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AMD Demos Dual-Core Athlon 64
DigitumDei writes "Dual core chips came closer to reality as AMD demonstrated their Athlon64 dual-core offering. The 90nm technology chip will use the same 939-pin infrastructure and cooling solutions as the current Athlon 64 chips, meaning that upgrading to a dual-core chip from your current AMD64 will require little more than a BIOS update. Available in the second half of this year, the chip will be added to AMD's current line (Athlon64, Athlon FX, Sempron)."
They talk a lot about this being the savior of power-consumption but:
They are seen as the solution to power-consumption problems that have come to the fore as clock-speeds have increased beyond 3.0 GHz. At such speeds, single-CPU processors can often dissipate more than 150 W. In contrast, dual-core parts can reduce power consumption to more reasonable levels. For example, a processor with dual 2.0-GHz cores can deliver performance not all that different from a single-core 3.5-GHz part. More important, such a dual-core part will hold down power dissipation to a figure closer to that of a standalone 2.0-GHz CPU, allowing processing throughput to effectively double for not much more power.
Yeah, great, so it reduces power-consumption to "more reasonable levels" yet in every article I have read on this no one really mentions much more than that. What's reasonable? Telling me twice the speed for not much more power doesn't mean anything to me (other than marketing doublespeak).
What I want to know is how much money these processors will save in power consumption compared to how much more they will cost over their single core cousins... No one has said anything about that yet.
Now, also, how many OSs (and applications) are prepared for dual-core support? Are there any available systems that are stable and do that?
And how many apps & other processes is your system running at the moment? Mine's running 58 with 518 threads.
I don't understand the hype about dual core CPUs.
As I understand it, they work almost identically to a SMP setup, meaning they don't offer much of any performance benefit in most apps (particularly games). They draw more power, they run at higher temperatures, etc.
SMP without the mess (extra CPUs, cooling, expensive/complicated motherboards) and cost is definitely something to be impressed about.
It should give a big performance boost to a multi app and multi thread environment.
Yup, pretty much. But, some of us do more than play games. Also, as multiprocessing hardware becomes more common, game makers will begin to take advantage of the benefits. For me personally, when I want to use my box for general-purpose stuff, and it is running the mythtv backand and transcoding some files into MPEG4, and I am rendering a 3D animation, and so on... Well, having SMP sure isn't a bad thing!
With dual core CPUs coming from AMD and Intel, Oracle is going to be forced to change their licensing policy. There customers will likely think of a CPU as one chip, not one core, and refuse to pay for two CPUs.
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The OS is responsible for distributing the workload over the CPU's, and the OS can even distribute one process over several CPU's, since each process is running at least one thread. So in the end, how well it runs over multiple CPU's depends on how well it makes use of parallell threads. The better it does that, the better the OS will be able to distribute the process' work over multiple CPU's.
> Before you buy one of these dual-core processors for your server, make sure that your software vendor isn't going to double your price on you.
/usr/share/common-licenses and I didn't find anything in there like that. Even if the prices doubled, $2*0 is still OK with me.
I looked in
Gotta love free software.
As I understand it, they work almost identically to a SMP setup, meaning they don't offer much of any performance benefit in most apps (particularly games). They draw more power, they run at higher temperatures, etc.
The reason most games don't get a performance boost from dual CPU's is because they aren't programmed to take advantage of the other CPU. How many end-users' home systems have dual CPU's? Hardly any of them. There was no reason for game makers to go through the effort programming for something that 99.99% of their customers can't use.
With the new dual core chips, technically it isn't anything groundbreaking but it will ensure that there's much more widespread adoption of multiprocessor systems. With more of the userbase using dual core CPU's, game makers will have a reason to program to take advantage of it, and you'll begin to see games that do see a performance increase when using dual CPU's (or dual cpu cores).
An SMP system can greatly benefit a game designed to be truly multithreaded.
Even if the game is NOT designed to be multithreaded, there is the fact that one core can be running the game, while the other core handles interrupts, operating system processing, and other tasks.
The days of your computer doing only one thing at a time are long gone.
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The big deal is that it is a way to get *cheap* SMP, motherboard sockets x2, the downsides being cooling such densities (read: reduced clock per core), and sharing a memory controller per two cores (which is what Intel SMP has been doing forever, AMD used memory controllers per processor in a NUMA fashion full time, and Hyper Transport to access memory not associated with the current processor).
Theoretically, the dual core clocks will add up to more cycles overall than a single core, but the single core will have more clocks per individual thread, so unless a game leverages threading very nicely in the processor intensive segments, a multi-core may be slower than a single-core for the high-end gaming scene, however for workstation/server/HPC fields, it is very exciting.
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With dual core CPUs coming from AMD and Intel, Oracle is going to be forced to change their licensing policy. Their customers will likely think of a CPU as one chip, not one core, and refuse to pay for two CPUs.
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Now this doesn't usually add up enough to warrant a normal user to spend the extra money on SMP, but if dual cores become the replacement for the desktop line, they should (eventually?) be more affordable than SMP. Plus, if dual cores become ubiquitous, more and more software will no doubt be written to take advantage of SMP.
I can't see any downside to the push for dual cores, as we seem to be slowing down in how far we can push a single processor in clockspeed and performance.
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And how many apps & other processes is your system running at the moment? Mine's running 58 with 518 threads.
But what's the processor utilization? On most systems, its usually less than 10 percent. So when a user does something, the bottleneck is usually not the processor. Its usually the hard drive.
Money would be better spent on RAID, rather than dual core or dual processor.
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Before I abandoned the desktop in favour of the laptop, I had an SMP system, and it was nicer to use than my faster UP system, since single-threaded computationally expensive things could be run on one CPU leaving the other one free for UI-related tasks.
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Does the software you're running take advantage of the dual cores for multithreading though>
So Intel is doing something crazy by making dual core processors because application haven't had to think about multiprocessors right?
Well, change is inevitable and developers can't stick their head into sand and stay that way forever. Intel recognizes that change has to occur in the development community to enhance performance their product line. What better way then introducing dual cores? This will force programmers to start thinking about programming their application with multi - user, threading, layer, etc' thus over time, the application will be better utilized for the future.
You know, I've been hearing this alot on this thread, and I don't understand the thinking. You do NOT need threaded apps to take advantage of SMP. A SINGLE app will run faster (potentially) on SMP if it is threaded, but running a SINGLE application isn't the big benefit SMP gets you.
Its that Firefox can be run on one processor, while your MP3 player is running at the same time on the other. This in turn will speed up BOTH applications, since Firefox does not ever have to yield to the player, and visa versa.
Since there's more going on then just those two apps (various system process, etc), your machine should be faster as each process now only has to worry about HALF the number of processes it did before.
I don't understand why a largely tech audience misses that point. We're not in DOS anymore; the OSes we are using all run more then one process at a time.
Also with dual core memory controller on chip has the distint advantage of being able to share that on chip memory. Meaning core to core communication is significantly faster than chip to chip communication.
The speed of light in Silicon is a limiting factor in CPU construction. It takes electricity a certain amount of time to go from one side of the CPU to the other. As proc speeds keep going up, we get closer and closer to that limit. To combat this, CPU designers shrink the die. That way, the maximum distance needed to be traveled in one clock cycle decreases.
The cheap way of decreasing this distance is to split up the CPU into 2 distinct cores. Each core can be smaller, so it takes less time for electrons to get from one end of the core to the other.
This is why CPU designs are moving to multi-cores. They are hitting the limits of shrinking the components. As the components are shrunk, it gets harder to keep electrons flowing down the correct wire and not jumping across to other wires. Additionally, it just becomes excessively difficult to produce smaller and smaller wires inside a CPU.
Absolutely correct.
Indeed, you can do that across all Sun's UltraSPARC-III - based SunFire range, replace the single-core US3 with dual core US4 CPUs. Something Sun deliberately decided to ensure was possible right from the outset.
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Only if those applications were maxing the CPU to begin with. An MP3 player on a modern processor only utilizes around 1% of its capacity. Firefox a similar amount. They can easily share a CPU with 98% of its capacity to spare. They might run imperceptibly faster due to better cache utilization, but the reality is that almost every application spends 99% of its time waiting for something slower, like disk or network.
The only sort of application that a typical user (i.e. a non-developer) uses that's actually capable of maxing the CPU is, say, video editing, or a high-performance game.
Actually I beg to differ. http://www.intel.com/technology/hyperthread/ says explicitly that HT is a form of SMT (simultaneous multithreading). The processor contains multiple PC registers which allow it to actually follow multiple threads simultaneusly -- which means grabbing instructions from multiple threads simultaneously. Again, this is really just an extension of superscalar, which could only grab instructions from a single thread.
This reminds me of the SCSI-IDE debate; if you have used multi processor boxes as your primary workstation you will always want one from that point on. Same with SCSI back in the day, doesn't make sense until you use it and get used to how much better it is, going back is like getting your hair pulled. Netscape could crash and I wouldn't know it, I could encode mp3s without worrying if playing another one at the same time was going to get hokey, CD burning was not failure prone, etc. Just makes the experience better if you are actively doing more than one thing at a time. If you don't agree, don't buy one, I don't care.... I love duals tho, if I used a desktop instead of a laptop now it would be a dual anything (PIII 500ish+) with scsi.
andy
is very noticeably faster on my system, for a bit I was running a single HD (due to other issues) and as soon as I added the 2nd and mirrored it my XP boot time has gone down by around 40% as well as Half Life 2 load times.
I know I am paying a penalty in write speed but the doubled read speed more than makes up for it. With HDs as cheap as they are now (I have 2x200G Seagate SATA) and RAID controllers integrated in most mobos (I have a Silicon Image in my a8n-sli board, which I prefer to the nvidia chipset raid) I think it's stupid *not* to go the RAID route, as with a very modest cash outlay (for a 2nd HD, or for a 3rd and 4th if you plan to run RAID0+1) you'll see a noticeable speedup, not to mention that if one of your HDs packs it in you won't be SOL.
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Maybe it's your operating system that sucks.