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AMD Going Dual-Core In 2005
gr8_phk writes "We recently learned of Intel's
plans to go dual-core in late 2005. Well it seems AMD has
decided to follow suit. It should be noted that the K8 architecture has had this designed in
from the start. Will this be socket 939 or should I try to hold out another year to buy?"
I have seen some licensing schemes that apply to per-processor costs... 1 CPU = $1,000, 2 CPU = $2,000 etc.
How long will it take to argue that consumers with a dual core processor should pay 2x the price? I'm betting not long.
Interestingly, in a review of P4 vs. K8, the K8 had a clear advantage at the 4 processor level and above, apparently because of reduced bus conflicts with their individual memory spaces. If AMD were to proliferate cores on chip, they'd wind up contesting for the memory bandwidth, just like the P4.
--- Bill
I could see a big future of heatsink business in Intel and AMD's plans.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Sure, if you are happier not only with liquid radiator cooling, and also having to have copper heatpipe cooling. That is right as I have discovered here Apple has had to implement not one, but two separate cooling solutions for their 2.5GHz PowerMac G5. What were you saying again? You do realize don't you that you will be able to swap out a single core dual Opteron system with two dual core CPUs and have Quad CPU power don't you? And that makes the G5 an advantage how?
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
To be perfectly honest, it depends how rich you are. At the end of the day when it comes to buy now, buy later; the state of technology generally speaking is that in most cases (particularly with computer hardware) after only a short period of time , whatever technology you invest in becomes obsolete.
...
From my own personal point of view, my dual athlon 1.5ghz is still holding out beautifully. When the cash comes my way Im banking on a powerbook. Truth is I dont need another desktop just yet. However if i had a stupid disposable income, and one that predictably would hold out till these dual cores come out id proabably get one now, and get one later.
When I built this machine I bought the highest spec parts I could afford at the time and I havent upgraded for 2 or 3 years aside from upgrading the graphics card. The rule I live by is get the best available that you can afford at the time and it should keep you going for a good while.
Im running gentoo box; faster processors would be very nice for source compiles but I gave up on churning out seti blocks a while ago and dont have a massive reason for further processor power
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Dual cores processors seem to me like a pretty good alternative to a dual processor system. You don't have the hassle of 2 huge coolers blowing out hot air, the mainboards are don't have to be overpriced and it is already supported by all OS.
Some years ago I was thinking about getting a dual processor system. Alone the motherboard was two times as expensive as a similar single processor one, applications did not support it all and so on. I hope newer applications are ready for dual cores. Quake III was the first game I know that used two processors and finally I can consider that animated desktop background.
Is there a list which applications can effectively use dual cores besides obvious things like webservers?
Dual cores have been in the IBM PPC pipeline for quite a while - of course the (now old) Power4 arch has been multi-core all along.
In all probability the PPC little brother of Power5 (rumored to be called the 975) will debut at 90 nanometers and the next chip will be a ~60 nanometer dual core version possibliy called the 976.
Which if these will be called the G6 is left up to the reader as an exercise. My money is on the 976. Either way the PPC has some serious legs.
=tkk
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
Seeing as the G5 is, more or less, a sinlge core from the larger IBM Power4 processor, I'm not seeing that it would be a large problem to make dual core chips.
I highly doubt Apple will switch to x86, it's a pride thing if nothing else. Also, at this point, a switch would upset everything. It could have been done, potentially, with the OS-X switch. Since software was having to be ported to a new OS, a new architecture port is just one more thing. Now, however, x86 Macs would be binary incompatible with PPC Macs. That means emulation, which isn't very efficient.
I think Apple is pretty much stuck on PPC for good.
While the idea of dual core cpus is really cool, and will take over shortly due in part to the fact that we need something to do with all those extra transistors, I wonder why the focus of the industry is on chip multi-processors (CMP).
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While CMP processors can give us rougly the same performance of a standard SMP system (somewhat faster due to interprocessor communication and shared memory, but also slower due to a larger memory bottleneck) I don't think that a CMP system would compete with a simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) solution.
While Intel's response to SMT (hyperthreading) has some benifits the performance of it is rather lackluster. The reason has more to do with their particular implementation. If you've read about the initial observations on SMT an 8-way SMT processor was shown to outperform a 4-way CMP processor. Now, I must note that the 8-way smt processor had more functional units then the cores in the 4-way CMP processor, but the overall area of the 8-way SMT processor would be much much smaller (far less structures need to be duplicated for SMT as opposed to CMP). For more information on this check out some of the papers at http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/smt/
What I don't understand is the insistance of the industry to use CMP first. From everything I've read, an 8-way SMT processor should take up less die space then a two way CMP processor. Even assuming that the 8 way processor contains more functional units. It kind of makes sense that a CMP processor is faster when there aren't enough threads to fully utilize a SMT processor (say only 2 or 3 threads that want full cpu usage). I guess SMT is a big chance in the model of programming and application development (I'm currently running research on the subject which is why I'm so interested in it). Is the reason to embrace CMPs simply because there's less new technology to add (they "just" have to interconnect two cores as opposed to adding the extra logic for SMT).
Does anyone else have any other opinions regarding this matter, or any idea why no one seems to be fully embracing SMT's potential.
Philip Garcia
Why not take an older processor (e.g. i80486) that already is basically single cycle execution -- or Pentium which has two execution pipes already -- update it to modern geometry which should increase speed and decrease power, and put as many as you can easily fit onto the die? After all, those older cores execute all the basic i86 code including MMX with a lot less transistors. How much does SSE, SSE2 and HT contribute verses a lot of cores just executing threads with little context switching?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
No it doesn't
Yes, it does.
If you're at all familiar with the Opteron architecture, you'd realize that each chip's memory controller does, indeed go to a new memory bank.
As an example, I just bought a 4-way Opteron. It's got four seperate banks of memory on it. Each processer has a 128-bit, DDR400 memory controller, all independent of each other.
If you have a program on each CPU, accessing memory tied to that CPU, the 4-way machine I mentioned would have a theoretical memory throughput of 25.6 gigabytes/second. The theoretical throughput of a dual-Xeon machine is 5.4 gigabytes/second. That's a huge difference.
You're right, it takes some intelligent work to schedule programs on CPUs that are close to the memory the program will access. If you hadn't been in a hole for the past year or two, you'd know that there has been a lot of work put into Linux to make it handle these NUMA architectures more intelligently. IBM has some VERY large NUMA systems, and has been pouring a lot of development into Linux.
As for system costs going up so much that it would be prohibitive for a desktop, think again. AMD's entire desktop line is transistioning to the Opteron architecture. Even the lowly 1xx single-proc Opterons and Athlon64's have nearly all of the features of the highest 8xx 8-way chips. The difference between a 848 and a 148 is just reduced cache, and fewer Hypertransport lines out of the chip.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.