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Quad Core Battle, Intel Yorkfield vs AMD Altair
Joe writes "Yorkfield Extreme Edition based on the 45nm Penry core architecture will meet
heads-on with AMD Altair based on the 65nm K8L core in Q3 2007 as
reported by VR-Zone. Due to its
advanced 45nm process technology, Yorkfield XE is able to pack a total of 12MB
L2 cache (2 x 6MB L2) and still achieving a much smaller die size and higher
clock speed of 3.43-3.73Ghz. Yorkfield will feature Penryn
New Instructions (PNI) or more officially known as SSE4 with 50 more new
instructions. Yorkfield XE will pair up nicely with the
Bearlake-X chipset supporting DDR3
1333, PCI Express 2.0 and ICH9x coming in the Q3 '07 timeframe as well."
Well, I recently (In June?) just bought a new computer after having my previous one for 7 years. If my current one lasts as long as my last one, I could very well be upgrading to the 80 core CPUs that Intel said would be ready in 5 years. If you buy something good with lots of room for expansion, and take good care of your computer, you shouldn't have to replace it every 2 years.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Ok, so we have all this neat info about the Intel chip; what about the AMD processor (it gets a whole sentence and a half)? If this is supposed to be a "battle", it seems that most of the comparison has already been done in favor of Intel before the event even takes place, if this article is any reference. :P
I don't reply to Anonymous posts; if you have something to say to me, identify yourself or I won't reply.
Intel is going to need that HUGE cache because of it's limited FSB. It will be interesting to see how they do side by side.
The AMD with it's Hyper-transport could have an advantage over the Intel chip but right now it is all pie in the sky.
I wish that AMD had access to the Intel Fab tech. Just how fast and low power would their chips be if they where 65nm right now like Intel's?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I've often wondered, what are these new instruction Intel keep thinking up? Are they some sort of fancy array processing, new addressing modes? I'm curious. Whatever happened to RISC?
Its not exactly 3 MB a core, and you cannot count it in the same method as 12MB for one core either. The reason for this is that future multicore processors will share L2 cache. As the number of cores per cpu increases, it is less likely that a single thread will resume on the same core it was once running on. As a result, instead of refetching data from memory, a shared L2 cache allows recently fetched memory to stay in the cache and be accessed by multiple cpus. The problem that arises is that multiple threads can be using this cache simultaneously and cause thrashing of the data. One way to solve this is to increase the cache size enough that memory thrashing is kept to a minimum. As a result, the Cache hit ratio on a single core cpu with 12MB would be very high, and the quad core version not quite as high, although, probably still substantially higher than giving each core only a 3MB l2 cache.
Antec + Tyan = bad
In my higher than average experience, Antec = bad. I couldn't believe how many of their P/S's (all above 400w) I've had to send back compared to the cheap-oh CoolerMaster 350w supplies we were using. Got to a point where Antec tech support number was being answered by a voicemail (we couldn't get a live person any longer).
When it got to a point where it was taking them *weeks* to get back to me (if they ever did at all), I got fed up and sent an email to the complaint email link they have on their support page (Yes! A complaint link! Only company I've ever seen that *needed* one due to such poor tech support!). In the email I stated my position, that I had a handfull of supplies I was going to dumpster because I could not get anyone to respond to me, and that I'd be reccomending *against* anyone using anything Antec again.
Long story short, someone actually replied fairly quickly, dragged me along for a couple weeks telling me how he'd get me help (he had me fill out an RMA form several times because he claimed there were errors, then refused to take the supplies back because I didn't have a recepit available (it got filed away and sent to storage) even though they were *well* within the manufacturer 3 year from the date of manufactuer instead of date of sale!)..
I've since switched to Enermax or Thermaltake and never looked back. Never had anywhere NEAR the quantity of P/S's to send back and of the FEW I have, it was taken care of right away.
In short, Antec can kiss my ass.
bork bork bork!
I agree 100%. People praise Antec, but from my experience they consistantly fall short of their performance and have a comparable lifespan to, say, a $20 no-name PSU.