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)."

Comments

Am I Missing Something?

[Dragoon412]

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.

Re:Am I Missing Something?

[teg]

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.

Re:Am I Missing Something?

[drwtsn32]

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!

Re:Am I Missing Something?

[SpongeBobLinuxPants]

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.

from TFA:

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.

and

At such speeds, single-CPU processors can often dissipate more than 150 W.
The dual-core Athlon 64 runs at a clock-speed of 2.4 GHz and has a maximum power dissipation of 100 W.

Re:Am I Missing Something?

[Donny Smith]

>Money would be better spent on RAID, rather than dual core or dual processor.

You're right about that.

Unlike CPUs which become worthless in less than 2 years, RAID h/w last a bit longer.

Some five years ago I bought an Ultra2Wide SCSI 320 card and a (at the time big) 8GB HDD - I paid $400 for the card and $250 for the HDD.

I still use the card - I haven't checked but it should be as fast as SATA II I guess - and the SCSI disk works too (although it's quite useless - I use it as dedicated swap disk).

In the meantime I went thru 3-4 generations of motherboards and CPUs (consecutive 100% wipeouts) and my RAID stuff still rocks...

By year's end I'll go not for a dual core CPU system but for what's today top of the line nForce4 system. Screw the hype.

Re:Am I Missing Something?

[sgant]

Waiting for someone to come along now and quote some article about how RAM doesn't noticeably speed things up in a desktop environment.

Pretty soon we'll talk ourselves into a corner where nothing speeds anything up and we were better off with a C-64.

(btw, I'm joking)

Why not two different clock speeds?

[Gates82]

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?

Re:Why not two different clock speeds?

[bbrack]

The main problem with this is that the processors share a clock tree and arbitration logic - if the clock multiplier is contained in the arbitration logic, then having one core at one speed and another at a different speed would be impossible.

If the clock multiplier is contained separately in each core, it would be possible - however, having different clock ratios on each core would considerably complicate the arbitration logic, since it would have to deal with different setup and hold timings when sending data to one core vs. the other - this would probably greatly increase your chances of inducing a processor error.

Trying to do this could also require a great deal more design difference between the two cores, which might cause many problems. It also would make it much more difficult to sell single core versions of dual core chips (i.e. one core fails, the other core is good - blow a few fuses to get the chip to look like a single core chip, and sell at as a single core)

I'm poor!

[shamowfski]

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??

Check your licensing agreements first

[bigtallmofo]

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.

Oracle and others have announced plans to increase their revenue by charging people for multiple cores in their single processor.

Re:Check your licensing agreements first

[ThaReetLad]

Buying Oracle is like buying a Ferrari. If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it.

Re:If this is anything like

[Kiriwas]

You should probably get your terms right before you comment on it. HT is simply Intel's name for SMT (simultaneous multithreading). They didn't choose an optimal implementation and people shouldn't expect the same performance from it as you would from dual processors. SMT is simply an extension of the superscalar idea. Disconnect the dispatch mechanisms from the execution mechanisms and you can run an out of order processor a lot faster than an in order. Make multiple execution units and multiple fetches per cycle and you now have an n-way superscalar. A few more additions (mostly replication of units in the processor) and you can grab instructions from multiple threads instead of from the same thread (it is difficult to get lots of instructions per cycle from the same thread because of the high frequencies of branches in the code stream - and branch prediction isn't perfect). Dual core is completely different, they simply put two processors on the same chip. Dual core has the problem that it cannot share the same resources between the two threads. The resources (execution units, queues, etc.) are partitioned x amount for thread 1 and x amount for thread 2. The designs are really very different, depending on the use, sometimes dual core is better, sometimes SMT is better. AMD's planning on bring out Dual Core SMT where each core will have 2 threads running through it for a total of 4 thread running simultaneous. If you want more information about this "throughput computing" google for Sun's Niagara chip.