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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!"
Will it be easy to unlock these though, because if there is potentially to destory it I would not risk it.
We know that clock for clock, AMDs are faster than Intels. So what does 2.8 Ghz in AMD mean in terms of Intel performance?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
An 800MHz overclock on stock cooling is absolutely incredible... But it kind of makes me wonder why AMD doesn't make the default core speed on the proc higher.
The Barton core is awesome, and AMD is just refining their game here, working with the same basic silicon for the A64 and the XP. Intel's brains are divided up among way too many incompatible irrelevent architectures.
Just my 2 cents.
What, me worry?
How about a more intelligent (parallel) architecture to begin with?
Unless you have a way around the von Neumann bottleneck, what intelligent architecture are you thinking about? Adding multiple cores will eventually hit a wall because of memory bus contention. The only solution I see is for someone to create a memory architecture that permits unlimited simultaneous memory access. At that point, fast processors will not matter much. Just have a bunch of cheap processors share a single huge memory space.
There's plenty of explinations.
Here's some:
A) The chip is designed to run very cool. Overclocking it makes it hot, but it still runs fine. Just very hot.
B) The chip is designed to be run at higher speeds, and the initial offering is clocked-down. This gives AMD a few steps before more core/retooling work.
C) The cooler that comes with the CPU is very good.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I think of AMD64 more as a consumer, then a flame=seeker. Is it the most powerful - NO CLUE Is it stable - YES Is it cooler - YES Is it affordable - YES Is it for a PC - YES Why should I buy anything that is more advertised, but actually too expensive. I dont buy it. Others buy it. But not me! I like my AMD :)
IRTFA and I am going to say it once:
Overclocking capabilities does not mean just speed, they mean stability under extreme circumstances, therefore granted stability under normal circumstances!
sex is better than war!
One big reason is the difference in FSB. Yours is probably what...800MHz max? Intel's fastest FSB is 1066 MHz while AMD's fastest is 2.0 GHz....huge difference there! Even if you had identical core processors *say P4 Prescotts* and they were both at 2.0 GHz but one had a 533MHz FSB and the other had a 1066MHz FSB the one with the 1066MHz FSB would be MUCH faster since the whole system could transfer data among its components faster. That's why when overclocking it's normally better to drop the multiplier on the processor a little and crank up the FSB.
With AMDs hypertransport and integrated northbridge, every processor you add adds another memory bus. It's call NUMA, for non uniform memory architecture, supported in Server 2003, XP Pro since sp2 and Linux since 2.4, perhaps earlier.
NUMA was first used by SGI with their late 90s MIPS machines.
Intel uses a shared bus, with the exactly the limitations you describe, except with their Itanium in 8 way+ configuration.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Physics has caught up with no one. Transistors are still getting smaller, but heat is on the rise, as any 2.5 Ghz water cooled G5 owner knows.
Think of it this way: work costs watts.
No matter if you do a given amount of work using a narrow speedracer architecture like P4 or PPC970, Or a wide architecture like G4, Athlon64/Opteron, Itanium or Pentium M, the work done costs watts, and generally the speedracer designs start paying more in work per watt.
The real current limitation is architecture complexity, where no one has a big enough brain to fit more than 150 million or so useful, non-cache transistors into their heads to debug the chip when there is a problem. Bob Colwell, former chief architect for Intel for the Pentium Pro/II/III/4, has spoken and written at length about this.
When he left Intel, there were perhaps 2 people left that could debug the Pentium 4.
Tejas was cancelled for this reason, as it was an even more complex version of the P4, certainly with AMD64 instructions included, possibly some EPIC (Itanium) compatibility, and a sort of SSE4 called at the time TNI or Tejas New Instructions, that were supposed to be the last straw in bringing complete vector processing to the x86 world, which Apple of course calls Altivec.
This complexity limit has caused architecture advancement to virtualy stagnate, while Moore's law marches on. 200 million transistors last year. 400 million in 2005 a billion in 2007. What to do with the transistors? Add more cores, since individual cores can not get any more complex and cache has a limited effect after 1mb, as Itanium and the G4 show. Cache is a poor substitute for a good memory bus, and after 2mb it's all crutches to keep poor architectures competitive with the better architecures out there.
Why the stagnation at 3 Ghz, or more specificly 3.06? Because that is all the northwood architecture could do, and Prescott, its replacement, was starting to hit that complexity limit and was delayed 8 months.
When Prescott arrived, it was hot, almost 175w per cm^2. This was not the process, 90nm, that caused the heat, because the Dothan (Pentium M centrino) was only 27 watts on the same process, and no one could figure out why it was so hot, so Intel got stuck, ramping clockspeed only 533 mhz in two an a half years, after doubling clockspeed to 3.06 from 1.5 in the previous 2 years.
AMD changed horses from 2.0 Ghz Athlon to 2.0 Ghz Athlon 64 and jumped 25% to 100% better perfromance, depending on the benchmark, mostly due to the integrated memory controller, not it's 64 bitness. It would take a 3.2 to 4 Ghz Athlon to match a 2.8 Ghz Athlon 64, and a 4.2 to 5.4 Pentium 4 to match it.
There is a performance race on, and a marketing bullshit race for clockspeed which may or may not mean a processor performs better..
Sounds like you have only been following the marketing bullshit race..
But then, you are an Apple owner.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Actually, leakage power surpassed switching power during the shrink from 130nm ot 90nm as the number one for power consumption.
Your formula is correct, but it now accounts for a much smaler fraction of the total power.
Intel has abandoned high k dielectrics at 65 nm, and gone for air gap, "the best k is no k at all", an extremely expensive process, which is an indicator of how fundamentally extrordinary a problem leakage has become.
Intel's very business model relies on cheap processes, so the move to air gap is telling.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
They knew why it was so hot...
They had to leave the germanium from the Silicon stretching process on the die, since to remove it would require the use of a patented IBM process. Which BTW AMD has a license to. This causes a great deal more current leakage than the IBM or AMD chips have at 90nm. This is why the power consumption of the IBM and AMD chips went down at 90nm, while Intel's original 90nm chips got hotter.
This is of course a simplification... But it's 3am...