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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
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?!?
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