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."

Comments

Four of parts?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that 7 of 9's ugly sister?

Speeeed

[Klar]

I didn't see any specifics in the article, so I was wondering if anyone knows how fast the Dual-core Athlon 64's and Opteron's will be running? Has there been any clue's? I'm just wondering how long my processor will seem fast for, lol..

Re:Speeeed

[mjuarez]

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.

Re:Speeeed

[Epistax]

Don't knock that vaporware! I plan on running Duke Nukem Forever on that. (They sound compatible)

Itanium?

[StevenHenderson]

but AMD will have four of parts running inside an HP ProLiant DL585 server at its Austin plant later today.

Does this mean HP is offically ditching the Itanium2? If so, strange move, albeit likely a smart one...

Re:Itanium?

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:Itanium?

[JayJay.br]

Not really. Opteron is part of HP's strategy for 64-bit computing everywhere.
The roadmap looks something like this:

- Tandem (NSK) will eventually turn to Itanium (as soon as lockstep is deployed and working fine);
- Alpha and PA-RISC will evolve into Integrity (Itanium2);
- Proliants (IA-32) will evolve into Opteron.

It's just that 32-bit computing is taking its last breath, and it's time to move on.

Now that looks like a smart move.

Re:Itanium?

[flaming-opus]

HP has several (6 actually) server product lines. They will probably use opterons in their high-volume/lower-profit proliant server line. However they have firmly commited to ditching pa-risc, mips, and alpha for their other 5 server platforms. The high-end/high-profit/low-volume systems are largely independant of the proliant group.

HP doesn't view itanium and opteron as an either/or proposition. Given their product porfolio, it's quite reasonable to use both. Itanium is fast and expensive, a good fit for a 128-way superdome. Opteron is pretty-fast and inexpensive, a good fit for a 4-way proliant.

Ad on site

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it it me or does anybody else see the irony in the fact that there was an intel advert on the page.....

Re:Ad on site

[ms00skr]

It's you.

(We all use adblock)

Re:Ad on site

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's you.

How are you gentlemen?

Comparison

[Nos.]

It would be interesting to compare the price/performance of these AMD chips versus the 12 cpu transmeta workstations we heard about yesterday.

8-socket?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, 4-sockets, each with dual core CPU.

Re:8-socket?

[Chris Burke]

No, 8 sockets is still wrong. What they are demoing is a 4 socket board with 4 dual-core Opterons in it. There aren't any 8-socket boards, and in fact the point is probably to demonstrate that they can make an 8-cpu system by putting their new dual core chip into the existing 4-socket board.

The possibility of making an 8-socket board doesn't make using "8 socket" correct in this context.

Are they made of...

[kayak334]

Unobtainium?

Oh wait, that's something else...

Cheaper Processors

[COMON$]

While it will be a while before I will be able to justify one of these at home. I am happy for any technology that will further lower the price of processors. Maybe a nice AMD64 will be in the future of budget home users.

Re:Cheaper Processors

[gid]

There are already budget AMD64 machines as long as your build your own. I don't know if any big name vendors build such a machine yet as I'm not into prebuilt machines, but I wouldn't doubt if there are some available.

You can get a Chaintech K8T800 socket754 mobo for $64, an Athlon 64 3200+ (newcastle) cpu for $218, a WD SATA hd for $68, maybe a 512 meg stick of DDR400 ram for $78, a case for $60. What else do you need? Most people probably have everything else they can canibalize from their old machine. All that comes up to $488. These prices are all from newegg.

I'm looking at a new setup myself, but using a nicer, probably nforce3 mobo with better sound (hopefully it won't pick up USB/HD noise as I hear some people are complaining about) either from MSI or Asus.

Re:Cheaper Processors

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been building systems for some time, I have made many nForce3 systems and have never experienced any hdd or usb noise. Then again my company only sells performance cooled computers, could make a diffrence for sound seepage. I would recommend only using a 10K Sata Raptor drive, since they have been around it's all I use. The real world performance gain only relates to about 2K 3dmarks (3dmark2k1), however overall system speed and performance is greatly enhanced, especially if you are going to skimp and not put 1GB or more of RAM, that faster swap file is quite apparent. If your worried about losing HDD space get a DVD-RW drive at less then 70 bucks for a nice one, it only makes sense to store your stuff on a DVD anyway, for the performance boost.

On another note I should mention if you are into gaming the amd64 core does far more than a high end video card. Obviously the fusion of the two is stellar, however if you have to choose get the cheaper $100 video card and focus on the amd64 core (for all you skimpers out there) with at least 1GB of RAM, you will be very happy with the result.

64: Intel vs AMD

[minerat]

4 procs, dual cores? Kickass. A short read on implementation differences between AMD64 & Intel's 64. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17906

Interesting, but realistic?

[Sheetrock]

Given the cothermic limitation on implementing 'cores' (or independent dies) on one surface, it seems a clever but limited hack to increase the performance by effectively implementing multiple CPUs on the same chip.

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.)

Re:Interesting, but realistic?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Given the cothermic limitation on implementing 'cores' (or independent dies) on one surface, it seems a clever but limited hack to increase the performance by effectively implementing multiple CPUs on the same chip.

Of course, in my experience, AMD64s are fairly cool compared to Intel's stuff. You could porbably do a dual core AMD64 at 2Ghz for way under 100W.

Names?

[Skraut]

Would the Consumer model of these chips be called BiAthlons?

Upgrading servers

[Archangel Michael]

So what today might be an eight-way server will potentially become, mid-2005, an "eight socket" server with 16 processing cores.

And just think, it was only last week when it was shown that most servers are never upgraded (Core Components), and that most people already buy their servers with growth in mind.

This kind of stupid comments are not helpful.

My question is this, how is this going to affect M$ licencing of OSes? I buy a dual socketed board and put in a couple of these babies is M$ going to complain that I have 4 CPUs and XP won't load because I have the 2 CPU version?

The idea of licencing software by HW is stupid, don't you think?

The Only Speed that Counts: Rate of Market Growth

[reporter]

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.

Of course it is realistic...

[Kjella]

In general, power dissapation scales in frequency with n^2, in multiple cores with n. So for the power of a processor 2x as fast, you could probably deliver 2^2=4x with 4 cores.

Granted, this is only true if the task is parallellizable, but with todays multi-tasking computers I could at least use two cores. (If main task is blocked, there's probably a dozen other background processes who'd like a few cycles).

Kjella

Four of parts?

[Canthros]

I know, don't pick on the lack of grammar on Slashdot, lest ye be struck down by Great Powers On High. I just can't help but wonder if that's a minor arcanum/suit for some sort of geek tarot or playing card deck.

Benefits of dual core?

[timeOday]

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.

Re:Benefits of dual core?

[Christopher Thomas]

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?

Less packaging overhead, and faster communication between cores (on-die bandwidth and latency are far, far better than any motherboard's crossbar's bandwidth and latency).

You also have less contention over memory, for single-chip systems with multiple cores vs. multi-chip systems. Instead of having to muck about with cache coherence across a bus, the chip looks like a single processor as far as the memory subsystem is concerned, with coherence operations only involving the first one or two cache levels on-die.

yield decreases roughly exponentially with die size, which argues for 2 separate cpus.

Processes are optimized so that you can build a chip with 1-2 square centimetres of area with reasonable yield (as this is what chip manufacturers demand). This has been pretty constant (or if anything, has been increasing). However, with each design generation, the number of transistors available in this area has doubled. We're now at the point where we can get high yields on chips with enough transistors that multi-core designs make sense.

A chip with N cores also doesn't take N times as much area as a single-core chip, as the lowest levels of cache aren't duplicated (just L1 and usually now L2). So overhead is reasonable, and the real estate is there. It makes a lot of sense to use it.

Dammit, AMD -- quit inventing shit so fast!

[IronChefMorimoto]

Christ in handbag covered in ketchup, AMD! WHY THE HELL CAN YOU NOT JUST TAKE A BREAK AND STOP INVENTING SHIT FOR A WEEK OR MONTH?!

It's not like AMD fanboys like me are going to let you go out of business. We'll still be buying your underpriced processors in lieu of Intel chips for a while to come. And we'll show up in droves to events that really tout your existing product line. We swear it!

Plus, Intel isn't moving that fast these days. I've read more about trouble for Intel in the past 2 months than I have in 5 years. "We can't frabricate this processor, or we're not responsible if that processor burns your house down when you overclock it." Come on! Let 'em catch up for the sheer thrill of beating 'em again with the Athlon128 a few years down the road.

Why? Why my insistence on your taking a g'damned break from inventing shit? You wanna know why?

I can't f---ing afford another upgrade for awhile. So stop it. Now. Dammit. Give us poor home built computer bastards a break.

And pass the f---ing message off to those asshats at ATI and Nvidia.

John Carmack too -- the "we're gonna change the world of gaming hardware every time we release a new game" motherf---er.

IronChefMorimoto

Re:Dammit, AMD -- quit inventing shit so fast!

[biz0r]

Am I the only one who can almost hear Cartman screaming this at the top of his lungs?

Backwards compatible, too!

[hirschma]

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.

Bad terminology

[Anonymous Coward]

Socket implies the physical chip. An 8-socket system using a dual core chip implies 16 processors. The poster really meant a 4-socket dual core system.

Wait, 8 Sockets?

[Myriad]

"AMD will be have four of the parts running inside a usually four-way HP ProLiant DL585 server at its Austin plant later today."

Wait... four-way with dual core processors... so what they are saying is

THERE ARE FOUR SOCKETS!

Blockwars: free, multiplayer Tetris like game

Re:Imagine ...

[RsG]

Imagine... a /. story where beowulf clusters are on topic! Imagine a cluser of cluster computing stories! Imagine... wait, what do you mean "recursive loo[NO CARRIER]

Cache coherency implications

[Geiger581]

From what has been published prior, the maximum number of coherent HyperTransport links in one Socket 940 interface is 3 and the number of logical processors has been limited to 8 to keep cache snooping traffic managable. Because each dual core chip will have 2 independent caches, the coherency traffic will increase regardless of whether external dual cores are addressed as single HT units. Will this result in either: a) reduction of sockets for general-purpose servers to 4 or b) entirely new ccNUMA protocols being developed from previous generation Opterons?

OS loaders and schedulers can help keep chatty processes allocated to the right mem/processor, but something more has to be said about hardware-level coherency standards. The X-box was fast and efficient largely because its CPU used the video RAM natively, but PCs still have to slog data over the slow and non-coherent PCI, AGP, or PCI-Express busses between the CPUs and GPUs. An inter-vendor standard could bring PC CPU-GPU interaction efficiencies much higher. ccPCI-Express or HyperTransportx16 slots anyone?

I'll be at the dual core demo

[ruiner5000]

Look for a report this afternoon on AMDZone.com.

Intel has nothing to throw at this?

[Tibor the Hun]

Whatever do you mean?
Let me count:
-They have speedy Celerons,
-They have shiny 32bit HT P4s
-They have shiny blue and orange stickers that say "You just paid too much for a CPU... err, I mean Intel Inside!"