Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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
...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
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
Well you're right about what you were saying, those words would arbit a good deal of flames. But everything has its place and there's a place for everything. Lemme explain.
Clockspeed is the easiest race, if you want to think of the CPU industry as a continuous race. All you have to do to crank out a faster CPU is continually shrink the die (because smaller gates flip faster), and make sure that everything is arranged neatly on the chip. When you hit thermal walls like we are now, it's simply time to reduce the voltage, and shrink the die again.
The only problem is, Intel's flagship for doing this now, happens to be one with a lot of baggage. The Netburst core design pretty much dictates there is to be at least two of everything, and both of them should be running all the time, especially if Hyperthreading is on. This effectively doubles your transistor count (though in reality it is less than that; there's only a single copy of bus administration, micro-op decode, etc). Keeping them on all of the time also helps jump the heat production.
But here's a truth; their CPU clock game could still be running if they would like it to. The Pentium-M is still running extremely cool. Shrink it to a 90 micron core, use SOI, strained silicon, more of their substrata magic, and a healthy dose of SpeedStep, and you could see a Pentium-M hitting 3.5GHz clockspeeds that would put both the Athlon 64 and the Pentium 4 to shame. Sadly, to build this processor is to admit defeat with the Netburst core, and Intel's being very stubborn.
On the other hand, I believe AMD's got some magic they haven't used yet up their sleeve. Though honestly I couldn't tell you what it is. There has to be a reason they aren't playing up the Turion more other than the fact it isn't scaling down as far as the Pentium-M can. I'm also surprised they're being so slow about ramping their clockspeeds, but this is probably just so their thermal profiles look superior to Intel's. A 3GHz Opteron could easily decimate a dual Xeon setup, but at the same time would probably produce just as much heat, and I think AMD would see that as a defeat.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush