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Quad Core Chips From Intel and AMD
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."
Say bye to the race to the Gigahertz. Say hello to the race to the core count
Really. It does seem that there's only so much that can be done to increase the clock. I hope this gives an impetus to improve multi-CPU software performance.
I am looking forward to multi-core systems. I have an athlon 64 dual core 3800 using windows for my main ebay computer and it can pretty much handle anything i throw at it. It will be interesting to see how the motherboards of the future look and how the memory is allocated since I would assume all of these cores sharing the same memory has to have more of a performance penalty. Adobe premiere recognizes the dual core during startup but I don't know of many programs that use both cores..i guess it just splits the load between them. I would assume multi-cored processors will sharply scale up in price due to the lower yield rate from effectively making two-four-eight processors at once on a single die.
Why wait? Sun already makes processors with 8 cores. For realz.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
This is silly. Microsoft made a conscious decision to license software per CPU (or per Slot) rather than core, and they had announced that they are doing so because multi-core looked like the natural way in which CPUs will improve, given that the Mhz war has ended. In fact they were the first major company to do so.
Also, this does not really eat into MS bottom line compared to Oracle or IBM. Most of MS revenue comes from the the desktop, while they are just competing in servers. Sql Server suddenly becomes more attractive, given Oracles complicated multi-core policy. (Remember that Oracle earlier announced that every core is a CPU, its just recently that they realized it will be a disaster and modified their original plans.)
Earlier CPU speeds doubled every 18 months. Multi-core will simply take another approach to achieving the same. I am not sure how this will hurt software companies any more than increasing cycles/sec.
Life is just a conviction.
Sun is currently shipping EIGHT core CPUS, and each core handles 4 threads... so you are talking 32 threads in one RU of space.
n dex.jsp
http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/overview/i
Well Sun has changed the threading design several times in Solaris. You need to be more specific. Sun used a model where one cpu was the controller (scheduler) and the other cpus ran jobs in sun os 4.x and in early Solaris versions it used a m:n model where there would be m user threads to n kernel threads similar to how Microsoft's .NET framework creates threads. Newer versions of solaris (9 and 10) are more like linux and freebsd's latest threading library and make 1:1 relationships between userland and kernel threads. I'm not an expert at this and have been taking an operating systems class this term where this has been discussed.
As for dragonfly, I do think that Matt was right about some problems with freebsd 5 and 6 but each release is getting faster. 6.1 beta is noticably faster. Dragonfly isn't revolutionary though. I think some of the ideas from Mach inspired some of their design decisions and we all know Apple has the most succesful Mach kernel in the commercial world.
I don't know if we'll see freebsd or dragonfly look super impressive on multicore cpus, but I do know that openbsd and netbsd may not scale well depending on what they are working on. I can tell you that freebsd 6 does fine on my dual xeon machine. Solaris 10 on the same system seemed slightly slow but i think that was driver support more than anything. Linux IS SLOW on the system regardless of the scheduler. For that OS class, I had to install the 2.6.15 kernel and custom compile it for my system prior to our work on adding system calls. Its not as fast (gentoo) as freebsd 6 was on the system, but faster than freebsd 5.x. (especially disk io) I don't know why linux seems slow as it is using both cpus quite well. Of course this is percieved speed.. i haven't done any formal benchmarks.
Maybe someone should do a serious benchmark on FreeBSD 6, Netbsd 3, Dragonfly (whatever the latest is), OpenBSD 3.8, Linux 2.6.15 (gentoo distro?), and for kicks OpenDarwin all running on the same dual core hardware. Hell if i get time this summer, i might do it.
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