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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!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
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..
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
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
Moving processing out into special purpose processers, and then back into the main one again as Moore's Law takes effect has been known about since the term the wheel of reincarnation was coined back in 1968.
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.
The P4 already does this. It will turn down the speed and even disable individual cpu components in order to save its life if it begins to overheat.
TomsHardware produced this video a while ago, detailing what happens when the heatsink and fan is removed during workload. They test both AMD and Intel processors from back then.
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.
Processor: shall be defined as all processors where the Oracle programs are installed and/or running. Programs licensed on a Processor basis may be accessed by your internal users (including agents and contractors) and by third party users. For the purposes of counting the number of processors which require licensing, a multicore chip with "n" processor cores shall be counted as "n" processors.
This is from Oracle's "Licensing Definitions Document," the emphasis is mine. I found it on the partner web site, which I'm pretty sure is inaccessible to the general public.Of course, I expect this to change (esp. on Windows) p.d.q. given Microsoft's recent announcement.
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.
Multiprocessing doesn't give you speed improvements for a single-threaded application, but it sure as hell makes a system a lot smoother and more responsive when it's running multiple applications concurrently.
And don't forget, hyperthreading is like adding a second CPU that's always partly loaded. It's not the same as adding another core.
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
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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.
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
Would it be possible to have a dual core processor with both a PPC and a x86 core?
I remember that the older AMD proccessors would start smoking and then effectively stop working.
An engineer I used to work with figured it all out (through much first hand experience). He deduced that chips were really just plastic capsules of compressed smoke, since when the smoke came out, they didn't work any more. He was planning a start-up company to re-inject the smoke and make them work again.
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?
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.