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Quad Core Chips From Intel and AMD

Posted by Zonk on from the more-is-better dept.

lubricated writes "According to the San Fransisco Chronicle, in an effort to one-up AMD, Intel will be coming out with 4 core cpu's in 2007." From the article: "Chips with two cores have been the latest rage, with both Intel and AMD selling those microprocessors as their high-end offering. Apple Computer Inc.'s new iMac, which started selling last month, uses the dual-core chip ... Not to be outdone, Randy Allen, AMD's corporate vice president of server and workstation division, said Friday that his firm is working its own quad-core processor for release next year."

19 of 412 comments (clear)

  1. The new race by 4D6963 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Say bye to the race to the Gigahertz. Say hello to the race to the core count

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    1. Re:The new race by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not sure that with gigahertz we got to enjoy the benefits. Word on my 233MHz G3 worked as well as it did on 800MHz G4 as it does on my 2x2GHz G5 and as well as it does on my 3.2GHz P4.

      I really think in the "megahertz" race we didn't really enjoy the benefits in all areas of software. vi, emacs, text editor x don't really benifit from 3GHz over 333MHz. Someone who just pops open Word or Word Perfect and an email client doesn't benifit from something zoom zoom high GHz.

      On that note, quite a few things on OS X work better for CPU/usage on a pair of slower CPUs than on one fast CPU.

    2. Re:The new race by 4D6963 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      "Word on my 233MHz G3 worked as well as it did on 800MHz G4 as it does on my 2x2GHz G5 and as well as it does on my 3.2GHz P4."

      What you just said reminds me of something I read before, it was something like "Computers in 93 used to run Word as fast as on "I really think in the "megahertz" race we didn't really enjoy the benefits in all areas of software. vi, emacs, text editor x don't really benifit from 3GHz over 333MHz."

      Suuure. It didn't benefit much for NetHack neither, but what kind of improvement can you expect from vi that is not mainly design decisions or stuff like that?

      vi now can only get as good as it could have got ten years ago because it meets more than the requirements it needs to do anything it can do. But many areas of software can't say they met more than they need, and that's obviously why computers need to go faster for some type of applications to improve.

      I fail to see your point anyways, is it that computers don't need to go faster, just because we can run vi or Word fast? Are that type of applications all you need, or do you also use more needy applications like for example a web browser that would have runned more painfully on your 233 Mhz G3?

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      You just got troll'd!
    3. Re:The new race by luvirini · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Even if you did not need a fast computer you were able to enjoy gigahertz race, just buy the slowest computer there is, and enjoy the other side of it.. slower things became cheaper.

    4. Re:The new race by 4D6963 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      I wasn't talking about the software benefits from more Mhz. I was talking about benefiting, understand, being able to use, those new cores, compared to being able to use the new MHz, back then.

      The point was that, if your computer had twice as much MHz, basically, you could make let's say twice as many multiplications in as many time. But if you have a quad-core CPU, given the same amount of GHz, you will only be able to make 4 time as many multiplications if your software is written for using those 4 cores, otherwise, you're fucked.

      Nothing to do with whether in your everyday use you benefit from more power or not.

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      You just got troll'd!
    5. Re:The new race by timeOday · · Score: 4, Insightful
      With multiple cores, you need software able to use these cores, am I wrong
      The transition from single-threaded to multi-threaded is fundamental, and will require a permanant increase in code complexity that we'll all have to learn to live with. However, the transition from 2 to 4 to more should be little or no trouble. At this point only a foolish programmer would think in terms of exactly 2 cores instead of N cores.

      The main mistake I think people are making is the idea of having each thread do something different, e.g. one thread for graphics and one for AI. To harness a large number of cores equally, we need libaries which divide up big repetitive tasks (say, collision detection or matrix multiplication) into a large number of chunks. Of course you can't write heavily procedural logic that way, (say, a word processor), but for the most part that stuff runs fast enough on one core anyways.

    6. Re:The new race by 4D6963 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      "The main mistake I think people are making is the idea of having each thread do something different"

      Totally agree. I once read a comment by a guy who was talking about a 8-core gaming system, and suggesting that one would be dedicated to graphics, one to the AI, one to sound, one to controlling the controllers, lol, some stupid crap like that. If you're gonna use a whole core just for controlling a keyboard or a gamepad, needless to say that you're a fool.

      Of course they need to be put to contribution in a way that all the available power is used when needed. Which makes me think, let's say you run a CPU hungry application, couldn't by some way the OS cut the work to be done between each core so it would run concurrently on many cores without the application program to have to modify anything, just having the OS to deal with it?

      I realize that the main problem with my question is, if your application is doing serial processing (for example basing it's next computation on the result of the previous one) it's not gonna be easy to make it work concurrently on several cores, but to a more or less small extent, couldn't something be done about the OS so it could make some applications written for a single core take advantage of multiple cores?

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      You just got troll'd!
  2. Having multiple cores ... by Gaima · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ... inside a chip is like having more than one engine under the hood of a car.

    Except it's quite useless with front wheel drive.

    1. Re:Having multiple cores ... by ArbitraryConstant · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "(Having multiple cores)... inside a chip is like having more than one engine under the hood of a car."

      No, it's like having multiple cylinders inside an engine.

      --
      I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
  3. When will Microsoft change its license? by TSHTF · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Currently Microsoft charges per CPU, not core http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/highlights/mult icore.mspx. As we begin to see 4-core and 8-core CPUs, how long will it be until Microsoft begins charging per core?

  4. Re:DragonFly BSD will really start to shine. by eviltypeguy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    While I don't doubt that DragonFly BSD will start to shine, I'm not sure that it will "take the lead." I personally expect OpenSolaris to take the lead since SUN has far more years experience in dealing with multiple processors.

  5. Le-Yawn..... by Groo+Wanderer · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wow, who would have guessed? Me.
    http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29550

    Want to know what the problem is? Near the bottom here:
    http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25349
    (Yes, I know I spelled it wrong, it was a verbal tip....)

                -Charlie

  6. OpenSolaris and DragonFly won't take the lead by r00t · · Score: 2, Insightful

    IBM licensed the RCU patent for GPL software. Well, if Sun really does use the GPLv3, maybe they could use RCU. DragonFly will be GPL when the BSD devil gets to ski and ice skate.

    Solaris helped Linux to scale, mainly by showing what NOT to do. Back when Linux was starting to get serious about SMP, the design was strongly influenced by horror stories from former Sun developers. Solaris and IRIX suffer from excessive locking. The locking is so complicated that it causes developers to add new locks instead of using ones that ought to be used, which only makes things worse.

  7. Be more concerned about the bus by Courageous · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This whole multi-core trend concerns me. Sun Niagra is now out, in the form of the Sunfire T1000 and T2000 computers. These are fine computers. But they really only excel for very specific workloads. Meanwhile, facts are facts. The chips are starved for data.

    It's almost comical how the Slash community seems to be so back and forth over which chip is "best". Cart meet horse. Get behind, thee!

    So. I am a bit of an AMD fanboi. I admit it. But it's not really about the chip. It's the IO fabric. Hypertransport (which does happen to be on chip) is why AMD is winning this race right now. It's affordable, and scales linearly with the number of chips. Around the corner on AMD's front is HORUS (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18251), the memory fabric to rule them all. Intel should be really afraid here.

    I personally can't get all excited about these multi core chips. Now IO solutions. Those interest me.

    Computers are entirely IO bound these days. Hello?

    Do any Slashdot readers happen to be home in there!?

    *knockety knock*

    C//

  8. Re:A quad system bus of some kind would help more by WuphonsReach · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I dunno what you do for a living (or a hobby), but there are those of us for whom quad-core won't get here soon enough. Disk I/O is always going to be an issue, but there are a lot of applications that still need more CPU power.

    I keep a dual-CPU Opteron system pretty busy most days and I'll be upgrading to a dual-CPU dual-core system once prices drop a bit more.

    --
    Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
  9. Re:Good for SGI and Sun. by cyberjessy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Are you saying that people just woke up to this "trend"? The industry decided years ago that Mhz war will stop, and everyone will try to put more cores in. Its not like no-one else knew it was coming.

    IRIX and Solaris are known to scale far beyond 4 processors.
    So does almost every other OS. Linux scales to 1000s of processors, in IBMs supercomputers. Windows 2003 Datacenter supports 64 processors (Which is more than enough for a regular commercial application. In case you want more, instead of scaling up, you should be scaling OUT.) AIX, HP-UX etc also have great support.

    If they can come out with a system that appeals to developers and business users, then they could take on Apple, Sun, Dell and others again
    SGI competing with APPLE and DELL???? In what segment, but in the figment of your imagination?

    SGI?? They lost $100m in 2004, $72m in 2005. They are nearly _dead_ and looking for a sell-out. In many ways they deserve it, I still remember their CD drive being priced 10 times higher than the ones in the market if you wanted to replace one. And of course, being totally proprietary nothing else would fit in. Who is buying IRIX now? And SGI now focuses on Linux.

    I don't know who modded you interesting. And I did not know SGI still had fans!

    --
    Life is just a conviction.
  10. Great excuse... by rfernand79 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Great excuse to keep promoting fatware instead of cleverly designed software.

  11. Re:The 8-core Alpha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    It had 8 execution threads on a single core, not multiple cores. It was the poster child of symmetric multithreading (SMT), the technology that was crippled by Intel to produce "hyperthreading". At least now we have Sun holding up the development of SMT with its new 4-thread 8-core processors.

  12. Re:Good for SGI and Sun. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Well just in case you haven't noticed, CyricZ is a master in the art of bullshittery. Like the pointy haired boss at your work he has no clue what he is talking about but says what is needed to get himself attention. Also note that he posts about 20 times a day meaning that 1. he has no job, 2. he has no life. So in conclusion: Ignore CyricZ he is a spamming troll that is critical of others yet brings nothing to the table.