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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)
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...
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
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...
...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
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
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.)