Slashdot Mirror
AMD Says Power Efficiency Still Key
Larsonist writes to tell us that even though AMD's new architecture wont be released until mid-2007 they are still letting people in on what some of the new features will be. From the article: "While clock speeds have not been revealed, each of the four cores will integrate 64 KB L1 Cache and 512 KB L2 cache. The native quad-core architecture will also include a 2 MB shared L3 cache, which may increase in capacity over time. The processor will have a total of four Hypertransport links - up from three today - that provide a total bandwidth to outside devices of 5.2 GB/s. AMD is also thinking about integrating support for FB-DIMMs 'when appropriate.'"
... run OS/2?
Joking aside, lately I've been pondering AMD's next move in the everlasting Intel vs. AMD chess game.
I'm here for hoping they can pull ahead again and force Intel to do the same.
Always Remember: competition is good!
Really interesting question. For my entire career (since 1983), hardware has outrun software, and OS software in particular. This is a new and interesting twist. Extracting money from users based on "number of processors" or "processor power factor" (think Oracle) may become more difficult in a world of muti-core, multi-die, and multiple architecture.
For example, which is worth more (none of these CPUs exist) - a quad CORE 2 or a eight core Athlon XP?
I'd expect the eight-way to be better at some tasks that are easy to multi-thread, perhaps database servers. I'd expect the quad CORE 2 to be better at most general tasks, mostly because current OS and compilers aren't designed for multiple cores.
is to reduce the distance between their transistors from 90nm to 65. Intel started shipping their 65nm chips nearly a year ago (OCT 2005), while AMD has yet to ship any. AMD isn't expected to be fully converted to the 65nm process until mid-2007, and by then Intel is expected to start shipping their 45nm chips. AMD is playing catch-up these days and it's hurting them bad.
I didn't know AMD could do that, as I run Windows and under Windows the two cores speed up and slow down (several steps from 1GHz to 2.2GHz) at the same time.
But you don't want to do it anyway. If you look at the voltages to the cores, as the cores slow down, the voltage goes down too. This reduces power used and also reduces leakage (which is large at 90nm and can be large at 65nm). The problem is that both cores receive the same voltage, so you can't reduce the voltage to the one core that is slowing down unless the other one slows down too.
So you'd rather run two cores at 1.7GHz and 1.2V instead of one core at 2.4GHz and 1.4V and one core at 1GHz and 1.4V. The power usage goes down with the square of the voltage, so the former case is saving 25% more power than the latter.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Poster of the post you originally replied to here... Read my post more carefully. I didn't say that their OS wasn't 'respectable', but that their POSITION wasn't respectable. Their overall position in the server market is abysmal, something like 10-15%. And, like a first year marketing student can tell you (And will. Oh god, they won't ever stop babbling...) mind share matters. When IT managers think "Server", they generally think UNIX, and will look at UNIX solutions first, (Unless it's something like an Active Directory or Exchange server). The market position they have simply isn't respectable. If it were, when the CTO was thinking "server", it wouldn't be "What type of UNIX" it would be at LEAST "Should I go with UNIX or Windows". This doesn't mean that there are no companies, or even industries, where that's not the case, but overall that's how the market stands.
"and none of them can be shared because it violates the SLA we have with Cisco."
But _that_ is not politics, it's because Cisco understands windows servers and how badly they handle more than one task.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.