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Intel and AMD's 2005 Plans Revealed
Takemedown writes "There's a good article on CTZ that talks about Intel and AMD's plans. Intel, continuing on their 18-month chipset refresh rate, will introduce their Glenwood and Lakeport chipsets for the Smithfield dual core desktop microprocessor in 2005. The chipsets will support SATA II, Matrix RAID and a higher system bus speed for the new Pentium 4 name holder.
As far as Intel's dual core strategies are concerned, they will most likely bring their dual core additions by the very end of Q2 or Q3 this year, so for those waiting for these next generation chips are better off with a due upgrade. Secondly, if you are hoping for a noticeable performance gain in regular computing tasks are in for a disappointment. Dual core microprocessors are for those who like to do multitasking or work on multithreaded applications. For example, if you are gaming and burning a DVD at the same time, dual core chips will come in handy and will definitely give a smooth computing experience."
...chat on AIM and refresh Slashdot fast enough to get a first post!
http://brandonbloom.name
Is it more efficient memory sharing amongst the different cores?
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Only thieves burn dvds, so I see the MPAA stepping top stop this.
A plea to both Intel and AMD. Please make a nonexpensive SILENT cooling system.
Yeah fans are pretty good but let's be honest, they wear down and become noisy.
Water cooling is great but I've already got one aquarium in my room.
One core was bad. Two? Three? Twenty! Passive heat sinks, huge slabs of copper, whatever, just please, I can't hear myself think.
-Teiresias
I liked the photo of the Intel booth, which had the tagline "Upgrade your senses". For the life of me I can't figure out what that means. Are they planning on offering upgrades to give me better vision and sight? Perhaps a socket for the back of my head too? Or maybe their new cpu can now smell me and indicate when I need to shower?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Processor power has been overrated for quite some time. A lot of people don't realize that other components, especially RAM matter just as much, if not more in most every day tasks than pure CPU power. If I had a choice between 2GHZ and 1GB ram, vs. a 4GHZ and 512mb ram, I would definatly recommend the former. So although this technology will help some people, most people should stay away from it if you are just doing day to day. Does grandma really need dual core processors for sending email and browsing the web anytime soon? Hell, a 500mhz and 256mb is more than enough for a lot of people to write documents and browse the web, but you will never see such a system on Dell website for $120 :).
When did using computers or the internet become an "experience"? They're tools, nothing more.
Trolling is a art,
The real bottleneck for gaming these days is hard drive access. If you are burning a CD while you are playing a game, there is a good chance that the game will need to load something like textures while you are burning the CD (presumably from an ISO on your hard drive). On the other hand, with a 52X CD-R burning a full CD takes less than 3 minutes, so it won't kill your game. Unless you have two hard drives, in which case the above is irrelevant.
Burning a DVD is IO-bound given all the traffic on the PCI bus from the harddrive and to the DVD. Burning a DVD is not CPU-bound, so it doesn't seem like a dual core CPU would actually help that situation.
The reality is most of the server market is their Xeon line and the dual-core Xeons are currently planned for 2006 and maybe even later.
For example, if you are gaming and burning a DVD at the same time, dual core chips will come in handy and will definitely give a smooth computing experience.
Why, of course, doesn't everyone burn DVDs and play games at the same time? I usually burn DVDs when I'm playing GTA: San Andreas, so by the time the DVD is done I've forgotten all about it and the tray opening scares the living shit out of me, so I pull out my penknife and stab the DVD to its rightful death! So with this new dual system you're telling me the DVD will be done so quickly that I won't forget about it? Or will the tray slide out more slowly in a smooth and controlled manner as not to provoke me?
Dual core shares a memory controller, whereas dual processors have seperate memory controllers. AMD's Athlon 64 and Opterons have memory controllers on die, and were originally designed to be dual core. What this means is now two cores on die with one memory controller, communicating through a crossbar (think SGI) architechture. On a side not, imagine where AMD would be if they scrapped 64-bit from the start and released the Athlon 64/Opteron as a dual core from the get go.
People that play DAoC but don't want to buy two computers will love this. It'll let them run their buffbots and mains without too much of a hassle. /scandalous
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I can already game and burn a dvd on a single core system. I'm using an Athlon XP 2500+ with a Plextor 8x DVD-RW drive and I've never seen a drop in FPS while playing SOL.EXE, Ever
On a more serious note my old roommate, the SCSI lover, could play Quake 3 while burning a CD because he was burning from SCSI HDD to SCSI CDR while playing the game off a seperate SCSI HDD. He claimed that the only thing making my machine slow while burning a CD was the CPU overhead involved in IDE.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
I hope Intel pulls off multi-core better than they did hyperthreading. The P4 netburst architecture simply weak, and hyperthreading is really just a patch to make it not suck quite so badly. I "upgraded" from a 1.6GHz AthlonXP to a 2.8GHz P4 Dell and was horribly disappointed with task switching performance. Tried throwing more RAM at it. The P4 with 1GB was still slower than the AthlonXP with 768MB. OTOH, I setup a friend's new Dell with the latest PCI express chipset and was really impressed with the speed, so maybe Intel is finally getting it together...
Question is: will the netburst architecture benefit more from dual core than it did from hyperthreading? Its essentially like having an SMP P4 system, so it ought to.
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
Oh will they? Consider what frequency these chips will be running at... You won't be getting dual cores featuring core frequencies along the lines of current top end CPU's anytime too soon. This should tell people that gamers would be much better off sticking to their single core guns... If they want to encode and game at the same time, there computing experience is most definetly going to have to be compromised.
There is no other way about this considering current limitations... As the fab processes are refined and application of technology is perfected, we will see dual cores running at higher frequencies, but there are considerable improvements which will need to be made before dual core can be referred to as a formiddable gaming option for new releases at the top end of the system spectrum. (they might not even be formidable until the unlikely circumstance when gaming authors start coding for multicore platforms on a large scale)
For MANY people with top end single core systems currently, the move to dual cores will not immediately present what would be considered a smooth computing experience - there will be noticeable deficincies in various areas, the severity of which will be determined by the specific way their system is utilized.
Overclockers
Via has been offering very - if not the most - stable chipset drivers for Linux for ages. There were many occasions in the past when I specifically chose via chipset brand boards with amd cpus because good experience in the past with Linux. And I never had any bad experience. That doesn't mean I don't have and/or use other chipsets/boards/cpus with Linux on them, I do - but mostly @ work. It's just I never see much sane reason in arguing like I-went-intel-because-of-better-linux-drivers.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I doubt it. Today's personal computers are already like those 60s muscle cars from Detroit (a 400 horsepower engine bolted into a car with narrow bias-ply tires, drum brakes and a solid axle).
I was burning DVDs a couple of days ago. The system was mildly sluggish. The CPU meter was pegged at about 2% usage. Then I ran an md5sum to verify the whole disk, and the system ground to a crawl. The CPU meter indicated about 10% load. In both cases the sluggishness was caused entirely by I/O latency and/or all of the working set being flushed out of memory to make room for disk buffering. Dual-cores aren't going to do anything for that.
and I would really like to finally upgrade: I'd love to have an SMP box again but I'm really not sure if it's possible at all nowadays, what are my options (at a reasonable price point) for something in the 2xAthlon64/3500+ performance range (I know Athlon64s are not SMP-capable).
The option(s) seem to be Xeon and Opteron, but I'm not quite sure which mobos are best and most supported and/or which one of them is the most cost effective (also including RAM costs). My typical usage is linux (would vmware it in this case), win32 games (would prefer AGP to PCIe) and music (hauptwerk -> I need lots of RAM (2-3gigs) and CPU power).
I don't think I can wait another year for multicore CPUs to come out (already been waiting forever).
-- the cake is a lie
A multi-CPU system, maybe, but a dual-core chip has two cores sharing the same memory and io controllers, so it would be either servicing the NIC or the game engine, but not both.
Code will have to be rewritten to take advantage of it. The game engines themselves will have to be multithreaded, and in such a way that the threads aren't constantly fighting over the same chunk of memory.
There's not a lot of code out there (yet) that would make any real use of a dual core CPU. I've had SMP systems, and aside from a few specific tasks, they really don't have much use as far as modern software goes.
As for games, people constantly blow the demands that games place on the CPU out of proportion. A 3.6ghz P4 plays Doom 3 just as well as a 1.8ghz Celeron, all things being the same on both systems.
I've never seen a game push the CPU hard, as in >75% CPU utilization while playing.
Try running two or three Prime95 stress tests in the background, then run Doom 3. It'll play just fine, even with so little CPU headroom left.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
InfoWorld had a nice story about the Power5 multi-core CPU (You'll have to download the report) coming out this year. It may outperform the coming dual core AMD chip, both in raw performance and in lower power consumption.
AMD has a write up on their upcoming dual core processor and what it means to performance. Somewhere I believe there are some published numbers for how an AMD dual core CPU running 5 steps below it's single core counterpart can still outperform dual single core processors. (i.e., a 1.4 GHz dual core CPU will outperform a 2.4GHz dual processor machine)
Meanwhile, Intel's dual core demo was doubted doubted when presented at the same time as the above referenced AMD demo. Also, Intel's dual core will not perform significantly better than a dual processor system, or so the analysis of the two processors stated. (I really need to bookmark these things when I read them! Hopefully someone else will provide that reference.)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Although most /. readers probably won't care, dual core CPU's are already on the market in the form of the UltraSPARC IV CPU from Sun Microsystems. Sun also happen to be sporting the most ambitious multi-core project going in the form of Niagara, which although initially an 8-core system has apparently been seen running Solaris 9 with 32 independent CPU cores.
In addition to this, the POWER 5 CPU is also available with multiple cores, fully supporting Linux.
Also of note is that the Opteron dual-core CPU's from AMD are apparently going to be pin-compatible with the current Opteron processors (by current,I mean, the latest socket 939 (I think) systems, not the original Opteron 2xx or whatever).
This is really of most use for the data center right now, but as more applications wrap their heads around paralelizing themselves, multi-core CPU's on the desktop will become more popular.
That said, developers really have no excuses for not having blazing fast "dual-core aware" apps... a multi-processor system purchased today provides about as much performance as a dual core system... so it's not like a wild new technology where application developers have to wait for SDK's or test hardware. Multiple cores, HyperThreading CPU's or multiple physical processors are all just additional CPU's from the operating systems perspective, and are developed for using the same tried and true thread libraries (pthreads, etc).
Multi-thread those apps people! There are so many instances, especially when writing GUI apps, where an extra thread or two thrown in the right direction can really improve the user experience.
Of course, a big problem is just how developers learn to program. Everyone learns their "Hello World!", then goes from there... but this is all very linear in approach. Finding good programmers who can think of an application in terms of what many parallel threads should (or shouldn't) be doing isn't easy... but I digress.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
Linux drivers?
AMD provided full driver support for their chipsets, and even optimized BLAS libraries (these are scientific computing libraries).
To get this from Intel you have to buy their compiler suite.
How about next time you study up on some facts before you blindly repeat the Intel party line?
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
I see very little use for a floppy as well. But when it comes to serial and parallel ports, lots of people still use them. I use them all the time. Ok, not ALL people need them, but to remove them all... They'd be selling a lot of controllers. Think printers (I'm not trading my laserjet for some cheap USB P.O.S.), networking gear, IR receivers (and various HTPC gear), X10 controllers, PIC/EPROM programmers (anything electronics...) There's a lot of uses for it still.
///<sig
err, I beg to differ. I don't know what chipset you've had trouble with, but even the laptop chipset of my athlon XP-M gives gentoo no trouble. Almost all chipsets are now supported by linux, at least most of the VIA I've tried, and the kernel lists a big bunch, which are not for Intel processors. I've had linux on 3 computers with all a different motherboard, but all AMD CPUs: Duron 1.3 GHz, Athlon XP 1800+ and Athlon XP-M 2400+. No trouble from linux with those chips.
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.