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Intel Unveils New Chips to Battle AMD
An anonymous reader writes "Reuters is reporting that chip giant Intel hopes to get back on track in their continued market share war with AMD when they unveil a new line of chips at their upcoming twice-annual developers forum. From the article: 'AMD, once content to mimic Intel's advances, has set the technological pace in recent years with innovations such as putting two processing cores in a single chip -- moves that have helped it gobble market share from its much-larger rival.'"
IBM have Power6 chips running at 6Ghz. IBM have been able to do 4 cores with this new technology.
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sorry for the formatting, here it is easier to understand:
a very simple perfomance check i love to run on every computer i come across:
put windows calculator in scientific mode (yes, mathmatica or maple will do factorials in a fraction of the time, but try to post windows scores for comparison purposes....)
type in 100,000
hit the n! button
ignore the warnings that it will take a long time, don't even bother clicking on "Continue", because the calculation is still going.
and report how long it takes to complete a factorial of 100,000
please report what CPU you have
**64 bit XP is twice as fast
celeron 800MHz (coppermine): 333 seconds (5min 33sec)
1.4GHz celeron (tualatin) does it in 205 seconds
P4 3.2Ghz and Athlon 3200+ both do it in about 80 seconds....
i disable sigs
No - Sun manage to get four multithreading cores in their Niagra, and only run at 72 watts with 32 threads. see this
However, with Intel's cores, I expect be able to have a hot dinner faster than you can say Microwave".
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If they made their processors slower, then they would be "innovating"? What do you want processors to do, really? EVERYBODY wants their CPU to be as fast as possible. If you could choose between two identical CPU's, but one of them were twice as fast as the other, which one would you choose? the slower one? I doubt it. So why are you then whining as if making CPU's faster is a bad thing, since everybody wants faster CPU's? What benefit would there be in having slow processors?
And they have been doing pretty interesting things in order to make it faster. Pentium Pro with the on-die cache, SIMD, multithreading etc. etc.. Hell, even Cell with it's SPU's was designed the way it is, so it would be as fast as possible. But according to you, that's not innovcation?
Uh, they are still comparing performance, the means to get performance has just been changed that's all. They are NOT adding cores for the sake of adding cores. They are adding cores in order to increase performance.
But since you apparently think that making CPU's faster is not the way to go, why not share ith us what YOU want processors to do?
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I'll add this to the list:
Opteron 146 (2.0GHz) : 43 seconds
Now I know what is the purpose of 64bit desktop CPUs - extreme Calculator performance!
You *REALLY* need to look at the Pentium M...
OS: Slackware Linux (Current)
Application: kcalc (Comes with KDE)
These are both ASUS laptops with PC3200 RAM:
2.8 GHz Celeron: 65 secs
1.6 GHz Celeron M: 18.5 secs
This kind of makes you wonder now, doesn't it? It appears that the Pentium M achieves *quite* a bit more per MHz then the Pentium 4.
Aside from that... the calculator in windows is obviously a joke, as the 1.6 GHz machine took 118 secs to do it in WinXP >_<
The main accomplishment of the Wright Brothers was the steering. The principle of flying 'heavier than air' was shown to be sound before (Lilienthal et.al.), and the idea to have the plane being self propelled was obvious. It was just a matter of time until the gas engines were light and powerful enough.
But it was the Wright's analysis of the bird flight, and the realisation that you have to have bendable wings and tail/front flaps to get to a controlled flight, that was really new. Ironically it was this idea that was published in the patent application of 1904, which enabled the other flight pioneers to get their planes ready until 1910.
There is nothing "innovative" about Cell. Cell is basically multiple vector processors on a chip, and is a very predictable path for Sony after the release of the Playstation 2.
/Store memory.
Each Cell SPE is simply a highly-optimized vector unit with 128-bit registers. It is capable of operating on 4 32-bit operands per cycle, just like SSE2/3 and Altivec. The difference is, eache SPE runs an independent task, while the Altivec / SSE units execute vector instructions in parellel with normal operations. However, the SPE is cut down: it has no branch prediction hardware or out-of-order execution, and depends on the main processor filling and emptying its Load
If you think the speed makes it innovative, think again: neither the Cell SPE nor its predecessor, the Emotion Engine, are IEEE754 compliant for 32-bit floating-point operations (for speed reasons). Cell can do IEEE754 compliant 64-bit floating point, but at an estimated speed hit of 10x, which makes it just "competitive" with existing solutions.
Sony / IBM actually inflate the performance numbers of the SPE, advertising it as 25.6 GFLOPS. But this doesn't take into account that the two pipelines of the SPE are NOT flexible, and can only perform certain types of instructions. The "Even" pipe can do arithmetic, and the "Odd" pipe can do Load / Store / Permute / Branch. Thus, the maximum arithmetic thoroughput per SPE is cut in half, to 12.8 billion arithmetic operations per second, and the double-percision performance is just 1.28 billion arithmetic instructions per second.
It's a nice idea for a media processor, but the complexity guarantees it will have a hard time finding buyers, and programmers for the Playstation 3 will be slow on optimization.
I mean, really, can you really break down a game into more than a few concurrent tasks without going crazy trying to synchronize it all? In addition, how many of those independent tasks can be designed with few or no branches? In your average code, branches make up about 20% of instructions. With an 18-cycle penalty per-branch, you'd have to keep those SPE branches under 1% of all instructions to avoid a serious performance loss.
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