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AMD's New Venice Core Shows Overclocking Potential
Vigile writes "It looks like the new Venice core processors from AMD are going to offer more than just 90nm technology through the entire line up. According to this article on PC Perspective, it is going to offer a lot of headroom for future processors as the author was able to overclock their 2.0 GHz sample to 2.8 GHz! I think I hear an FX-61 calling my name!"
What real good does overclocking 2 to 2.8 really do? These cores keep getting faster and faster, yet the increase in number of floating-point operations per second achieved isn't really that spectacular. How about a more intelligent (parallel) architecture to begin with?
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I don't mean to be flip, but if I can't judge the power of a processor by a simple metric like "megahertz" or nowadays "gigahertz", how can I know which processor is best suited to me? I've got a 2.8GHz P4 machine sitting next to me. How is that not better than the 2.0GHz AMD "Venice" processor that's only clocking in at 2.0GHz?
If CPU speed is irrelevant to processor power, then why do we keep talking about it?
If CPU speed is irrelevant to processor power, then why do we keep talking about it?
It's not irrelevant if you don't make stupid architectural changes specifically designed to raise the clock speed, like Intel did with Prescott. It's not everything, but it's still something.
Or were you just trolling for Intel?
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So what does 2.8 Ghz in AMD mean in terms of Intel performance?
Zero, because you'd be running an AMD chip!
Given how well Athlon 64/Opteron have been doing in benchmarks, power consumption, and pricing, there really is little to no reason to buy a 64-bit chip from Intel. It's sad, but it's true.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
This is so dejavu.
Now it's AMD's turn to pull an Even Steven on Intel with cool running cpus that also O/C high. That SOI sure does wonders ever since they started using it on the first A64's.
Most people don't run around overclocking their cpus but it is a great market to target (oh I'm da rappa!) because Intel has had great cores to O/C ever since the first Northwoods until the first Prescott, the bacon-cooker.
gigahertz are a fairly useless comparison between different chip types. A 2.0 ghz AMD64 might run circles around your 2.8ghz P4, while a 1.5Ghz Pentium-M could go faster than an AMD XP 1800 without worries. Architectures make this happen. If a 2.0ghz AMD64 can go the same speed as a 2.8ghz P4, obviously the 2.0ghz AMD64 is running more instructions per megahert. This means, that each one counts for more. Thus, a .8ghz increase is a huge increase in speed. Imagine running a 2.0ghz P4. Not very fun, eh? Now, the difference between a 2.0ghz P4 and a 2.8Ghz P4 is smaller than the difference between a 2.0Ghz AMD64, and a 2.8Ghz version of the same exact chip. That is a huge speed increase!
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I remember when there was an actual megahertz race between amd and intel. Now it appears as though everyone is out breath. I can't believe we are still talking about 2.0 ghz AMD processors. Are they ever going to break 3 GHz? Intel seems to be no better off. How long was it since the first 3 Ghz was release and there is no 4 Ghz chips in sight? As a mac user, I can only revelled that physics has caught up with everyone and I no longer have to spout out about the megahertz myth in defence of my platform.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
I posted this yesterday.
-1 Redundant? Yeah, sure. But it's sad to see this place being overrun not only by racist posters but by moderators who are as well.
Who ever said judging the performance of many different cpus just by looking at the "megahertz" was good enough?
You want to know which cpu is faster than what? read reviews. Easiest and best way. Forget mhz, hell, even forget technical data if you don't feel like understanding it. Simply check out a few reviews on one product, take note of the benchmark results that interest you (such as gaming or compiling) and then see if the results from the different reviewers make any sense. If they look similar, then you can trust them.
In my case, I'm a gamer so I'll do what? Look at reviews and take note of which cpu is faster than which. In the end with a few sites being checked, I can make a conclusion unless all the results are unique. Most sites out there show the same pattern for gaming, A64 > P4. Then somehow, that must be a reliable way to measure performance among different processors, right? Just make sure not to read from crappy reviewers (did I just hear an echo saying "toms hardware"?..)
Intel and AMD chips have completely different designs. In general, Intel chips are designed to blast through simple code very quickly (as Intel thought that's all chips would be doing by now), and AMD chips are designed to be able to handle branches and conditional code better. Also, current AMD chips have a memory controller on the chip itself rather than on a helper chip on the motherboard, which makes their memory access faster.
Before Intel hit the gHz wall, the strategy was actually working out pretty well. They were at a bit of a disandvantage in some areas, but for the most part the clock speeds were so high it didn't matter.
With the new Prescott core in Intel chips, they increased the penalty for branching in anticipation of still higher clock speeds. Those speeds never came, so they're at a disadvantage now.
At more or less the same time, AMD upgraded the memory interface of their chips, which improves performance in most areas in addition to helping them catch up with media stuff. At the same time they kept and in some cases improved their performance on branchy code. They avoided the gHz wall by improving performance without pumping clock speed.
I think Intel assumed Itanium would take over in areas that needed branchy code back when they comitted to the Pentium 4 design in the 90s. It arrived very late, and it turns out regular desktop users still need to deal with branchy code.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
P=I^2R only for purely passively resistive circuits, where the current can be determined by voltage divided by resistance using Ohm's Law.
But a CPU is a gated transistor circuit. Current is based on the number of times transistors are filled and dumped of charge, which of course is driven directly by the frequency. Voltage is fixed, so CPU wattage is pretty much linear with frequency.
D) They received a hand-picked processor that is in the top 5 percentile . . .
Not at all unreasonable.
He is probably reffering to electron drift. While an individual electron may move slowly within a wire, the impulse it creates to displace further electrons along said wire is fast.
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Not necessarily. A lot of CPU's fail testing at very high speeds but run with perfect stability at lower speeds. The CPU companies are profit driven, so they're happy to get some money for the CPU instead of throwing it.
Now, you can get yourself a cheaper CPU and overclock it, knowing it's probably capable of higher speeds, but there's a big risk of stability issues.
The current generations of CPU manufacturing process make very good error free batches compared to what it used to be like. So CPU's tend to work quite well at high speeds but still get badged down. That makes sense from a corporate perspective - if there is demand for a slower, cheaper CPU, you can sell into that market with higher specced CPU's. That just happens to be the way the market works.
The alternatives are untenable. It makes no sense for AMD to deliberately make a batch of CPU's specifically intended to be 2.0GHz when it costs the same as making a batch of 2.8GHz CPUs. AMD then has the *choice* of selling these CPUs at whatever speeds and prices the market demands.
Would the parent prefer than AMD make special 2GHz only CPU's to sell? Or perhaps AMD should instead only sell > $600 high end CPUs and not sell budget range CPUs at all?
This is the way the industry works. If you don't like it, feel free to go back to using transistors instead of IC's.
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What a load of BS, Try any recent kde or gnome based distro on anything slightly old and it you'll see its unusable, while linux itself runs fine i've yet to see a decent GUI, they're all obsessed with letting you configure your windows to look absolutely any way you want, when all anyone really wants is fast response time and a few reasonable config options. Boot windows 2000 (the only decent creation out of redmond) on the same PC and you'll see some what i mean. CPU speed and memory aren't so important if you've been running a simple word/web system for for the last few years, but when it comes to games, 3d-animation, video editing, image editing, audio composing/mixing, or even just compiling, then the difference is high. Also people often forget their hard-drive witch can be slow as shit.
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It makes absolutely no sense to introduce inefficiancies into the marketplace.
This is precisely why speed-binning exists. When AMD takes 2.6GHz-rated chips and marks them as 2.0 GHz, they are AVOIDING market inefficiencies.
The market only has so much demand at a particular pricepoint at a particular time. Chips cannot sell themselves just because they are "faster," the market only buys the chips when there is a perceived "need" for them.
This is why, as time goes on, speed grades increase quite frequently, but the overall pricing structure changes VERY slowly. Not that the market forces are set in stone...there are more high-end enthusiasts than there were say, a decade ago, but the number is still relatively small, and it has take a lot of time and effort for manufacturers to create and nurture that growing market.
So, here's how speed-binning relates to this market. Let's say AMD's new Venice core can hit 2.6 GHz 40% of the time. That means 60% of your processors have to be downgraded in rating, but that's no big deal because the demand for your "BEST" processor (the 2.6 GHz) is only a few percent of your total processors sold. That is to say, only 5% of people in this competitive market will pay $600 for a processor that is that good.
Now, what if 75% of your total processor sales market wants a "GOOD ENOUGH" processor? You look at your yields: 40% of your processors can hit 2.6 GHz, but let's say 80% hit 2.0 GHz. If you sell a 2.0GHz as your "GOOD ENOUGH," this means you can throw out a lot less processors by serving multiple market segments. It's better than selling the entire 40% of all processors as 2.6GHz, as that would produce market inefficiencies as 95% of buyers would be unwilling to spend $600 in this competitive market.
Yes, you could just sell processors at their maximum tested speed, but market trends are not typically well reflected by yields, so you have to tailor your outputs to fit the market demand via speed-binning. Some of your 2.6, 2.4 and 2.2 GHz chips end up marked as 2.0 GHz to meet demand.
Thus, your 2.0GHz processors end up as a mix...some of them really can't do much better than 2.0 GHz, while others have been speed-binned to meet demand. Thus, you are not guaranteed a marvelous overclocker if you buy the 2.0 GHz processor...and that has always been the fun of overclocking, the mystery and risk involved. Did you buy a dud, or will this one be a bargain screamer?
Myself, I don't overclock much anymore...but it used to be a lot of fun seeing how far I could push chips, before I wanted a system that just worked.
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