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AMD Says Power Efficiency Still Key

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the teaser-trailers dept.

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.'"

8 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Almost obligatory statement... by Pharmboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    But will it run Vista? (j/k)

    Is Vista going to support 4 cores, or like XP Pro and 2k, limit it to 2 "cpus" so they can charge more for the server version?

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    1. Re:Almost obligatory statement... by Pharmboy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If I remember right, there was some controversy with Oracle considering a dual core as two cpus, and they backed off. If we see 4 or more cores, the need for multiple sockets goes down, and I just wonder if MS will reconsider this licensing to prevent "lost revenue".

      --
      Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
    2. Re:Almost obligatory statement... by cecil_turtle · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I agree that Microsoft (or likely anybody else) won't change to a per-core pricing model, but for different reasons. The point of per-CPU pricing is just to determine the market - the type of user/computer:

      1 CPU = most laptops and desktops, low end servers
      2 CPU = high-end workstations, average servers
      4 CPU = high-end servers

      As the number of cores ramp up, as you said to 4/8/16, then charging per core would be like charging per GHz or per L2 cache size - it doesn't make sense, adding cores will just be another way that new chips get faster than old ones. But the number of actual CPUs/sockets to define a specific market will likely stay the same for some time. Other than the Oracle debacle that grandparent poster mentioned, all per-core pricing theories have just been speculation. I can't imagine any company successfully pulling that off.

    3. Re:Almost obligatory statement... by eggoeater · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Is that because you need more Server 2k3 boxes to get the job done?
      Outside of the obvious joke, this is actually true, but probably not for the reasons you think.

      Real reason: politics. One of the problems with server apps is that they tend to be "critical" to normal operations of the business.
      This means if you tell someone, "Hey, your server is under-utilized so were going to put this other groups app on there...",
      the shit is definitely going to start flying. (ex. "that server came out of my budget..." etc.)

      Ask anyone where I work (or probably where anyone works) and they would say that it would be the end of the world to have to share a server.
      In truth, it's all too easy for someone to mess up and bring a server to it's knees.
      The group I work in, we have probably 80 servers (yes, they all run MS), and none of them can be shared because it violates the SLA we have with Cisco. They won't support the app if anything else is running on the server.
      (Cant say I entirely blame them.)

      They solution to this problem is virtualization; I've been telling my co-workers that the future of servers is virtualization.
      Until we can really make it work politically, we'll be running racks and racks of servers that mostly run 90+ percent idle.

      --
      $7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
    4. Re:Almost obligatory statement... by hackstraw · · Score: 3, Interesting

      "processor power factor" (think Oracle)

      I'm not sure if Oracle still does this, but they used to have almost voodoo math to figure out how much you owe oracle. It was something like X/CPU, then that value multiplied by a scale for the type of CPU (at the time RISC vs CISC), and then another multiplier by the amount of RAM on the box.

      When I heard that, I always suggested under specing the box and then silently upgrading it after the Oracle guys left. I believe the technical term is sliding scale which means the more you can afford, the more you will pay.

  2. I don't get the point of this by Sloppy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm sceptical that this technique will be very useful. (Of course, AMD is full of smart people and I'm just some net.moron.) I don't think it will be very common for the load on a 4-core processor to be somewhere the middle like 1.5. It's either going to be mostly idle (load close to 0) so you might as well power down the whole chip, or going full blast with the load as high as I think will give me the most throughput. For example, when compiling (and that's when I wish I had more cores) I'm gonna "make -j n" and my load is going to be about n, and that number is going to be chosen to be one more than the number of cores I have (or something like that). If I have a 4-core machine, do you think I'm going to make -j 2? No way.

    I can't think of many situations where I would have one core running at 100% and another at 50% and the others idle, for any significant length of time. I can imagine a desktop user clicking on something and maybe for a few milliseconds that load is somewhere around that, but then the work gets done and you're idling again. Or the user asked it to do something "hard" so all cores are near 100% (except maybe while waiting for I/O) for a "long" time.

    Am I wrong? What kinds of things does your computer work on, which are a little parallelizable but not very much?

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    1. Re:I don't get the point of this by Mr.+Hankey · · Score: 3, Interesting

      One of my computers (well, 'one' and 'my' being relative terms in this case) is a 40 node cluster, completely SMP with some of the newer nodes being dual core as well. Often they're fully utilized or more, imagine a 5.00+ loadavg per node weeks on end. When a job is winding down though, the remainder of the jobs will probably finish up one at a time and you often have a few CPUs with just one job running for a few days. It's good for the electric bill to allow the CPU cores to power down.

      Another of my computers is basically used to play games. Most games don't seem to do much on the SMP side, so I doubt it would much matter how many cores there were as far as the game's concerned. They do tend to peak one CPU pretty much all the time though, while another core might end up servicing OS calls. Again, it couldn't hurt to let those sleeping processors/cores power down while they're not doing much of anything.

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  3. Re:Efficiency, yes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm afraid that I'm being a thermodynamics fascist, but you really can't efficiently heat your apartment with CPUs. Typically, for every BTU of heat delivered to you by electrical power, 2 more BTUs go up the power station smokestack or are lost in transmission. In contrast, for every BTU delivered from a modern gas furnace, less than 0.1 BTU goes up the chimney.