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Intel Yonah Performance Preview
illusoryphoenix writes "Anandtech has an interesting preview of the successor to Dothan (Pentium M's second generation), Yonah, with tests run on an engineering sample. It seems like latest Pentium M is still lagging in the floating point area, but has gained some ground overall. It's also interesting to note their comparisons to the Pentium D/Netburst based dual core."
Er, the 2.0GHz Yonah in these tests is slower in nearly all cases than the Athlon 64 X2 3800+, which is the slowest CPU in AMD's lineup. The _top_ of AMD's line would be the Opteron Model 880. The best CPU they market for the desktop is the Athlon 64 X2 4800+, which has double the cache and runs at a 20% higher clock speed than the 3800+. So, Intel's upcoming chip /barely/ hangs with AMD's bottom of the line. Compared to AMD's current best, Yonah would be left standing in the dust. And Yonah hasn't even been released yet.
About the only good thing I can say about Yonah is it will run MacOS X.
that's total system power, not just the proc. That's going to include the chipset, disk, peripherals, USB devices, and the GPU.
OS X is a 32-bit OS. It can run 64-bit applications, but there appears to be only one such app on the market: Mathematica.
Also, current PowerBooks, iBooks, and minis use the 32-bit PowerPC G4, so a 32-bit Yonah is no worse.
It's for several reasons:
1. There is no real support for Windows x64, there's no virus protection and very few device drivers. Why go out of your way to support 1% of your users who would actually run a native 64-bit OS?
2. Intel's 64-bit extensions actually slow their chips down. That's right, they added 64-bit instructions to their microcode, but they still get broken down to the same old instructions on the i686 core that the old ones did, and the 64-bit ones take longer to digest. It was a move for buzzword compliance only.
Want to prove it? Get a pentium D830 machine, compile Gentoo on it, first a 32-bit install, then the AMD64 install. Compile both with the same options, but one with 32-bit instructions, and one with 64. The Intel 64-bit Linux will be slower than the 32-bit. The opposite is true with an AMD K8 chip, because the core was designed from step one to be 64-bit.
3. Intel doesn't forsee you needing (or being able to fit) over 4GB of RAM in a portable or business desktop for several years, after the lifetime of this chip revision. If you insist on a 64-bit Intel chip, you must be running a server, workstation, or other high-end rig, so fess-up and buy an appropriately-classed chip (the D830, EE, or Xeon).
4. They need to deliver this chip to market NOW, Intel's stronglest lead right now is with mobile platforms. These chips are in demand as-is; Apple and other vendors want them NOW, not in a few months with 64-bit extensions.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
More specifically,
OS X is mostly 32bit. 64bit libraries are available. You can run native 64bit integer math with the accelerate framework so you can do your fast, high-precision work on a G5.
The big problem is, the GUI parts of the OS (most notably) are still 32bit. GUI apps must be 32 bit. Apps like Mathematica run kind of like X-Window.. they have a GUI and a mathematical engine running in the background. It's kind of client/server. Wolfram has a 64bit engine, but not a 64bit GUI but you don't need the GUI to be 64bit native.
The problem is, other apps aren't logically de-coupled like this so it's difficult write these 32bit/64bit applications. The big issue, as I understand it, is that there needs to be a distinct separation of 32bit native and 64bit native code.. not just in spawned threads but in actual binaries that are compiled. In Mathematica, the front end is a separately compiled binary from the computation engine.
ffakr.
I'm not feeling witty so bite me