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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."
I want lots of cache and extreme memory bandwidth. As CPUs are getting faster and faster, both the lack of cache and memory access are seriously limiting the performance of current PC architectures. Yet, not even Intel seems to be interested in improving those areas. In fact, with P4 Intel actually cut the amount of cache.
To the best of my knowledge, the fastest 496 chip out there was AMD's 486, clocking in at 120MHZ.
Oviously there is a market for super-fast processors to those of us on /., but aren't we at a point where currently available processors are fast enough for more and more user segments? What I mean is, people who do Word and Excel were happy along about 800 MHz and ordinary CAD people like me don't need more than about 2 gig. There are only two guys in my organization (running VHDL simulations day in and day out) who have any need for faster processors. Will we soon get to a point where the total market size of gamers and /. people will not pay for another processor spin?
Benchmarks are as bad as statistics. They measure nothing but how much you can tweak your CPU and compiler to fit that specific benchmark.
I would say that AMD may have an advantage for being more backwards compatible than Itanium, but I also feel that it is time for a change!
All major CPU manufacturers make proper RISC CPU already so why don't we find them in our ordinary computers? It is because the Windows codebase cannot simply be recompiled for a new target but has to be ported function by function (painful assignment, to say the least). Perhaps they can reuse 3/4 of the code, but still, there is a whole lot or rewriting and verification to do.
I have worked in a Tru64 environment (running Alpha CPUs) and I was surprised of how easy it was to get 95% of the Linux apps to properly compile and run. I didn't try to get Linux it self running but I had gcc running and that was enough.
What I'm trying to say is that the open source movement has proven that one can write portable code successfully and that it is time to make a hardware change. The serial ATA and AGP solutions from the PC are good enough, so is the PCI bus (lots of peripihals available) so I wouldn't change that, but simply make the standard computer run multiple RISC CPUs and a proper multi-threaded OS that can take advantage of that and then you'll have a performance boost that would make P4 look like a bicycle compared to a F1 car (ok, perhaps a Porche, but still, an F1 does 0-200kph in
While I'm at the subject. As we have bochs, it would still be possible to run Windows in a VM, no matter what platform we use, so all M$ users could be happy, or do as ACorn did (does), have a PC as a extension card, i.e. run a PC natively in a window, just used the *fast* RISC CPU for any real work.
I don't pretend to feel the difference between 2.0GHz and 2.1GHz. I don't "feel the difference" when going from a HD with 3x20gb platters to 2x30gb platters. I don't feel the difference between PC3200 and PC2700.
;) ) price, I do need to know what the state of the art is.
But I do feel it when I upgrade from an outdated system to a new one. And to know what kind of performance I could get for a reasonable* (*as defined by me
Maybe that isn't relevant to you, maybe your 486 / Pentium / Duron / Space heater does what you want it to when you check your email and type up your word document, but not for all of us. I know a few tasks where I'd like 4gb+ of memory, solid-state SATA drive and a multi-GHz proc+, or a dual, for that matter.
Large strides are best made one small step at a time. This is just another one of them.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I think a better approach for the future are smaller less power hungry modular CPUs. We've all seen the evidence of the clusters that makeup super computers. What if all standard computers came with 4 CPUs that used the same power as the P4 today? What if, instead of buying a newer faster computer, you could add CPUs like expansion cards but, at a reasonable price?
UNIX/Linux Consulting
1. According to Borland, the name of the language is now simply "Delphi." This changed as of the release of Delphi 7.
2. Borland C++ and Delphi use the same machine code generator engine, so the optimizations are largely the same. The performance is largely the same. As you said, Delphi is single pass, and parses a good bit faster.
3. For those of you out there saying "huh? Pascal??? No one uses THAT??!?!" Guess again. It is used a lot more than you might think, typically by small, lean shops with insane deadlines like mine.
meh.
They're saying that Barton will be here 1Q03, Sledgehammer is due 1H03, but now ClawHammer may be delayed until 2H03!
Arghh. I thought the point was to do a 64 bit CPU without requiring an Itanium schedule...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?