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AMD Announces 65-nm Chips, Touts Power Savings
Several readers wrote in about AMD's entry into the 65-nm manufacturing generation. The company introduced four chips to be manufactured with 65-nm process in the first quarter of 2007 to replace existing 90-nm chips in their lineup. AMD is playing up the power economy of its line, claiming that even its existing 90-nm parts consume less than 50% the power of Intel's Core 2 Duo, averaged over a typical day's usage, while the new 65-nm chips will be even stingier with power. Next stop, 45-nm. The article says that AMD has a goal of catching up within 18 months to Intel's lead on the way to 45-nm technology.
Is anyone as tired of software companies eating up the gain in hardware performance as me? And for what? How about someone writing better software, not just new software. I got sick of buying new hardware just to open the same document because the O/S or new Office suite was bloated/full of shit/required way more horsepower just to do the same task. No Vista for me. I'll stay will XP and Linux on my (older) machines. And if MS forces people to go Vista, I'll go Linux or BSD. If I get new hardware, it will be to make these systems faster, not make new software, doing the same job, run the same speed.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I remember a test in the German C't magazine where complete computers were tested. Everything being equal except mainboard and CPU. The CPUs were AMD Athlon 64 vs. Intel Core2Duo
Under load, the Core2Duo machines used a bit less power. Idling, the AMDs were better. The overall differences were pretty small compared to the total power consumption, so I'd disregard them for a typical desktop that does NOT run 24/7.
And BTW, avoid the old Pentium 4/Pentium D. Those are really inferior.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I'd rather see less dense microprocessors. The problem is this big chip manufactuerers make these super dense mammoth race car processors, it concentrates heat in one place, requiring a CPU fan, which is a mechanical component that can and will eventually fail.
I would rather have a motherboard with a CPU design distributed, where the surface area is spread out in such a way, that is completely solid state without any moving parts to fail, namely, a CPU does no require active cooling.
The future lies in completly 100% solid state devices. What does this philosophy mean?
No CPU fans, no power supply fans, no harddrives (flash memory instead), no noise, no moving parts whatsoever. Distributed or minimized waste heat.
Reliability and shock resistance skyrocket. You can seal them inside waterproof and dust proof and fire proof boxes.
I've implemented these kind of computers, at critical network points, and literally you can plug them in FOR YEARS and forget about them.
They are absolutely silent. And absolutely low powered. And totally reliable. All of which, is a very beautiful thing from an engineering standpoint.
These guys need to hire me on their team, because the definition of what is going to be expected in computers is going to radically change in the near future. Computers are going to go under, they are going to become *embedded* in everything with no expectaions of mainenance to them at all and installed in harsh environments. They either work or they fail after decades of use (or preferably, never), and then you replace them.
Reliability is CORE, and to achieve it, computers are going to have to abandon all cruches and become purely solid state devices entombed in indestructible plastic modules.
How often have you ever reformated the drive on your wrist watch? Had to reinstall an OS on your cellphone? Had to replace the CPU fan on your calculator?
I often wondered, why in heck weren't motherboards encased in protective plastic casing, and the same for ISA / PCI / AGP / PCI-x cards. Putting a comptuer together today has become like putting together lego blocks. And each component should be as equally durable and interchangable based on standards as a lego block.
Einstein
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- Intel puts twice as much L2 cache on their dies as does AMD for their high-end parts. The high-end Intel part has 4MB, the high-end AMD part as 1MB per core for a total of 2M.
- Intel's L2 cache architecture is "shared", meaning that when you're running a single-thread benchmark, the single core on which the benchmark is running basically has access to the entire 4M L2. This is significant because it now means the single core running on an Intel part has 4M of L2, whereas on AMD it has 1M. This is quite a nice feature for Intel's single-thread performance.
- In 32-bit x86 mode, there are 8 general purpose registers (GPRs). That means spill/fill code (which certainly hits in L2 and almost certainly hits in L1) is a lot more common. In other words, memory ops are more common. Intel, with the C2D, introduced a more aggressive out-of-order memory architecture, basically allowing any memory op, even with an unresolved address, to execute out of order, fixing it up later if there was a problem. This really, really helps with memory ops, especially the common spill/fill ones going to the (cached) stack. In 64-bit AMD64/EM64T code, there are more GPRs for the compiler to play with, so you have less spill/fill code and fewer memory ops, which mitigates C2D's advantage here. That's one of my theories on why 64-bit performance of AMD vs. Intel chips is closer (the other, which isn't a theory, is Intel's lack of a 64-bit-capable IOMMU, causing the OS to use bounce buffers for DMA to high-addressed main memory).
What I'm basically saying here is, C2D's larger cache and more-aggressive load/store architecture are really helping it for certain apps. My guess is that the libtomcrypt benchmarks are run in 64-bit mode (mitigating Intel advantage point #3 above) and either a) fit entirely in the L1 or L2 of both processors, nullifying any cache advantage C2D has, or b) fit in *neither* of the L2 caches, and is significantly larger than 4MB, which lets AMD's faster on-die memory controller make up for its lack of L2.