Slashdot Mirror
AMD Dual-Core Performance Revealed
Timmus writes "In two separate articles, FiringSquad takes a look at the performance of AMD's dual-core Opteron CPU. The first article examines the performance of dual-core in scientific computing applications (MATLAB and LS-DYNA) as well as digital photography, while the second story focuses on the performance of dual-core Opteron paired against Intel's dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition in video encoding, Cinebench, and a few other applications. The performance improvements are pretty impressive in multi-threaded applications that take advantage of the technology."
So we have:
scientific computing applications (MATLAB and LS-DYNA)
digital photography
video encoding
Cinebench and
"a few other applications".
So what about the average user? Will the college kid who just needs to type their papers, the parents who want to do their taxes, the gamers who want to play high-end stuff, etc. get any sort of boost from this?
I am scientifically inaccurate.
...LONG LIVE COMPETITION!
I wish both AMD and Intel well. All the better for us. Lower prices and better performance.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
It wouldn't work. Why do you think we have processors with two or three levels of cache? There is a serious speed/bandwidth mismatch between the processor and the main memory system. There are ways of increasing main memory bandwidth, but they are very expensive. There's no point in adding more processors if they are going to spend 95% of their time stalled, waiting for cache lines to be filled.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
And then detrimental again because both processes share the L1 cache... I don't know if Intel fixed that problem yet, but the cache sharing actually decreased performance compared to a processor with HT disabled while running high-demand single-threaded applications (games).
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
With comments like:
"Even grandmothers own 8-megapixel consumer digital cameras now"
I really have to question the intellegence of this poor guy. I don't know many grandma's that drop $700-$1000 on digital camera's.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
The computing theory and architectures are already there. Now that Java has finally jumped on the bandwagon of reliable multi-threading with v1.5 (or v5.0, or whatever the hell they're calling it today), chances are unless you're using really legacy code the language will have the appropriate system calls available to it.
The difficulty is that in order for multi-threading to be worthwhile, a developer really needs to know their stuff. It is not easy, there are a number of things that must be taken into consideration that simply do not occur in single-threaded programming. A programmer who just picked up a 'C++ in 24 hours' book is most likely not going to have the tools available to them in order to handle or understand the complexities of multi-threaded programming.
That being said, there are many situations where multi-threading is not appropriate, but if you think the theory needs to play catch-up, you might be surprised at how common it is in professional development.
This is not a sig.
How can anyone take an article seriously when the very first sentence just screams, "AMATEUR!!" like this one does:
Intel may very well go down in history as the first processor manufacturer with a dual-core solution, if only by three days.
IBM Power4, Power5
HP PA-8800
Sun Sparc IV
All full-fledged dual-core processors shipping long before Intel -- HP's been shipping for over a year and IBM's already well in to their 2nd generation of dual core processors with Power5.
Sure, you can excuse the author with some hand-waving about x86 context only or whatever. But if they really knew what they were talking about, they would have said it that way - or at least a competent editor would have corrected it. If these guys can't even get the trivial stuff right, how can anyone trust them to get the real technical details right?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.