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!"

Comments

uh

[eobanb]

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?

Duh!

[bstadil]

Within the same architecture the clockspeed is almost directly linear with performance. IE 2.8 is 40% faster than 2.0

Or were you just trolling for Intel?

Re:Duh!

[maraist]

That is assuming you're compute-bound, instead of memory-bandwidth, harddrive-bandwidth, or some other kind of IO bound

Hard-disk bound is hardly ever a factor for system-upgrades. If you're HD bound, it's unmistakable, and you usually are doing something worth the money of upgrading the disk-system. 3D grahpics-card bottlenecks, on the other hand are real and subtle.

As for memory bound, I'm not aware of any benchmark (other than synthetic memory-testers) that didn't improve semi-linearly merely because of being memory bound. Increasing CPU speed these days generally means increasing the cache-speed which implies speeding up critical memory paths.

Overclocking just like the northwoods...

[Man in Spandex]

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.

Re:2.8GHz? I've got that now

[JoeShmoe950]

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!

what up with the clock speed nowadays

[Enrique1218]

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.

Re:what up with the clock speed nowadays

[mp3phish]

They are hitting the limits of the physical world with their current known solutions. Until there are more breakthroughs and improvements in chip fabrication, you won't see many 4GHz chips any time soon.

Just as an example, for intel to be able to get to 3.8GHz they had to decrease their chip performance significatnly. So now their IPC (instructions per clock) are lower on the 3.8GHz chips than previous P4 chips. Every time they bump up the GHz they have to extend the pipeline. This lowers IPC.

So you have this race between the physicists who are in charge of coming up with innovative ways to overcome physical limitations in chip fabrication, and you have the engineers redesigning their chip to work around these limitations. It is an uphill battle both ways and they have finally hit the ceiling where it is significantly detrimental to cost/performance at anything higher (for now).

Re:2.8GHz? I've got that now

[ArbitraryConstant]

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.

Re:So what you are saying is..

[obeythefist]

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.

Re:why go further when we should make better

[t_allardyce]

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.