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Dual Cores Taken for a Spin in Multitasking
Vigile writes "While dual cores are just now starting to hit the scene from processor vendors, PC Perspective has taken the first offering from Intel, the Extreme Edition 840, through the paces in single- and multi-tasking environments. It seems that those two cores can make quite a difference if you have as many applications open and working as the author does in the test." It's worth noting that each scenario consists of only desktop applications, and it'd still be interesting to see some common server benchmarks, such as a database or web server.
(Dual core is the same as an SMP system, except the cores can communicate a bit faster with each other)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
It's a shame they just upgraded our PCs. I'd *love* to get ahold of one of these. We're developers and running Eclipse and JBoss locally (we have servers, but local installations can be useful) and a dualcore could speed things up.
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How long before applications start figuring that they should have an entire core dedicated to them?
Windows, for example. What if the next version of Windows requires a dual-core processor to be usable? You know..Windows gets one core to idle at 80% of its capacity..and spills over into the other core when loading a text file.
If things stayed the way they were now, and the entire other core could be kept separate from the OS and used for gaming/other applications, it would be a great idea.
But guess what.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I'm still bumming around with a sub-gigahertz chip, specifically an Athlon T-Bird. I've been out of the loop for too long, can anyone tell me the benifits of using a dual core system (and while we are at it, a 64-bit chip)? Any problems to look out for if I decide to jump on the wagon in my next upgrade?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
allows for more than 4gb of ram. That is all the advice I can give you on that subject. The article should answer your questions about dual core.
Does this mean my Windows XP machine wont pause when I put in a floppy or Cdrom? Wow, sign me up.
What this test really was missing was a direct comparison to SMP systems which really for me makes the results entierly boring and expected .
If he had shoved in a duel opteron set-up and a duel xeon set-up then it may have been a little more intresting , though as it stands its like stating the obvious.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
How do dual-core single cpu desktops stack up against dual-cpu desktop with similar mhz?
Anyone have benchmarks?
that slashdot is on the intel payroll too. people talk about the giant marketing machine intel operates, i just wish all of their lackeys would be a little more open about their financial relationship with the cpu juggernaut.
oh btw, amd made a real dual cpu release yesterday... You can actually buy the chip, unlike intel's paper release just a few days ago (ya, that was a really desperate marketing effort.) But at least slashdot gives intel the last laugh.
Does (or when will) there be support for an SMP setup using these beasts? I'd just love to see how a 4-core/4SMT system performs on rendering.
Has the new dual core opteron up against a quad Xeon with 8MB cache, amongst many others.
? i=2397
Well worth a read:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx
No Norm, those are your safety glasses; I'll wear my own thanks...
Does anyone has java benchmark numbers on dual cores?
...and I'm not quite sure if it's a good one, but for desktops:
The foreground program has a dedicated core. If you switch programs, put the old on the "other" core. The new moved from the "other" core. Essentially, your current program has full responsiveness (assuming you don't do things that lock up the application itself), no context switches, no other programs that can run some weird blocking call (on a single core machine, it certainly looks that way at least, especially CD-ROM operations).
Granted you could end up with your fg processor being idle most of the time. But the way many people work with the computer, the foreground program is the ONLY time-critical application.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The benchmarks they've done would seem to give a good real-world example of the benefits of multi-core. As many have noted, "proper" multithreaded application of course see the biggest benefit, but they're relatively rare on most Desktop systems. Having additional CPU power available to simply dedicate to multiple applications does have benefits.
;), really do give an insight into the kind of benefits regular users will see.
Their tests, doing such things as Anti-virus scans while performing other cpu-intensive tasks (e.g. Doom 3
Has anyone seen the various chip manufacturers roadmaps, with regard to the demise of their current ranges? My point is, I was amazed at how fast the AMD64 range replaced the Athlon XP. I wonder how long - realistically - it'll be before multi-core is "the norm"... less than a year?
JJ
Or do I have to wait for Service Pack 3?
Yours,
Gator Fan.
For those wanting a real idea of how good these things are (compared to other SMP server setups) http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22711 has a good set of links.
...
That last page raised my eyebrows. 291 Watts under load, that's some serious power draw compared to what I'm used to. And that had to be kicking out some serious heat, too.
Anybody know what is the draw for a 4x Xeon system? I'd be interested in seeing how they compare.
I wonder at what point the facilities people will want to use the server farm to heat the building, too. A weird convergence, the PC world is becoming more like the old mainframe world.
"Well..here I am..." - Jubal Early
Who the hell runs benchmarks with FireFox and iTunes.
if you ask me, the people that desperately need the ability to multitask are folks in the creative industry. Every 5 minutes bounce back and forth between massive applications rendering huge files.
Nothing sucks more then opening a 400dpi photoshop document and not having InDesign respond since your single core CPU is being bogarted.
SMP is probably the only reason I still find my crusty old Dual 450 g4 useful. It does things slowly, but it doesn't "feel" slow. If something is taking its sweet ass time, I can usually do something else without waiting years for windows and menus to draw.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
For benchmarks relating to serious DB and web use, see this review by Anand Shempi: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2397
or these two at FiringSquad:
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_dual-core_ opteron_875/
and http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/colfax_dual_op teron/
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Extremetech have a review of AMD opteron dual core http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1788685 ,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532
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I'll probably get flamed for this....
Increased performance in CPUs has normally come from faster clock rates and more complex circuitry. As we all know, Intel (and the others) have bailed out on faster clocks. If you add more complex circuitry, the logic delay increases--to keep the clock rate up, you have to burn power.
What does this mean? The old-fashioned ways of getting more performance are dead--if you try it, the chip will burn up. It's easier to build two 1X MIP cores than one 2X MIP core. Like it or not, dual cores are the only solution; with transistor scaling, we'll have to go to 4, 8, and 16 cores in the next few years. IBM went dual-core with the PowerPC in 2001. Intel, AMD, and Sun are just following suit.
Not bummed out yet? Massive parallelism works well for people doing scientific computing, but for the average joe, it's useless. I don't care how fast a processor is--I usually have one task that will crush it--but rarely do I have two time-critical things to worry about at the same time. In the article referenced, they had to work hard to find things that would test the dual-core features. Parallel computing and multiple cores sounds great. History buffs will know about Thinking Machines, Meiko, Kendell Square, MasPar, NCUBE, Sequent, Transputer, Parsytec, Cray, and so on.... Not a happy ending.
So.... we can't get more single processor performance without bursting into flames. And parallel machines are only useful to a small market. IMO, it's gonna get grim. (And before anyone says new paradigm of computing to take advantage of the parallel resource, put down the crack pipe and think about it--we've been waiting for that paradigm for about 40 years. Remember occam? I thought not.)
If the article is correct, Intel could build in a coffee pot for those long nights of full load modeling.
"the XE 840 almost hits the 300 watts level under one"
Another plus! Demand for dual core laptops should give battery technology a new push.
I feel a good use for Dual-core systems is to put the OS on one core, including all explorer.exe instances and threads.
The operating system shoul employ a smart system of monitoring CPU usage per thread and move the high- usage threads to the other core.
I wonder though, on a slightly different topic - heat dispersion: nobody seems to talk about it - but two cores mean twice as much heat. How the hell do they do away with the heat? It dissapointing but they might be speedstepping/downclocking the cores dynamically at peak load.
This certain warrants discussion.
Except that this is a desktop processor, that won't be shipping in server systems. So in actual fact it's worth noting that the entire point is that each scenario consists of only desktop applications.
What, exactly, do you think the difference is between a 'desktop' and a 'server'.
really... modern software is bloated as all get out. who cares about new fancy shmancy processors when all it would take for our computers to run fast would be some good, old fashioned efficient coding? These new procs are just a way to get money for the chip manufacturers they do NOT translate to increased productivity.
Huge differences. We're not talking about a dinky little MP3 server in your basement. No one will be producing motherboards with these 840EE's in them and no one will be shipping tower nor rack machines with one of these 840EE's in them.
As far as I can tell, this is basically no different from a dual processor system, except that you are probably going to get a little less performance out of the dual core than out of two separate processors. In return, you are going to save a bit on hardware (sockets, etc.) compared to a true dual processor system.
All these questions about whether Windows will usurp one of the cores or how to schedule the two cores seem positively bizarre, given that the answer is no different from dual processor machines.
There could be multi-core designs that can get better performance than multi-processor designs (cell attempts to be one), but this doesn't seem to be one of those.
He said the amd64 is only for large databases... that's like wrong.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The machine I use as a workstation is a Dual Xeon box with SCSI drives. The only difference between that and a 'server' is what I do with it.
Graphics processing (large amounts of data in multi-dimensional arrays) are a perfect scenario for multi-threading. This is essentially lots of independent little problems.
Another one would be writing real AI. AI running on its own threads could act much more like a real player in a game.
So, there's 2 processes that could benefit from multi-processing. I bet you're saying but that's specialty graphics/games only. Well, what about an intelligent agent handling processing of your email/IM/IRC/web browing? (Not here yet, but everyone thinks eventually there will be some sort of agent technology to help us filter through the chaff)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Actually, on the "normal" versions of Windows 2000 and Windows XP applications will only have 2 GByte of adress space available. So if you want to run One Big App that consumes all the memory, limitations on 32 bit Windows will start at 2 GByte.
About Linux, I'm not sure...but someone else might help out with that question.
In practice, 512 MByte are comfortable for typical desktop use. My private PC has 1GByte and I still count that as a luxury.
C - the footgun of programming languages
If you think the only hardware that matters with a server is the CPU and hard drives, I can tell you've never had to actually manage a real server. Does your workstation offer redundent power-supplies? Hot-swapable components? 64bit PCI slots? Local console ports? Can it be remote booted? What chipset and motherboard does it use; server oriented chipsets are generally tuned to server tasks (Which are generally I/O and memory bound, rather than CPU bound) Whats the cooling like? What monitoring and reporting functions does it provide? Is it rack mountable? What memory does it have; is it checked and certified? How much memory can it take? Servers generally take GBs of memory; most desktops either don't have the DIMM slots or don't have the BIOS support for a fully populated 4GB, let alone enough slots to make use PAE on 32bit CPU's. What NICs does it have? Gigabit? Dual Gigibit? Fibre?
No?
I think the biggest thing that is driving the need for dual-core CPU's is the fact that multimedia-editing programs are very CPU-intensive tasks and could benefit from the use of a dual-core CPU.
The Adobe Photoshop CS example you cited is a good one; imagine being able to use both CPU cores to dramatically reduce rendering times for processing high-resolution images in Photoshop CS. Also, video-editing programs such as Adobe Premiere and its competitors could also benefit from a dual-core CPU, given how much CPU time you need to edit videos downloaded from your MiniDV/MicroDV camcorders nowadays.
My company wanted to try dual processors in our multi-user systems, but the motherboards and processors are just too expensive.
These dual-cores are just another reason we feel that multi-user computing is going to be the efficient choice of the future, instead of everyone having their own high-powered machine. Single user machines will probably not take full advantage of the dual-cores for some time
These are great for our local multi-user approach, but will also help networked thin client approaches like LTSP. Having one processor or core per user isn't even necessary, just having the second core will do a lot to lower latency when one cpu is busy with a thread.
We can't wait to start putting them in our http://groovix.com/ systems in June...
Open Source is Common Sense: http://groovix.com/
There's this interview with Tim Sweeney, the leading developer behind the Unreal 3 engine.
They're working on a multithreaded engine for unreal 3, exciting stuff.
Like you said, AI is a logical chunk of processing that should be on a separate thread. Other logical chunks he mentions are physics, animation updates, the renderer's scene traversal loop, sound updates, and content streaming.
So at least one multi-threaded game engine is in the pipe. This is good because we don't really have a chicken and egg problem.
So I agree games will improve a lot with multi-core.
But for other apps I'm not as excited. I don't know what other apps I use regularly could be sped up with a multi-threaded rewrite. Virus scanning? Searching? Media playback? eMule? SETI? Maybe lots of apps can be sped up, but will any of them do it? In the interview I linked Tim says a multi-threaded system takes 2-3 times longer to write and test.
I don't use most of the apps that have a lot to gain from multi-cores (Media creation apps, server apps). Maybe I'll start doing more things at once. Or maybe run a dual-head system. Maybe.
It seems games are the only resource pig apps I've ever really run, so they're the only apps that will prompt me to upgrade to multi-core. Maybe once dual cores are common non-game developers will start to exploit them. And maybe some app will suprise me but I'm not holding my breath.
Until then a single CPU serves my needs fine. Sometimes I come across situations where I close one app to give another a boost. Such as shutting down apps to make the game faster. With a dual core I could probably run everything, but for now I'll settle for shutting extra stuff down.
In the future when playing a multi-threaded game on a multi-core PC I'll probably still shut down extra apps just to squeeze out the extra fps.
Are you Canadian?
Actually my main function is monitoring Server Hardware, but that is hadly significant.
OK, point by point, since you are so curious:
Does your workstation offer redundent power-supplies? Redundant power is supplied to my power outlet, the PC doesn't need any additional hardware for this.
Hot-swapable components? Yes, actually, ALL USB Based devices are hot-swappable.
64bit PCI slots? no, but then I don't see too many 64 bit components yet either.
Can it be remote booted? Yep, sure can.
What chipset and motherboard does it use Irrelevant
; server oriented chipsets are generally tuned to server tasks (Which are generally I/O and memory bound, rather than CPU bound) Dude, my CPU is idle 99% of the time, it almost always is waiting for either the disk or the network or the keyboard, just like every computer out there.
Whats the cooling like?fine, thanks for asking
What monitoring and reporting functions does it provide? Like most modern hardware it has a health chip and has been configured to use SNMP, after all it is on a corporate lan, and that's just plain sensible
Is it rack mountable?No, but that's just the box, not the computer inside.
What memory does it have; is it checked and certified? How much memory can it take? Servers generally take GBs of memory; most desktops either don't have the DIMM slots or don't have the BIOS support for a fully populated 4GB, let alone enough slots to make use PAE on 32bit CPU's. Actually it runs ECC RAM, and is currently configured with 2 Gig. That's quite a lot for a workstation, but yes, it can hold 4 Gig.
What NICs does it have? Gigabit? Dual Gigibit? Fibre? Well, no, it doesn't handle fibre, but that is immaterial, it's just a different kind of card after all. It is on a Gigabit LAN though if that helps.
So you see, in almost every respect, my 'workstation' is a 'server' except that I don't use it as one.
P.S. have a look at the specs for the Dell Precision 6700 'workstation' - not the machine I have, but it sure looks like a 'server' according to you.
The SUV of CPU's!
In Windows, from the task manager "processes" tab just right click on the process and select "Set Affinity..." I'm running a dual processor right now and I can force any process to run on either CPU. This is very useful for multi-tasking, not just SMP programs.
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
How does the performance compare with a dual XEON server vs a dual core (or the AMD equiv) ?
I do a lot of video encoding and visual effects work and am about to build a dual 3.6GHz XEON server. I wonder if I would be better off/cheaper with a dual core instead?
I haven't been following this too closely, but do they have one integrated memory controller or two for the dual core devices ? It would seem to be a fairly obvious thing to do to maintain the memory bandwidth per core. And yes, that would probably need a higher pin count package, but the overall system cost would be lower.
Actualy , i implied that the AMD64 bit extensions were currently only showing noticble advantages in such operations as things are still not fully optimised for AMD64 in the normal users sphere(faster for some things but not by enough to be needed) , but i did go on to note that AMD64 chips were excelent for other reasons such as the architecture and the onboard memory controler which gives them an edge (compelation times are solid and i wouldnt do without them in x86) ;).
Not offtopic no as grandparent said though , just a simple missunderstanding
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Why are you answering with totally irelivent information? Your original argument was that these 840EE CPU's could be used in servers because you consider your Dual Xeon workstation server-class hardware. My point is that it is not; server-class hardware is far, far more than than a fast CPU and SCSI disks, as I attempted to point out to you.
The very fact that you seem to seriously believe that you get "redundent power" through your power cable and that USB is "hot swappable" just highlights this nicely. You prove further total ignorance of server hardware with your comment that you "don't see too many 64 bit components yet either"; maybe not on your home PC or workstation, but you sure as hell see 64bit PCI cards in server class machines.
I'd consider changing your UID; perhaps "OneIgnorantKid" might suit you better?
Maybe that's because you've been trained not to run two intensive applications at the same time. If your subconscious is telling you not to launch a compile job until your DVD transcode is done, then you probably wouldn't get a lot out of an SMP system. Break that habit, though, and you might like what you find.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
thinking about it, why would Joe User want to upgrade his PC, if there is not any advantages to him. Think about it, someone is buying today a computer for about 600-700 dollars. the computer happily works for the years to come. The processors have become fast enough to work for everything that a user wants. Joe happily uses his PC to browse the web for the next 10 years. He is using email, internet and maybe excel / word / open office (take your pick). is there anything, some kind of technology that will actually appear and make people want / need to upgrade? I'm not talking about the power users nor the gamers. How is the industry going to make people upgrade their PCs if their PC is working just fine? Dual core means nothing to normal users.
If a dual-core AMD is fully loaded on one core and half loaded on another core, will it be able to throttle the speed of the second core and keep the other core running full-speed?
It's all been said before. 100MHZ, 1GHZ, 2GHZ. Just check google groups.
w er pc/browse_thread/thread/feaaa145095f4f1b/dfda61bc4 c0674b9?q=cpu+mhz+limit&rnum=1&hl=en#dfda61bc4c067 4b9
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.sys.po
The limit is qualified with "todays materials limits." New materials will change these limits.
Is XP Pro really limited to 4 cpus? I wish my copy of Linux 2.6.11 Home Edition supported SMP... If only I'd forked over another $75 to Linus!
Anyway, in response to the parent, I'm pretty sure the reason that most people see an improvement with WinXP and hyperthreading is that hyperthreading subverts Windows's braindead scheduling policy.
(Unless they've changed this recently) By default, Windows puts CPU hungry jobs in the foreground, so if you're running multiple apps, the only one that responds well is the one updating its progress bar.
With multiple cores, you need to have at least one cpu intensive job per core before the scheduler can get in the way of interactive tasks.
I've always wondered what the "Schedule the CPU for my applications" vs. "Schedule the CPU for system services" toggle actually did. The services choice might lower the priority of processes that are CPU intensive. (If that is all that it does, it should increase responsiveness when you multitask, and I doubt it would have much effect on games or multimedia, but I could be wrong.)
A secure DRM solution needs a secure kernel. What could be better than for Windows Secure Kernel to run on one CPU, and non-secure Windows and apps to run on the other.
Microsoft needs dual-core, not multi-threading to make this happen in a very secure manner.
Enable DMA on your CDROM.
Are you trying to say that USB devices are not hot-swappable, strange, I can plug and un-plug my USB drive and it always seems to work fine