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Intel And AMD's Dual-Core CPUs Investigated
Hack Jandy writes "Anandtech has a bunch of insider information concerning Intel and AMD's move to dual-core CPUs. The article has lots of great information on how the move to dual-core processors affects modern computing - in particular, Anand sees more promise in multiple CPU cores that perform different operations, rather than just stamping two identical cores on the same processor like AMD and Intel are doing now."
I would rather have faster processors than multiple cores, as it is not enough is multi-threaded. Even the highest end 3D apps, their render engines are SMP capable, but all geometry translation/deformation is not. That would be one core right? Unless multiple cores could show up as one single core/proc in the OS..
Given some vendors (eg Oracle) who like charging for licenses on a per-cpu basis, doesn't this translate into an unavoidable increase in licensing costs ?
As this kind of technology becomes more pervasive, and manufacturers stop supporting single cored CPU's , customers end up paying more for software licenses with no way of avoiding these unnecessary costs.
Often the extra 'grunt' is not needed.
Its seems that Intel have lost their technology edge. Early in Intel's life, the company direction was driven by the engineers, but it over the last few years, highlighted by the mhz race, all tech R&D has been driven by marketing managers. This was probably to be expected. Marketers and non-tech managers are usually very good with people, very good at playing politics, and hence very good at influencing company direction; far better than most engineers. Intel is now paying the price for their incompetence by loosing out to smaller, more hungry competitors.
0 (Project Niagra). Intel certainly has much catching up to do, but its time for a new race and hopefully they'll get their arse into gear and show us some exciting things in the years to come, that is, if the marketoids can be somehow dethroned from their positions of power.
I don't know where the Itanic fits into this theory. I guess if it wasn't so late, and was made available during the tech bubble, Intel would now be on a fundamentally different track, rather than playing catch-up (poorly) with more innovative companies.
Now, onto multi-core chips. This is actually a very exciting direction. Sun has already demonstrated an 8 core, quad-hyperthreading 32-way chip http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/2004091
What is being referred to here is the possibility of having different cores, not just two identical cores on the same silicon. Similarly to how the PowerPC970 has two different branch prediction algorithms which "compete": each calculating which branches should be taken, with a central heuristic keeping track of how well each has been doing lately and chosing which will be used for the next series of branch predictions, a heterogeneously cored chip could offer several differing implementations of the same realestate. This could mean having one core with 4 FPU's/2 IU's and another with the reverse, or different length pipelines/branch predictors/L1 caches - thus opening up the possibility of CPU hierarchies, where set A is really good at certain tasks and set B is really good at another, and the OS is smart enough to schedule them appropriately. Think of a machine which is used for both compilations and running jobs, or think of the benefits in a virtual machine environment! The admin could partition the system along functional boundaries (intelligent hyperthreading).
Another possibility is where the entire system is devoted to a single task (think HPC: fluid flow, weather simulations, etc) where you could have threads doing the intensive floating point calculations on one core, and the heavy integer arithmetic on the other, or maybe split up the cores based on memory accesses patterns, or cache use, or built-in ASICs!
What I would love to see is a system where you have 2/4 cores with a large cache, plus an FPGA or two on die that each application can program - with OS cooperation this could be a "killer app" in silicon. Do a lot of "int*float*sqrt(int)?" - then program the FPGA to do it in one operation, as if the original chip design had it all along!
Insanely cool stuff! "CPU and GPU", sheesh.
I can't fucking wait.
I hope that w/ multicore CPUs speach recognition (you shout "archers to the big tower!" and they do) and maybe camera tracking of player's movement will be more commonplace in games. I guess that would be pretty cool stuff until 3d-without-glasses-or-helmets displays come to life.
Yep, this would be cool. However it sort of already exists, but coming from the other angle. I know at least xilinx has a powerpc builtin in a number of their high end FPGAs. But your approach could possibly very interesting for homeusers. A more high-end cpu with low-end FPGA.. Guess you just have to invent the first killer-app that would use it :)
In terms of "marketing speak", this is a good opportunity for Sparc and PowerPC chips to catch up to the X86 architecture.
Thanks to Intel's own marketing, most users are used to seeing that Mhz = power, and Apple suffers from the fact that the G5 tops out at 2.5Ghz, while Intel chips cruise along at 3+Ghz. Sun's SPARC architecture suffers from the same illusion, although comparably, both the Sparc and PPC architectures are quite close to X86 in terms of actual horsepower (not so much with Sparc, but Sun's true power is total throughput and reliablity and scalability, not flops).
With Intel "stuck" at around 4Ghz, IBM/Apple could figure out how to ramp up the G5 (or it's successor) to 4+Ghz, and beat Intel at it's own marketing game.
Similarly, this bump in the roadmap for Intel could be the opportunity for other/alternative CPU architectures to gain some marketshare.
(Posted as someone very, very tired of the Wintel Monopoly)
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It looks like IBM chose the right direction to go with their line of processors. With things like the power 5 chip, and altivec processing units combined you get more bang for the buck vs a dual core x86 chipset running at a higher clock speed.
However I dont see a mass migration to the power platform due to the entrenchment of the desktop market. BUT if they can proove they have the more powerful upgrade path we may be seeing more powerPC type servers in the farms as businesses upgrade and look for that power for price. With PPC linux this will be possible and Microsoft will be sitting around wondering what the hell happened.
There is a very interesting article in the last edition of Fortune. I think AMD got it right this time around.
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s /0,15114,724543,00.html
:(
My favorite quote
AMD CFO Rivet explains
"As hard as we tried to win the hearts and minds of CIOs, with the desktop as our focus we were going to fail. They made their decisions with the server on down. When Intel had 100% of the x86 server market, it could charge whatever it wanted and use that money to beat us on desktops. We had to be in the profit haven".
Ruiz (CEO of AMD) calls the server-led approach "do or die" for AMD: "If we hadn't pulled this off I would have shut the door"
From the Fortune article:
AMD: Chipping Away at Intel
CEO Hector Ruiz came from humble roots to propel AMD into the big leagues.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/article
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Why is this better than current implementations of multiple processors on one motherboard? Isn't it fundamentally the same thing, just using less space? Granted, using less space allows for more and more processors to be placed in the same area, just like making smaller transistors allows you to place more of them on the chip. But that's only really useful in a server environment, which is why it never really caught on among home users. Will this really provide any benefit for everyday users?
I wonder if we have reached the end of the race for processing power. Up until the 60s and 70s, car manufacturers were trying to create increasingly more powerful engines. In part because of the gas shortages of the 70s, but also due to the fact that people really can't do anything useful with 700HP, other than kill themselves really really fast. The focus shifted from power to economy. Maybe one day manufacturers will be touting that their laptops are so efficient they can power themselves from the kinetic energy of moving them around, like watches of today. This will be a sad day for most of us, because it means we will have to get off our asses every once in a while to keep our laptops running.
On a side note, how come nobody's posted anything about a Beowulf cluster of these?
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The P4 does indeed clock down as it overheats, but you chose a poor source to cite for a comparison between Intel and AMD processors. The Tom's Hardware demonstration wasn't indicative of how the Athlon they tested actually behaves. The demo was staged to give the Athlon some bad press.
Tom's Hardware specifically disabled thermal management on the Athlon motherboard, which would have ensured that the Athlon simply shut down upon overheating. Shutting down is less elegant than what a P4 does, but the chip should not have fried.
In general purpose computing it would be nice to have one core dedicated to mathematically intensive tasks and one for the housekeeping. So that while you compile your X does not hang.
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There was interesting paper at ISCA a few years back that proposed vector extensions to the Alpha ISA (called Taranula) and then making a dual core processor with the second core a vector core. The vector core would still be dependent on the scalar core for certain functionality (eg, supplying scalar arguments, renaming) and they proposed a 16MB!! L2 cache to feed the beast, but the performance numbers (especially the performance/power numbers) were pretty impressive.
The thing that irks me is that there is no general computing source any more. Things have pretty much descended into the various "camps" with pee cee people reading about those new processors and the Mac people reading about the Power PC processor.
I used to be able to keep up with processor design in Byte Magazine. It also kept me apprised of each different computer that came out back when no one computer type and operating system had over 90% of the market and I think that Byte helped serve those who didn't want to see Microsoft-Intel become as dominant as they have become.
The death of Byte is still a sore spot with me. I ran an Intel platofrm for many years and was able to keep up with what Motorola and Sun were doing with their designs. There were even columns on embedded applications. I felt like I had a really good handle on the microprocessor universe and the differences. Sadly, not so now (or should I use Jerry Pournelle's frequent "Alas...").
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