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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."
Look Ma! I got a Ferrari that when you press a button becomes a Yugo!
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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..
>Anand sees more promise in multiple CPU cores that perform different operations
Aren't they called 'CPU' and 'GPU'?
The applications simply aren't there, as AnandTech mentions. Hyperthreading, for instance, did not cause sudden and dramatic speed improvements. The only benefits we're going to see are with applications specifically written for multiprocessor systems. These can take full advantage of the strengths of dual core CPUs.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
And let's call it, say, the x87 math co-processor? :)
Naw, you really need two of the same chips in there. Too much steering of processes and whatnot otherwise.
-m
http://www.invisik.com
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
I think they should dynamicly change the clock speed based on heat content. Have a max hz, then have it slow down the hotter it gets. Then you could remove the cpu fan and not worry about it, save the fact that it would be slow as dirt.
I think the CPUs would be the same speed sorta. Just have one tweaked for say floats and the other something else. If you have a float heavy process you use core 0 and otherwise core 1. You can end up with the same CPI for standard loads but with some programs would do better with one than the other, as they aren't standard.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
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.
I disagree. Ever looked at a NUMA architecture? From the operating system's scheduling perspective, the CPUs are not the same! No difference here with dual+ cores, just that there is more to be exploited between the "processors", so although threads/tasks will have affinities to cores based on computational design, they will be able to share a much larger amount of information though the cache than in a NUMA architecture.
Is just me or does it seem odd they are using x20, x30, and x40 for names? I guess x20 + x30 + x40 does make an x90, slightly better than my x86.
My old PC had this, it was called a turbo button.
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
At least yesterday they were still in.
Amds dual core chips dont use a local HT link to for core-core communication. They have both cores linked to a crossbar, which also has ports for the HT-links and the memory controller.
So a dual core chip still has 3 outgoing ht links, allowing to use 8 dual core chips in one system without "glue"
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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)
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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.
:
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
You need to be a subscriber to read the whole article
A hungry bear does not dance!
On a single CPU system, the X client and server compete for time. It can sometimes be faster to run certain apps over a fast network than locally on the same machine.
On a dual machine or multi-core machine the client and server can both be given time on separate CPUs or presumably different cores on the one CPU.
Deleted
Certainly about how AMD do dual-core, which as it has been detailed since 2001 (and talked about since 1999) I think is extremely poor for a large website like Anandtech to get wrong.
See comments 50, 51 and 54 that go with the story to see how AMD actually do dual-core (they don't 'fuse' hypertransport links together, like the article says they do)
What is sadder is that they haven't corrected the story even though the incorrectness has been pointed out to them in the feedback, and presumably via e-mail as well. Nothing in the article can be trusted in any way because if basic facts are ignored, then what about the rest?
I certainly do not think that such poor articles should be linked from Slashdot. Why should AnandTech get rewarded for such shoddy work?
Maybe we'll see dual-core CPUs where the second core does some
of the 3D-calculation today's graphics chipsets do?
That would certainly be useful for some fields of math.
I think Anand was suggesting that in his article. While the schedulers of Linux and some of the other OSes may be able to handle that, I don't think you want to go that way given the hacks that are used in schedulers, e.g. the hack that Linux uses when running a high priority and a low priority thread on the same hyperthreaded processor. All system accounting is done in terms of processor run time and on an ASMP system, run times aren't going to be equal.
This is a tricky time for hardware manufacturers - how to promote upgrades which are essentially placeholders for a new hardware generation - and hope like hell that Microsoft will actually promote applications that will use that new functionality. Because Microsoft can afford to lose their R&D money, Intel and AMD cannot.
Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to true 64-bit dual core architectures on the PC platform, but unless something amazing happens in the next 12 months, Microsoft will again be the gatekeeper to the mass uptake of that hardware, geek rage and linux notwithstanding. The shark will get it's DRM when the makers are appropriately terrified, and even then they may not make their money back.
From a manufacturer/reseller point of view, it's not looking all that certain. Uncertainty is deadly to the CPU/mainboard market, and I'm seeing it in the hedged bets of computer swapmeets and resellers. The explosion of mp3 players, digital cameras, dvd burners and the astonshing fall in solid state memory might take up the slack for now, but that still means those crucial early-adopters aren't looking at the new goods.
We live in interesting times.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Intel's math's co-processors were a marketing scam to encourage you to buy the same chip twice.
The processor and the co-processor were basically the same part, except that the processor had the math part disabled. When you plugged in the "co-processor" it disabled the original processor and took on all the work itself. There was certainly no multithreading going on.
Didn't that simply make the chip faster by combining it?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
The only processor where your claim is true, is the 486SX, which had indeed the floating point unit disabled. When you bought the 487 (or Overdrive, not sure there), it was essentially a 486DX processor which turned off the 486SX processor.
The joke on the customer here was that SX and DX means something completely different on the 386 chip. (bus speed was doubled on a 386DX and not on a 386SX)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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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Simon
Would it be possible to have a dual core processor with both a PPC and a x86 core?
I know.. how about putting both a general-purpose CPU and a dedicated floating-point processor on the same die? No one's done that yet!
If you go back another generation and also to the first generation, you get the true floating point units on different chips, with the 8086 and 8087 co-processor and the 80287 coprocessor for the 80286 processor.
The next generation after the 80286 processor used the "enable" "disable" scam along with the strange naming conventions, all of which you may find here. So I would agree that the 80287 was a true floating point co-processor; I'm not so sure about all of the 80387 co-processors.
The advantage of having these floating point operations on the same die is, of course, speed. I wonder if the "Alti-Vec" enhancements to the G4 and G5 IBM-Motorola RISC processors is along the same lines as a multi-core processor with different functions in the two cores.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
I was serious.
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 486 was the first to introduce an on-die FPU, as you can read in wikipedia article . It mentions everything I tell, and more, so you really don't have to take my word for it.
The naming oddness with the 386 and 486 were marketing gimmics in order to sell low-spec CPU's to unsuspecting customers. Much like the early day Celerons without cache.
I can tell you the history of the x86 cpus up until the Pentium Pro (which I had back in theday), after that, I don't know the details anymore. Last Intel CPU that I had was a P-III 800Mhz which now happily serves my parents as a home computer. Okay, there is still one Intel machine in my house: a good old Pentium 166MMX powering my "server" ;-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
From what I saw, Intel is using AMD's x86-64?
I loved that button! Computer goes fast, computer goes slow. Computer goes fast, computer goes slow. Computer goes fast, computer goes slow.
Yay!
What is the difference with duel core and hyper-threading? Are they not supposed to solve the same problem? Make the computer act like there are multiple processors. MIKE
Dual cores are in my mind not the 'way forward' as Intel and AMD are pushing them but they will certainly fill the gap as they strive to design the next generation of cores that will push the raw Ghz barrier back even further.
I see this as a way to make it look as if the technology is progressing when in fact it is not. We all know that Intel have been finding it very difficult to keep on ramping up the core frequency of the P4, and I guess we will see AMD start to struggle more and more to ramp up their new x86-64 cores
Hey if they crack the dual core idea and the take up is good perhaps these new cores will also dual core, which can't be bad can it ?
Plus with advanced applications like voice recognition hopefully coming into their own in the next few years a seperate CPU to handle all the 'behind the scenes' stuff will be a boom.
- Leigh
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...").
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Intel's P4 can't go any faster because of heat, and they can't do anything about it.
The hell they can't. Three words would fix Intel's heat situation easily: Desktop Pentium M. Where can I buy such a motherboard?
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 ?
No, it translates into the one-time cost of "Fuck you, our business is migrating to PostgreSQL."
This month's Sci. American outlines the way dualies ease the chip maker's problems in keeping pace with Moore's law...and its not just physics. Economics kills proposed new microprocessors just as dead as insurmountable heat dissipation problems.
Sci Am does not put up current content on its site for free. Go to the library.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Instead of adding dual cores, I would rather have a larger, more capable cache. For example, with enough chip real estate, I would rather have a 16 MB fully-associative L2 cache, rather than a second CPU. After that, I would look for ways to speed up CPU memory bus inter-node communication (e.g. something like SGI NUMAlink) to get to neighboring nodes. Someone has decided that adding an extra CPU is cool, but, I would like to see an objective engineering trade study comparing the extra CPU to the option of spending the same real estate on cache.
I have a dual Athlon MP 1200 board, and before that, an Abit BP6 (dual celeron). There are advantages to having dual CPUs. One of them is, if a rogue process suddenly starts using up an entire processor (a situation that would bring single cpu systems to a hard-lock) you might not even notice a performance problem until you try and use that process. You can run twice as many processes and won't see a performance hit (provided you have the RAM). For example: I can run about 4 instances of Diablo II Expansion, Firefox with about 10 pages open, and tons of other little things in the background. I'm currently running 46 processes, including 3 diablos, Firefox with 7 pages open, AIM, Rapidbackup, Google desktop search, gmail notifier, getright, Ultraedit, TrayIt, Windows Sniper, Clipomatic, Transtext, Tclock, stickies, powermenu, winbar and all the usual system processes. This is the normal state of windows for me and it runs just fine.
However there are disadvantages too. Good luck finding a soundard with lots of features that gets along with dual CPUs. Creative has awful drivers and I'd almost swear they don't bother testing them, most other soundcards do just as bad or worse and offer fewer features. I built this machine back in fall of '01 and it wasn't until about a year ago that they released a set of drivers for the Audigy that I couldn't cause a BSOD at will with. If I ran Winamp using the directsound out and seeked around within a song repeatidly really fast it would BSOD 100% of the time. Not to mention you have to buy TWO processors rather than one, and the board was ~$500, is E-ATX, barely fits in an Antec SX1200 (HUGE case). In fact the hds stick out over the DIM slots and almost over the 2nd CPU. My case is gigantic and its too small for this motherboard.
Question everything
Look at the DSL, OMAP etc., chips. Some of them have 6 DSPs. The more common ones that go into your DSL modem have a DSP along with a general purpose processor like MIPS. Actually its not the process of putting the processors in one die which is the bottleneck. How to use them is the bottleneck. In case of Signal processing chips(DSL/Fibre etc.,) it is easy coz the task is fixed. But in a general purpose CPU you need an advanced management system which can actually decide in real time what talk goes where
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Grandparent: >Anand sees more promise in multiple CPU cores that perform different operations
Aren't they called 'CPU' and 'GPU'?
Parent: Sometimes I wonder why people even post...
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!
Mr. Pot, allow me to introduce you to Mr. Kettle...
There were some wierd Mac variations in the 1980s with a second CPU on a plug-in board. They could run Photoshop faster, but otherwise were useless.
There are really only two multi-CPU architectures that are generally useful: shared-memory symmetrical multiprocessors, and networked clusters with no shared memory. Many other architectures have been tried - partially shared memory machines, shared-memory machines where some CPUs lacked some features like floating point, hypercubes, single-instruction-multiple-datastream machines, and dataflow processors. None has achieved lasting success.
About the only unusual architecture ever sold in volume is the Playstation 2, with two vector processors. Even there, the vector processors are mostly used as a GPU. (Although one major game physics engine actually runs in the PS2 vector processors, an impressive achievement.)
Programming for wierd architectures is hard, requires much tool development, and results in programs tied to specific hardware. So it doesn't happen much. That's why the wierd architectures fail. They're never that much faster, and by the time the software works, the hardware market is somewhere else.
Most real world cpus get IO-Stalled to main-memory.
One core runs X86 the other core could be a RISC, or Itantium based. Your old apps run under the the old core new apps run under the new core. Interesting but the very idea of one computer an OS using two different ISAs makes me head hurt.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
They should be focusing on the memory interconect tech, to get all that cache off the die. Hell, then they could fit 8 cpu into one w/o breaking a sweat.
:T:R:A:N:S:
2 cpus should be the same or worse than a dual core 1 cpu setup. Please allow me to explain:
If the software is not multithreaded on a dual cpu machine, only one cpu is utilized anyhow. Furthermore, dual cpu computers likely will have slower communication path than a computer having a cpu with two cores on the same die for obvious design reasons. As long as the OS sees two cores as two processors (which in all likelihood will be the case as this will in effect replace hyperthreading), I do not see the reason why two cpu's would have any advantage over dual core chips, except possibly due to fact that cpus do not share the memory bandwidth in the dual cpu setups. Yet, this may be very well thwarted by the fact that the communication between cpus will be slower than in a dual core setup, hence the end-result would be at best comparable and at worst better for dual-core.
If you add to this the fact that single cpu machines will be generally cheaper to produce (simpler motherboard, one cpu to buy, and likely more competitive pricing of a chip since they will be viewed as the next-gen Pentiums and/or Athlons), I'd say that dual core is much better solution than dual processor.
Of course, all this is based on the limited info currently available as there are still many unanswered questions (i.e. does one core go dormant when not used and if so is this done as efficiently as keeping a second cpu idle, etc.). Yet, I fail to agree with AnandTech's reluctance to the dual core setup and dubious preference for a dual cpu setup...
Now that computers are moving to dual cores how difficult would it be for say AMD and Apple to team up and produce a co-branded unit with both an x86 and G5 processor on-board? Would it be possible to create a dual mode processor?
It's a historical accident that graphics processors are peripherals, though. Early SGI machines had the 4x4 multiplier as a coprocessor, not tied to the display. Apple's first attempt at 3D acceleration had a 3D coprocessor separate from the display. But because the CPU manufacturers ignored graphics for a long, long time, the 3D market was based on add-ons, and those had to be sold as plug-in boards. Peripheral bandwidth was too low to usefully put a coprocessor on a plug-in board. Hence the "3D graphics board".
Ace's Hardware is a pretty good (though low-volume) cross-architecture news site. Still covers x86 mostly, but does go into other architectures from time to time, and the people there seem to really know their stuff.
IMNSHO, Byte "died" a long time before 1998. Once upon a time it was *THE* technical magazine to read - for all the reasons you cite, and more. But over the latter part of the 90s it was aimed at guys in suits and not the tecchies that had made it what it once was.
(And whilst I really like Pournelle's SF writing, Chaos Manor always used to leave me wishing he'd co-write it with somebody...)
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Thanks for the link, I shall bookmark it, though at this read, I see only Intel and AMD processor articles
I must disagree that Byte lost its focus and redirected itself towards the "suits" as one poster put it. They covered processor evolution, covering the Intel P6 a full two years before rollout.
They would be the only reliable and fair testers to show the real differences between the AMD processors and Intel processors, eschewing all routines that the processors might have been tuned to beat. And they would be fair and reliable about the real performance difference between the Power PC processors with slower clock speeds and the processors you see in pee cees with faster clock speeds. I cannot trust Apple or the Windows magazines to tell me the truth, they have too many reasons to lie.
Thanks again for the link
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
I just had a disturbing thought. What if the pretty pictures of the die as obviously having dual cores is just a marketing gimmick, and inside the silicon there will really be only one processor with hyperthreading to make you think there are two?
How would the average consumer be able to tell the difference? Even if a benchmark appears to show that dual core is no faster, this could just be explained away as some sort of obscure architectural bottleneck.
Is there any externally visible way to determine for sure that the customer is getting two separate cores and not just HT enabled by default?
*reads article*
Sure enough, from the article:
In that case, I'm going to wait for the benchmarks on this one.
If you wanted to talk about that, you should have started a new thread
Only the editors can do that.
But I was talking about using Mobile Athlon processors. What you (obviously) don't realize, is that they are Socket A, and can be used in a desktop
Thank you. I didn't know about that. What web site(s) or what Google keywords would you suggest that I use to brief myself on the subject of MIPS per watt before the next discussion?