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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."
Yes, most apps are only a single thread, but the underlying OS is multithreaded. So there is a large benefit to dual cores / processors, even on the desktop, if one multitasks. (It's also really cool to be rendering video, and be able to start up a game and play online while you wait for it to finish. :-) ) Think of your computer as being like a highway. Increasing the width of the road doesn't make a single car go any faster, but there's room for lots more cars.
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
I would rather have multiple cores than a faster processor. The combined clocks of my old dual processor system ran just over half that of my current (similar core) processor, yet the feel of it on the desktop was far better. None of the little hitches, glitches and rogue processes that plague me on the uniprocessor system. I'm very curious to see how these dual cores stack up against dual processor systems in terms of cost and power consumption, as those are the factors keeping me from going back to a dual proc system.
You are right that many individual applications would not benefit from the additional core but for overall system performance, the dual setup can't be beat.
Kill, Tux, kill!
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.
There is a very interesting article in the last edition of Fortune. I think AMD got it right this time around.
:
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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A hungry bear does not dance!
Bear in mind that a lot of people run more than one program at a time, so apps don't have to be multi-threaded for you to see an advantage. I have a dual CPU system, and it always seems to me to be more responsive than a single CPU system - there just seem to be fewer lockups where the PC seems not to respond for a few seconds. It may only be a second or two, but it's what I find annoying.
My system is only a dual 800MHz Pentium III system, but it usually feels more responsive than the single CPU 2GHz Pentium 4 system I use at work.
I'm about to upgrade to a new PC, and it seems SMP is even harder to buy now - seems like I have to buy Xeons, get special (i.e. expensive) server motherboards and PSUs, etc., so I'll probably end up getting a single CPU system, but I'm kind of worried I'll end up with a system that feels slow, even if it's 3GHz. I can't really justify the extra expense of SMP with a new system. Oh well.
I am a developer, so I do run CPU-intensive tasks like compilers/linkers, which may affect my findings. While building projects at work, it's pretty sluggish if I try to do anything else on my PC - whereas at home on the 'slower' system, I can browse the web, read email, etc, without noticing any real slowdown.
One reliable way to speed up a system is to buy shedloads of RAM, of course. For the current cost of RAM, getting a gig or two of RAM makes a huge difference (for the stuff I do, anyway).