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AMD Demos Dual-Core Athlon 64

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the with-two-types-of-salsa dept.

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)."

11 of 428 comments (clear)

  1. Am I Missing Something? by Dragoon412 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    Is there something I'm missing? Or is this whole dual-core mess really just SMP on one CPU? Because from what I've read on the likes of Extremetech, Anandtech, and so on, I'm not finding any reason to be impressed.

    1. Re:Am I Missing Something? by drwtsn32 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Sure, benchmarking a single app on an SMP system often makes little to no performance difference, but SMP is fantastic if you are a heavy multitasker and work with several apps at once.

      My first SMP system was a dual Pentium 133Mhz box. After that I never went back to a single proc... until the Pentium 4 came out. It's disappointing that this chip does not support SMP (except for the Xeon line). P4 hyperthreading helped bring back some SMP goodness, but it's still not as good as two real chips.

      Personally I can't wait for dual core CPUs!

    2. Re:Am I Missing Something? by Shalda · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Effectively it's SMP on one CPU. Something I very much look forward to as I always build my desktops SMP. It also incorporates some of the overhead of SMP into the CPU driving down the system price a little bit.

      While you're right that SMP offers little performance to most apps, I tend to run a lot of CPU hogs at the same time. Watch a DVD while waiting for a project to finish compiling or whatnot. It can also help keep runaway processes from sabatoging your system. I used to have a program that set its priority to 'AboveNormal' and would from time to time it would hang up in a loop. Since it was running at a higher priority, you sometimes couldn't bring up Task Manager to kill it off as the higher priorty thread always took precedant. And if all else fails, you can set up 2 SETI @ Home clients and process twice as many packets. But do your self a favor and set their priorty to 'Low'.

      Also, you've got a chicken and egg problem. The reason there's so few programs that benifit from SMP is that there are so few computers that are SMP. When I was running some computer labs at a Big 10 university a few years back I was insisting on SMP workstations so that the CS students could learn to program multithreaded apps and see the benifits of it when it ran on 1 vs. 2 processors.

      Lastly, my basement is very poorly insulated and gets a bit chilly in the winter. Anything to help warm it up and keep my fingers working properly is a good thing(tm)!

      --
      bance.net
    3. Re:Am I Missing Something? by c.r.o.c.o · · Score: 4, Interesting
      SMP without the mess (extra CPUs, cooling, expensive/complicated motherboards) and cost is definitely something to be impressed about.


      The motherboards supporting dual core CPUs should be identical to those running single core CPUs. I guess this is where having the memory controller integrated into the CPU really pays off for AMD since it further simplifies mb design. But in the past SMP motherboards weren't THAT much more expensive (at the most $100 extra) than similar single CPU motherboards. The main cost associated with SMP setups were the very expensive SMP CPUs, which were anywhere from 1.5 times or more expensive than regular CPUs. The pricing of dual core CPUs remains to be seen, but I think it'll still be cheaper than 2 separate SMP-enabled CPUs.

      However I completely agree with the rest of your post. Not having separate heatsinks, large motherboards, etc is a definite advantage. Just because of that the market acceptance will increase very rapidly. I wouldn't be surprised if games and other CPU intensive apps started supporting dual core CPUs soon.
    4. Re:Am I Missing Something? by Vaystrem · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I've had the pleasure of using a number of friends Dual CPU systems across the years.

      The most relevant one to this discussion is my friends Abit BP6, Dual Celeron, setup. At the time he was running Dual Celeron 300s. Not that impressive right? Except that he was able to host our Unreal Tournament Server - and then join it with no lag for any of the players. Running Unreal Tournament by himself showed a 50% load on each processor. He was able encode MP3s, burn CDs, and play games simultaneously. Something I was not able to do, and wanted to for the sake of time saving. I did not want to choose one activity over another - a 'leisure' productivity issue if you will.

      Fast forward to now. A nice dual cpu system would allow me to play games, encode movies / my audio files, simultaneously while running Distributed.net. Are dual core's absolutely necessary? No, but when you are doing some very intensive applications you can't do anything else. As well even though not all games are multi-threaded, various aspects of the game may be, the networking code/the sound code etc, meaning that the game may run somewhat better on a dual cpu setup.

    5. Re:Am I Missing Something? by Thagg · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Multiprocessing, both discrete and multicore, will accelerate all compute-bound applications in the future. Right now we haven't reached a critical mass yet -- where programmers feel it's worth the effort to multi-thread all of their applications -- but we will get there soon. It's not an easy change, and there are a whole world of problems that programmers haven't had experience with yet, but either these programmers will learn or they will not be competetive any longer.

      Face it, the days of increasing clock speeds is over. It's done. Finished. Kaput. The low hanging fruit has all been eaten.

      On the other hand, the multiprocessing benefits are huge and practically untapped. There is every reason to expect that in ten years we have 64 or 256 processors on a chip. People who hope to be working in ten years better learn how to write for these systems.

      Compare the P4 to the Cell. The P4 goes to unbelievable lengths (even literally, in pipeline lengths!) to run at a high clock speed. Its contribution to global warming is substantial. It's expensive. And, it's an absolute dead end. Intel has already abandoned it.

      The Cell has eight much-simpler processors along with its Power core. It can, and will, compute 10 times as fast as a P4, if programmed correctly. The game programmers are going to be pulling their hair out for the next couple of years, but they are going to be the high-demand programmers of the next decade as they are the first over the wall of significant multiprocessing.

      Thad Beier

      --
      I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
    6. Re:Am I Missing Something? by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Interesting
      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.

      That's most systems, but certainly not all. I wrote a web application in Zope that acts as a portal to our scanned document warehouse. Whenever a customer wants to access some of the data we're storing for them, we fetch a few TIFFs from a Samba filesystem, convert them into a PDF with ImageMagick, and send them out. A RAID wouldn't make a bit of difference to our setup, since even the comparatively slow network file retrieval is much faster than the image processing which is the real bottleneck.

      Our system is idle probably 95% of the time. In fact, it currently has a 5-minute load average of 0.04. But in that other 5% of the time, we want it to respond NOW and not 30 seconds from now. This is a pretty common situation for server machines - relatively long periods of inactivity punctuated by short periods of frantic scurrying - and it seems reasonable that AMD is offering their 64-bit server chip with this feature.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    7. Re:Am I Missing Something? by magarity · · Score: 4, Interesting

      What makes you think the database is CPU-bound instead of I/O-bound?

      CPU load versus disk queue length versus memory page accesses. But no worries about my off the cuff example being the only case; a very popular move these days is to run VMware (or similar) on an 8 or 16 way machine in order to provide 20, 30, or more "servers" doing light to modest loads so introducing dual core CPUs will allow even more virtual servers hosted on a single physical box. The cost saving potential is TREMENDOUS.

      And what makes you think the manufacturer of the two machines will allow this software patch

      It only takes one manufacturer to advertise "Buy our 8 way single core now and upgrade to dual core on the cheap later!". You can buy an 8-way now with only 2 CPUs and add later; there's no reason why you won't be able to buy 8-way dual core capable with only a few single cores and upgrade/add CPUs for years. Big corporate servers costing serious money are upgraded and/or assigned to different roles for a long time compared to desktop PCs. It's a whole different world. One company *finally* decommissioned a quad PPro server and donated to a nonprofit I know. That's been in service 24/7 for what, 14 years? It was probably over $50K when new and they have to get their money's worth out of it. Anyway, the manufacturers know that most IT budgets are not unlimited and customers always like less expensive alternatives.

  2. Why not two different clock speeds? by Gates82 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Rather than using two identical chips, is there any difficulty in putting say a 2.4 Ghz chip with a 500 Mhz one? I would love to have the latest and greatest chip for gaming, and crunching through video and then have a low powered second chip to play my mp3's and surf the web, while the high-end chip is crunching through numbers in the background. Guess that's why I have a laptop, play on that while the desktop is doing its thing.

    --
    So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's sister?

  3. I'm poor! by shamowfski · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Does dual core mean dual price? With current fx-55's costing around a grand, what can we expect these to cost? 1,500-2,000? If AMD wants to remain competitive with Intel they are going to have to work on that. Who ever guessed AMD would be the one who had to lower prices to compete??

  4. Awesome! 939 Huzzah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I actually just purchased a socket 939 board for this exact reason. I'm extremely pleased with AMD for not forcing yet another motherboard upgrade on us based on chip advancement. I got a cheap Athlon 64 3000+, but two or three years from now I can go dual-core without getting a new motherboard, memory, etc. and I like that.

    I understand that sometimes it's necessary to upgrade motherboards instead of just chips (FSB adn so forth), but for those of us who can't afford top-of-the-line, bleeding-edge stuff, it's nice to see upgradability for more than just a few months into the future.

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