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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."
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...
Is it it me or does anybody else see the irony in the fact that there was an intel advert on the page.....
It would be interesting to compare the price/performance of these AMD chips versus the 12 cpu transmeta workstations we heard about yesterday.
Unobtainium?
Oh wait, that's something else...
4 procs, dual cores? Kickass. A short read on implementation differences between AMD64 & Intel's 64. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17906
...and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.
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.
Would the Consumer model of these chips be called BiAthlons?
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
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.
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
Don't knock that vaporware! I plan on running Duke Nukem Forever on that. (They sound compatible)
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]
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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.
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?