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

full article mirrors

[winkydink]

here and here.

Chance for someone to karma whore...

[Amiga Lover]

OK. Anyone have a quick simple explanation of why Dual Core over Dual CPU motherboard? are there inherent advantages to dual CPUs so close together?

1 Dual Core vs Dual CPUs?

[uofitorn]

Wouldn't a better benchmark be to compare a dual core setup to a similarly configured dual processor workstation?

The simple future

[caryw]

Why stop at dual core?
Once a way to link multiple cores of a CPU is firmly implemented scaling the chip to 4, 8, or even 32768 cores should be relatively easy.
With chip dies getting smaller and smaller the only real reasons not to continue this multi-core scaling would be physical space and power usage.
Perhaps they could scale multiple cores vertically instead of just making the chip wider and longer.
And perhaps the cores could only be "turned on" when called for instead of using up juice all the time.

Interesting look at the future of chips.
Sony's Playstation 3 is using a "cell processor" or similar multi-core design that has already been covered here in the past.

Arstechnica article on the cell processor here.
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Re:The simple future

[jd]

IIRC, the latest generation of Sun UltraSPARCs has 6 CPU cores. An alternative approach is to have "virtual" cores - have a stack of registers and pools of computational elements. This does require some extra element of sophistication, to share out resources, but if you have two programs with very different CPU needs, both programs should run faster. Also, if you have fewer programs than there are virtual cores, but instruction parallelization can be performed, you still get a speedup.

The idea of turning off parts of the CPU would work, if you have a large enough cache. What you would need to do is prefetch all possible paths far enough ahead that you could turn on any deactivated part of the CPU before the instruction needed to be executed. You then have an independent "monitor" processor (an MPU?) which purely scans the cache and turns off all elements on the CPU that aren't needed within the lifetime of any of the contents of the cache.

Another poster noted the bandwidth issue between processor and main memory. That is certainly a problem, but one that may be fixable. One way is to sped up memory (and the bus). The other is to look at ways of reducing the amount that needs to be transferred, by putting some of the CPU in memory. (The technique is called "Processor-In-Memory", and has been around for about 10-15 years.)

Re:As for gamers (from TFA)

[millennial]

I suppose that makes sense. The question this raises, though, is whether there are any games designed to work better on hyperthreaded/multiprocessor systems.

Wow!

[truesaer]

This is pretty disasterous for Intel. The game benchmarks show significant performance penalties for dual core chips, as expected. Intel launched its dual core specifically as an Extreme Edition for games.

On other benchmarks the AMD dual core gets 10-20% better performance! SiSoft Sandra is an exception, where there is a mixed bag between the two processors.

This pretty much verifies for me that Intel did a seriously rushed cludge to get this thing out the door. The only reason I can think of to target this to gamers is that no OEMs would want to buy them for server or desktop use, so you have to target people who like the latest technology even if it isn't that great.

AMD on the other hand seems to have a pretty good product here. I can't wait until the desktop versions come out.

Anyone realize that suddenly all P4's disappear?

[denominateur]

Now, it's struck me as very peculiar that the benchmarks where the dual dual core setup from AMD really shines leave out any comparison whatsoever to the Intel dual-core offering. This begs the question whether the person doing this review is a journalist or a marketing represenatative of AMD.

"We did not have time to evaluate the Intel platform with the Intel MKL, the P4 3.0GHz is an older reference measurement." is a very cheap excuse and indicates either lazyness or bribes on the side of AMD... I hate hardware review sites!

Re:As for gamers (from TFA)

[DigitumDei]

Depends I guess. I know I don't have the luxury of keeping my gaming machine seperate from all other applications I use, so my gaming machine is also my work machine and it tends to have a lot of stuff running at any given time. Now when playing shooter games I often notice a sudden drop in fps when some service or other decides it needs to do something. A dual core machine would be a lot less prone to this I guess.

Also, from the article. "And although the company says dual-core isn't for gamers quite yet, perhaps it is, only in a different usage model. Alan Dang and I were discussing processor benchmarking moving forward and he came up with the idea that we don't run compute-intensive tasks in the background today because we think they can't be done. However, if a dual-core processor enables a DVD encode while you're playing Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, there's a good chance that the way we think about demanding tasks may change. Even though games aren't currently threaded, the background processes a dual-core processor enables may very well catapult the technology into favor with game enthusiasts."