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AMD to Demo '8-socket' Dual-Core Opteron System
flynn_nrg writes "AMD will make the first public demonstration of a system built out of its dual-core processors today, the result of a strategy first made public almost a year ago. Two-core Opteron chips aren't due to ship until the middle of 2005, but AMD will have four of parts running inside an HP ProLiant DL585 server at its Austin plant later today."
It would be interesting to compare the price/performance of these AMD chips versus the 12 cpu transmeta workstations we heard about yesterday.
It means that HP is hedging their bets, like a smart little company. Itanic still has better floating point from what I understand, and if you are willing to spend absolute gobs of money to get it, itanic may yet be the right platform for you. Of course most of the problems that demand high quantities of floating point seem to be running on clusters these days but I'm no supercomputing expert.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, although there have been no specific comments on CPU frequency for dual cores, I'd bet that these babies are running somewhere between 1.8Ghz and 2.2Ghz. Remember, these dual core is from the very first batches of 90nm AMD products out there. It will take some months to squeeze all the bugs out.
OTOH, I fully expect a 2.4Ghz dual-core Opteron available for purchase by July 2005. Meanwhile, Intel has absolutely nothing to throw at this, except for vaporware.
Clearly there is a performance benefit in both bandwidth and latency respects in multithreading/multioperating in this manner, but it's not difficult to see that the footprint limits the factor to which this technique can be exploited. Indeed even if they were able to fit three cores in the same chip the thermal energy would most likely outstrip the dissipation potential of conventional heatsinks -- unless of course the user is willing to invest in air conditioning or other mainframe-style cooling technologies (which may make sense for servers.)
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
The only speed that counts is how fast you can grow the market for your product. In that category, AMD wins. AMD appears to be on a roll these days. In the latest quarter, the Opteron (AMD) outshipped the Itanium (Intel) by a ratio of 10 to 1. AMD shipped 60,000 units, and Intel shipped 5665 units. Apparently, the survivors of the microprocessor wars in the 1990s are the PowerPC architecture and the IA32-X64 architecture. The Itanium architecture will survive, but it will be relegated to a high-performance graphics engine.
I wonder if somebody could explain why dual-core CPUs are a good idea. If it's a pair of cores on a single piece of silicon, it seems it would take the same silicon as two separate cpus, so where's the benefit? You'd save the cost of an extra socket on the motherboard, but then again yield decreases roughly exponentially with die size, which argues for 2 separate cpus.
Clearly there is a performance benefit in both bandwidth and latency respects in multithreading/multioperating in this manner, but it's not difficult to see that the footprint limits the factor to which this technique can be exploited
Actually - if you have two cores on the same die you can minimize the needed bus transport path and use processor scale path => less heat... you still need the same components to provide the bus external to the two processors, but the speed gains from having a dual core should not have an impact on the heat dissipation other than just having two cores to cool down (and with modern HSF technology that is not a problem - If I can cool down a P4 3Ghz with a quiet HSF combo - AMD can do it too...)
Get your free iPod![it really works! - my buddy got his after I signed up, I have just 2 more referrals to go...]
This is the hottest part. It means that I can take my current Operton dual CPU machine and make it into a 4-way, likely with just a BIOS upgrade.
I think that a lot of folks are going to go for this type of upgrade, just because the upside is so huge.
research ways of
1) Speeding up hard drives
2) Getting data between the HD, memory and processor faster
Surely this would improve the overall computers speed rather than just the processor.
A large number of people make the claims that Intel has better FPU's. yet over the past year I have seen AMD's FPU's meet or even beat Intel's offerings on a regular basis in real world use.
Granted the Itanium is still "alphaware" and who knows when it will have a full release, I find it hard to believe that the AMD64 doesn not have a superior FPU, or at very least a comperable one.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Call me a troll, but I would gather, pretty close to the same as if there were two processors.
Performance of a CMP chip relative to a dual-processor system depends on the load. On one had, you have shared L3 (and maybe L2) caches (depends on whose CMP implementation you're talking about), which means you have two (or more) processes trying to use one chip's worth of cache space. On the other hand, if you have loads that are not cache-bound, you get faster inter-process communication than with a dual-core system (as data the processes are sharing is in-cache instead of in main memory).
Several types of scientific load meet the footprint requirement. Rendering might or might not, depending on what you're doing (tends to be memory-bound).
I read somewhere a few weeks ago that Oracle, MS and some other big software companies with per-cpu licensing intend to count a hyperthreaded cpu as 1 cpu since it's basically virtual processors. Multi-core cpu:s, OTOH, will be regarded as multiple cpu:s, as there are, duh, multiple cores. They just happen to sit on the same die.
Somehow a Slashdot thread on Itanium and Opteron did not get into the Intel section.
This is really funny. :)
But just a bit of information. Intel is coming out with a similar chip with either 4 or 8 (I can't remember now) processors on the same chip. Then when compaines order them they can designate how many processors are turned on.
Pretty cool stuff.
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
Yes, but we're not talking about if the Itanium has better FPU than the P4 - we're talking about the AMD opteron.
I don't tend to be a grammar Nazi because as long as I get the idea of the post I tend to ignore it, especially on slashdot.
This shit, however, needs to stop. What the fuck do all these 'employees' do all day? How hard is it to read the submission and realize "FOUR OF PARTS" doesn't sound right?
I would have subscribed awhile ago, and continued contributing but not with this kind of crap. Slashdot is on top the same way MS is, mindshare and sheer numbers. They don't do anything better than anyone else these days.