AMD's Next Generation Processor Technology

Esekla writes "AMD has released info about their upcoming processor technology. The press release claims that they're producing circuits that run 30% faster than any other published benchmarks using "Fully Depleted" Silicon-on-Insulator and AMD's metal gating technology and actually has a good bit of technical detail for a press release."

Comments

Re:I/O Speed Please

[Jeffrey Baker]

Opteron already has an excellent memory subsystem and fast paths to PCI-X peripherals. Aggregate I/O and memory bandwidth in 4-way Opterons is pretty sick, and although it won't compete with insane systems from IBM and SGI, it is a lot better than anything else you can get in an $8000 box. What were you hoping for?

Re:Will anyone notice the speed?

[Junks Jerzey]

In all honesty I believe the Slashdot whining is because a lot of posters are poor college students or jobless teenagers. This means they generally cannot afford the shiny stuff. About this time last year I was running a PII-233 myself. By denouncing the great you can make the not-so-great seem better.

I have said this before, and I will said it again. I'm a professional software developer. I work on high-end 3D games, and I have a penchant for working with large, high-level languages that so many programmers put down as "too slow," such as Lisp, when I can. When I had an 866MHz Pentium III, wow, that was my dream machine. It felt like I had infinite processor cycles. If something ever felt a little sluggish, it was because I did something dumb and a little algorithmic tweaking made it go away. I never felt the need for more speed. Ever. Seriously. And now I have a P4 with 3x the clock speed (which I have for reasons other than the old PC not being fast enough).

The "gotta have more speed" issues come down to three major things:

1. Certain very specific tasks eat up all the processor power you can throw at them, such as high-end scientific numerical work (think: systems of tens of thousands of equations) and video compression. Both of these are specific enough that they shouldn't be driving general, across-the-board, desktop CPU development. Ideally, video compression should be done via coprocessor, just as drawing texture mapped triangles is. If we didn't have GPUs like those from nVidia and ATI, we'd need CPUs clocked at 100GHz in order to achieve the same results.

2. Some things are slow, but they often come down to really poor design or have nothing to do with processor speed. Boot time, for example. Or sometimes you hit Help in a giant program like Quark or Maya and there's a substantially long period before the help shows up. That's not a processor bottleneck; that's another program being paged in, maybe even the Java runtime stuff to support it, and then a monstrous index of data being loaded. But people see things like this and immediately think the processor is too slow.

3. There are certain outdated--IMO--activities that some people engage in which are fundamentally flawed, and hence slow. A good example is building monstrous applications using C++. C++ doesn't have formal support for separately compiled modules, so each one is compiled independently, you need an ugly make system to sort out the dependencies, and then they all get thrown into a massive link step at the end. People who write code with Delphi don't have this problem; compile time is effectively zero for most projects. Ditto for Lisp or Python. C++ is a necessary language, but again it shouldn't be the impetus for processor upgrades.

Thanks for reading.

Intel vs AMD

[nepheles]

It's about time that AMD got some recognition for their work, and, more specifically, their R&D. 3DNow! was miles ahead of MMX, and the Athlon was vastly superior to the P3. The AthlonXP in turn beats the P4, Mhz for Mhz. The widespread opinion is that AMD processors are the poor-man's Intel. "Good, but not as good". Hopefully the new Opertron (it will be amazing if the Itanium does nearly as well in the 64-bit marked) and announcements like this will help redress the balance. And show that marketing budget isn't a measure of CPU quality.

Faster CPUs are a huge benefit.

[Andy Dodd]

Without modern CPUs, home video editing would not be practical (and hence the market for DV camcorders would be much smaller.)

You obviously haven't tried compressing 2 hours of video into DVD-quality MPEG-2, let alone trying to compress it into DivX to send home videos to some relatives.

Would we really need more than 800 MHz on a home computer? I have a 1.7 GHz P4 laptop, and a 1.1 GHz Athlon. Upgrading to a Barton 3000+ (2 GHz or so actual clockrate, but much more efficient per clock than my current TBird) would take my 14-hour encoding jobs down to 7 hours. A difference between taking most of the day and running while I sleep.

And reencoding 1080i HDTV recordings into a more managable size... yikes... I've had 24 hour encoding jobs before.

So my suggestion: Go buy a DV camcorder, or an HDTV tuner card. I guarantee you you'll be desperate to upgrade that poke-ass 800 MHz machine in under two weeks.