (or lazy) and the CPU is fast enough". Each one of these decisions may be justified *in itself* but they add up (or rather multiply up) to a 1/10000 difference in efficiency. Slowing the edit/compile/debug cycle reduces programmer productivity and code quality. Reduced code quality to more code bloat and even slower edit/compile/debug cycle and so on.
Damn, it's depressing.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Yeah, but only in the way than no-one NEEDs modern medicine, central heating, or citrus fruit during the winter.
On the other hand, I NEED faster than a Duron/600 for:
sending messages in ICQ (yup, sending a message is O(n) or O(n^2) - not sure which) with n the number of messages in your scrollback
Encoding MP3s - I spent over 2 hours this afternoon switching CDs every 10-15 minutes.
Recording TV - I can only record to divx at quarter VGA or less
Using Mozilla the way I want (with 20-50 tabs open at a time and 128M of RAM cache)
Using an encrypted filesystem (unless win2k's implementation is just horribly inefficient)
Opening / manipulating 500M images
Sure, I could plop an XP2200+ in here, but I spent $50 on the original CPU and I'm unwilling to spend more on another until Hammer comes out. A dual Clawhammer should be about 10-20x as fast as my current machine depending on app - a most satisfying upgrade.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
Back when Pascal was prevalent...wait that never happened.
Anyway, twenty years ago people didn't write thing modularly like they do today so recompiles were of a bigger piece of the project.
Now we use modularity, so code is broken up into much smaller pieces. A recompile need only be the file you're working on - the other 50 of them can just stay compiled as they are. Obviously 'make' was developed specifically to optimize the decision of what needs to be recompiled.
Sure, it is much, much slower. But linking takes very little time, and compile time has been cut way down by previous compiles - almost enough to make up the difference (although, I admit, not quite). Still, you're comparison is not the best - Pascal hardly has the powers available to a bigger programming language, and since its only been academic, not as much effort has been placed in making the compiler really smart (and therefore slower). Perhaps you should talk about Fortran '77?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
10% never matters.
On the contrary, if you can get by with spending 10% less on equipment (the other way of looking at this) than that can make the difference between being a solvent, viable company and everyone being out of work.
You're at a university, so you are under no commercial pressure to deliver. I mean, once you're past undergrad assignment deadlines, research gets written when it gets written, right? You can't rush science, maaaan, pass the bong. But in the real world, there are real consequences, and 10% could make a real difference to computation-intensive jobs.
What do you want large caches for? Large caches aren't simply a trump card to be played to magically make all your applications faster. Misusing a cache can be detrimental to performance unless your cache is big enough to fit the entire application and all its data. Algorithmic enhancements can be used to make a huge difference... and in some situations, I can get higher performance out of a processor with 1/4 the cache size of another processor where a poorly written version of the application runs on certain types of data. All that being said, yes, larger caches will improve the execution of the majority of software (and certainly of algorithmically tuned software) but it is not the end-all, be-all solution.