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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.
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.