Slashdot Mirror
VIA K8T800 Chipset Preview - Dual Opteron in Action
Mr.Tweak writes "It has been a long time coming but we are finally reaching the beginning stages of 64-bit mainstream computing. AMD has been the first to bring a 64-bit processor to the market with any true support in the Opteron. VIA is one of the key chipset companies supporting AMD64 and today TweakTown takes a preview look at their new K8T800 chipset with AMD Opteron 242 and 244 processors. 64-bit computing is boarding - don't miss the train!"
I think the distinction between PC and RISC is quickly becoming obsolete, and so perhaps one should be including the UltraSparc IIe that's in the SunBlade 100/150, which retail for less than most new PC's.
By all accounts this is not the best of the current 64-bit chips, but I think it was the first to be offered in "PC-priced" systems.
The via board hinders the opteron. Instead of utilizing both on-chip memory controllers, it only uses one. You can see better results if you added a second set of memory banks for the second opteron to use.
There are more dual boards also including Tyans Thuder K8W. Rumor has it that nvidia will be coming out with a nforce chipset that will support dual opterons also.
Benchmarks
246 Benchmark
Overclocked 246
While it's slick that they had a dual proc board and all... none of the tests they used used the dual proc-ness of the system. They even indicate in their results that the second proc just threw overhead into the system.
;)
They've asked for help getting some dual proc benchmarking software. It would be great if someone could help them out. I'm really curious what that box is ACTUALLY capable of. IT's a goodly amount of horsepower with a reasonable amount of L2 cache with 64-bits of data-y goodness. It could make a heck of a "workgroup" size database server.... for a lot less than Sun's workgroup servers.
I think this next gen of procs (and their 64-bitness) is going to put another dent in Sun. First, lowend *NIX servers based on x86 put a huge dent in their pizza box market. Now, consumer grade 64-bit procs will probably start to eat heavily into their midrange market (like the 220R and that realm). In the big iron... well, that's contentious already. No need to to mess with them there
I'm down with that, as it were
Repeat after me: 64 bit processors aren't new. There's no new "computing fad" leaving the station. No new architectural wonder.
They aren't even new in desktop machines. I just threw out an Alphastation4 with a 64 bit 21064 from 1996 or something (nearly put my back out lugging the thing down the stairs. They built computers to last in those days). That was a competitor with the Pentium Pro IIRC. Many of the machines where I work were 64 bit ultrasparc before we started to go 32 bit x86.
That said, the new athlon does look pretty damn fast.
AI stuff can benefit, since Lisp on 64-bit architectures is especially nice. Lisp code on 64-bit architectures with 64-bit address space is significantly better performance than on 32-bit architectures, as you can implement many language primitive datatypes within the 64-bit quad, and still have a few high-bits for type-tagging, making a sort of virtual tagged memory architecture.
That means a dynamically-typed language with comparable performance to statically-typed.
Historically, one of the significant markets for Alpha processors was people running the Genera virtual lisp machine.