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

water cooling

[essreenim]

..with water brought to you directly from the highly polluted canals of Venice. Sniff, ahhhhh, I love the smell of sewage in my PC..

nt

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I hear an FX-61 calling my name!

Sorry, actually, that's my Intel chip. Noisy bugger.

Re:uh

[Anonymous Coward]

Warning Independent Thought Detected.

The white van has been dispatched.

You will be taken to the Marketing 101 Re-education center.

Re:Intel-Rating?

[ergo98]

So what does 2.8 Ghz in AMD mean in terms of Intel performance?

Duh...

2.8Ghz -> 9081 AMD Cybermarks -> 84.7 ISO 9011:2005 quartets -> 1.7E10 Intel TruePerfs.

I think that was fairly obvious.

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?

Non-von Neumann Memory Architecture

[MOBE2001]

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.

Re:Non-von Neumann Memory Architecture

[hyc]

re: unlimited simultaneous memory access - it's called a crossbar switch, and a lot of parallel supercomputers use them. They are fairly expensive, in real $$ and in terms of board space, etc...

The HyperTransport that AMD uses is not a bad interconnect in the meantime, for people on smaller budgets...

Re:Non-von Neumann Memory Architecture

[maraist]

something revolutionary and cheap, maybe a new optical memory

Revolutionary and cheap.. You don't ask for much do you? Optical is coming slowly, but I'm not convinced it's ever going to replace electric current/voltage-based computing. At least not for general computing.. The problem is shrinking optical paths; you need a wave-guide for optical paths; for electric current, all you need is a string of closely spaced ionized atoms. Theoretically you could get down to a couple-atoms thick of wire with electric current.

Moreover, photons are only slightly faster than electric-current. Electrons move between 0.6 and 0.9 times the speed of light. What photons are really good at is traveling long distances without dispersing as heat. Electrons move only a couple atoms before bouncing into something. But you can do lots of really useful things with electrons that you can't do with photons... Having photons mimic the functionality of electrons might not be doable on the same scale (meaning by the time you get 30 million photonic transistors on a die, you could probalby get a billion electric transistors).

Quantum computing has the same density dilemma as photonic computing. But at least quantum computing does more than electric or photonic switching, so it doesn't need as many functional units. Don't expect to see an Intel Q4 any time soon.

As for a more practical architecture. If practical and economic are what you want then the Pentium 3's with a flat BUS multi-CPU architecture is where it's at. Lots of cheap cores on as simple an architecture as you can get.

The problem of course is in the mathmatical algorithms that we use to do real work. Most steps of computational algorithms are inherently dependent on the results of previous steps, and are thus not parallelizable. single-threaded CPU's have gotten VERY good at parallelizing individual instructions. The compilers aren't well suited for helping the CPU out, so things like the Itanium were supposed to exploit such parallelism. But the loss of backward compatability (and the Itanium's focus on floating point) spelled the death nell for that architecture.

IBM, Intel, AMD are all pushing multi-threaded execution.. Basically giving up on figuring out how to make a particular algorithm work. They're pretending that a CPU which works well on a high-end server with lots of independent jobs (web pages, database transactions, IO requests, etc) can be sold to a market which is trying to scroll the mouse wheel on an excel spreadsheet with a thousand rows. The spread-sheet navigation is extremely sequential. A dual core CPU will be noticeable since there are periodic background tasks which often "get in the way" of your foreground task. But a 3'rd/4rth CPU is not likely to be useful at all to non-workstation end-users. (My workstation generally has 8 visible applications, all actively running).

Personally, I think the answer is taking a step back from MHZ and pipelining. Go back to a 3, 4 or 5 stage pipeline with MASSIVE read-ahead decompilation of instructions (similar to transmeta). Get lots of high-speed cache on board with as little latency as possible (current large-cache architectures have HUGE latancies). By lowering the CPU MHZ, you reduce the latency to the all-important main-memory. Advance the state-of-the-art in power-consumption (I've read of several very novel approaches, including decreasing power to the point of statistically acceptible and correctable errors occuring in the computation). Perhaps put a second core on the CPU, but don't just put two identical masks.. Make use of the fact that a CPU has hot and cold regions.. Rewire both devices so they're really one big device with two functional CPUs..

Develop better heat-dessipation techniques.. THey've been very creative over the years.. Flipping the chip so the silicon directly presses against the heat-sink, for example. They've introduced lower-resistence copper as the main wire interconnect, which was a major material-science challenge. Newer exotic materials may provide for better heat conductivity and voltage regulation. The cooler you run a CPU, the higher the power it can dessipate, the more power you can shove into it, the more work you can ask it to do.

-Cheers

Re:Non-von Neumann Memory Architecture

[Anonymous Coward]

Electrons move between 0.6 and 0.9 times the speed of light.

That's a pretty fundamental error for someone acting like an expert to make, don't you think? At 0.9c, we don't call them "electrons," we call them "seriously badass beta rays."

It's not the electrons that propagate the signal, it's the potential difference the electrons are at. I have no idea what voltage you'd need to get electrons to be travelling at 0.9c, but I'd put it well into the MeV range.

Re:Non-von Neumann Memory Architecture

[lostchicken]

E=(gamma)mc^2
gamma = (1 - v^2/c^2) ^ (-1/2) =2.3
E = 2.3 * .511MeV/c^2 * c^2 = 1.17 MeV

Yes, that is, in fact, one bad ass beta particle.

only downwards

[doormat]

AMD chips have multipliers unlocked downwards. That means if its got a 10x or 12x multiplier, you can chose 8, 9, 10, up to the default number. It works well, even if you dont want to OC, you can turn down the multiplier and crank up the FSB for better performance.

Pretty simple..

[cbreaker]

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.

Karaman

[Karaman]

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!

Re:Overheating issues?

[YU Nicks NE Way]

The parent is currently moderated "Insightful" -- but it isn't. It's wrong.

P = I^2 R. For a processor, the current applied to each transistor is proportional to the clock frequency and the resistance is constant, so the power consumption per transistor (ceteris paribus) rises as the square of the clock rate. For modern processors, the power consumption of the chip is basically due to the total switching power of the transistors, and thus the power consumption rises roughly as the square of clock speed.

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.

Better review

[uodeltasig]

Here is a better overview of the changes and feature additions

Re:Intel-Rating?

[Suzuran]

Because, since the amount of work done by an instruction on one processor differs from the amount done by the same instruction on another processor, it was a rather _Meaningless _Indication of _Processor _Speed.

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.