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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
You just got troll'd!
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.
Not to be outdone by AMD..? Bad news: AMD made this very same announcement in June/2005, indicating quad-core CPUs would be available 'sometime in 2007'.
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?
...scientists report global warming is predicted to increase four-fold by 2008.
DYWYPI?
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.
In other news:
Not to be outdone by AMD, Gellete releases a 5 core Razor.
Why wait? Sun already makes processors with 8 cores. For realz.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Sun has been shipping 8 core T1 processors for a few months. T1000 and T2000 rack servers based on "CoolThreads" - whatever that is. See here: http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process= SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=141649. IBM has QuadCore Power5+ chips shipping any day now.
Both Solaris and AIX scale over 100 CPUs already. Good luck AMD and Intel on getting Microsoft to create a standard OS (not their funny datacenter version) that is the same on 1 CPU or 124 CPU systems.
Processing power is rarely the problem. Graphics processing is already handed off, and unless you're trying to crack encryption, most software isn't bound by processor speed anyway.
Software performance is bound by I/O limitations. It FEELS like processor power because threads on hold for I/O block a core up like cheescake to a lactose intollerant grandparent.
Until I can index on disk at about 100 times the current speed, these processors won't help what I'm doing.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
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//
By Craig Barrett
CEO and President,
Intel
February 10, 2006
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of computing in this country. The Pentium 3 was the CPU to own. Then the other guy came out with a 64-bit x86 CPU. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Itanium. That's 64 bit and a new instruction set. For performance. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to two cores. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling 64 bits and a new instruction set. Floating point performance or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to four cores.
Sure, we could go to two cores next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, one worked out pretty well, and two is the next number after one. So let's play it safe. Let's make a faster bus and call it the Pentium4SuperExtreme. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!
You think it's crazy? It is crazy. But I don't give a shit. From now on, we're the ones who have the edge in the multi-core game. Are they what's inside? Fuck, no. Intel is what's inside.
What part of this don't you understand? If one core is good, and two cores is better, obviously four cores would make us the best fucking CPU that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the processor game by clinging to the 64-bit industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, four cores is the biggest chance of all.
Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don't tell me what to invent--I tell them. And I'm telling them to stick two more cores in there. I don't care how. Make the wafers so thin they're invisible. Put some on the bottom of the die. I don't care if they have to cram the fourth in perpendicular to the other three, just do it!
You're taking the "point" part of "floating point" too literally, grandma. Cut the strings and soar. Let's hit it. Let's roll. This is our chance to make CPU history. Let's dream big. All you have to do is say that four cores can happen, and it will happen. If you aren't on board, then fuck you. And if you're on the board, then fuck you and your father. Hey, if I'm the only one who'll take risks, I'm sure as hell happy to hog all the glory when the four-core CPU becomes the computing tool for the U.S. of "this is how we compute now" A.
People said we couldn't go to 64-bit. It'll cost a fortune to manufacture, they said. Well, we did it. Now some egghead in a lab is screaming "Four's crazy?" Well, perhaps he'd be more comfortable in the labs at AMD, working on fucking Turions. HyperTransport, my white ass!
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we should just ride in Motorola's wake and make embedded IC's. Ha! Not on your fucking life! The day I shadow a penny-ante outfit like Motorola is the day I leave the CPU game for good, and that won't happen until the day I die!
The market? Listen, we make the market. All we have to do is put her out there with a little jingle. It's as easy as, "Hey, gaming with anything less than four blades is like playing at VGA resolution." Or "You'll be so l33t, I couldn't snipe you with an aimbot." Try "Your b0x is going to be so friggin' fast, someone's gonna walk up and put a goddamn spoiler on it."
I know what you're thinking now: What'll people say? Mew mew mew. Oh, no, what will people say?! Grow the fuck up. When you're on top, people talk. That's the price you pay for being on top. Which Intel is, always has been, and forever shall be, Amen, four cores, sweet Jesus in heaven.
Stop. I just had a stroke of genius. Are you ready? Open your mouth, baby birds, cause Mama's about to drop you one sweet, fat nightcrawler. Here she comes: Put another Level 2 cache on that fucker, too. That's right. Four cores, two caches, and make th
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
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.
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
Intel said they were going to be releasing x100-core processors by 2015.
Just watch the Intel 2005 Keynote speech, (video) hear about x100 cores and x100 GBits/sec chip-chip data transfer.
It's not like this is a big secret or anything.
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.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
64 processors should be enough for anyone
Procrastination Man strikes again!
As usual, if you want good CPU info, Ars Technica is the place to look. They have a blurb on Intel's 4-way core plans here.
Basically, they point out that Intel's dual core processors are already starved on the FSB, and loading two more cores isn't going to do very much. He seems to expect that, until Intel gets their FSB in order(which won't happen until 2008), AMD is going to stomp all over them. He says that Intel's cores are excellent, but without CSI (their new FSB), it may not matter much.
My own projection is that the extra contention may end up imposing a net speed _penalty_ for many workloads. That is, however, pure speculation from an amateur, based mostly on the dismal performance of the first dual-CPU G4 Macs.
Just before the end of the Alpha line, DEC prototyped an 8-core Alpha. It's not clear that it was useful, but they did succeed in cramming eight CPUs on one die over five years ago.
As long as we're waving "number of cores" about as if it were the number of inches a piece of spam is promising:
g le+chip/2100-1006_3-5399128.html
http://news.com.com/Designer+puts+96+cores+on+sin
In short, Clearspeed's CSX600 has 96 cores, but is designed to be an accelerator board.
Well, you can, for some things. The problem is that the speed of even gigabit Ethernet is so slow (compared to the speed of the interconnect between two CPUs on the same chip or motherboard) that in order for a program that runs well over a cluster, it often has to be designed completely differently from a program that will run well on a multi-CPU machine. In particular, things like shared memory are extremely difficult to simulate over a network, but trivial when you've got a single machine where the CPUs, well, share the memory.
For a lot of problem types, the high latency and low bandwidth of the network interconnect lead to the situation where you've spent hours and hours getting your app to run across all the CPUs in your cluster, only to find out that it's actually running slower than the simple version of the app that does everything on a single CPU. That's really embarrassing...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.