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."

Comments

OK then.

[millennial]

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?

Re:OK then.

[antifoidulus]

Why would they need a "boost"? These are expensive and obviously aimed at high end users. You can already get sub $1k laptops that really do all the stuff you described, so why would they buy a dual core desktop system?
If you are using a dual core system to run word either a) you have WAY too much money, or b) the code bloat at Microsoft has REALLY gotten out of hand......

Re:OK then.

[Chris Burke]

Currently, 50 processes. The two highest (memory and VM wise) are Thunderbird which is using (60mb of main memory) and Firefox which is using 55mb of main memory.

Point conceeded. Some OSS software chews up the memory, and FireFoo are major culprits.

Though I'd hope to hell Visual Studio is way down the list. It's just an IDE! It has a GUI and a text editor. All the memory-chewing hard work is done in the compiler back end. With that comparison, my Emacs session is 6MB.

Nearly all popular linux distributions now come on more than one CD (even if you ignore the source code) and the default installations are WAY bigger than that of Windows XP.

Of course they are -- they include reams of free software! Nobody would complain about the large size of Windows installations if that installation came with practically every piece of software you would ever need! Even a 'default' install that doesn't install everything still has vast swaths of software from compilers to office suites to web browsers to web servers to image manipulation to whatever.

Who could possibly complain about getting more free stuff, even if it takes another CD or two or three to fit it? Consuming disk space for useful things is fine. Windows installs are considered bloated because the size increases but the perception is that you're not actually getting more stuff. Honestly -- what comes with the XP install these days?

All I can say is...

[FlyByPC]

...LONG LIVE COMPETITION!

I wish both AMD and Intel well. All the better for us. Lower prices and better performance.

Re:The simple future

[Detritus]

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.

Amateurs

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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?

Re:Amateurs

[leoc]

Another thing that pisses me off is that he tests these 64 bit CPU's with 32 bit Windows, claiming that Linux is "hardly mainstream".

What a load of crap.

These dual core chips are PERFECT for high performance NON-GAMER Linux systems, and yet these guys disregard the most mature and stable 64 bit platform to run game benchmarks on 32 bit windows.