AMD Says Barcelona Will Outperform Clovertown

Dysfnctnl85 points out a ZDNet Blog posting in which AMD claims that its upcoming quad-core "Barcelona" chipset should be 40% faster than "Clovertown," Intel's quad-core Xeon 5300 line. AMD says that the introduction of Barcelona marks a shift in their strategy from emphasizing price to performance. The post goes on: "Intel is eager to claw back some of the server market share from AMD, and this is where Clovertown comes in... The Xeon 5300 line will represent excellent value for money since Intel plans on pricing them the same as its dual core Xeon 5100 processors. That could make things tough for AMD."

Comments

Mainly in FP

[Visaris]

This 40% faster than Clovertown claim is only referring to FP code. The integer side is not nearly as clear. Expect AMD to improve integer performance over K8, but I don't expect any miracles. Here is a small list of improvements Barcelona will have over K8:

- Double L1 cache bandwidth
- Double FP units
- Single-cycle SSE (vs K8's 2-cycle)
- More fast-path decoding
- Double TLB size
- Independent DDR channels
- More cache (L3)
- Out-of-Order loads
- New instructions (LZCNT, POPCNT, EXTRQ/INSERTQ, MOVNTSD/MOVNTSS)
- Double prefetch (from 16 bytes -> 32 bytes)
- Larger Branch Target Buffer
- Larger Out of Order (OoO) buffers
- Support for new HT standard (3.0)

Re:Linux on quad-core

[MoralHazard]

Urm, that depends. Linux CAN be a pre-emptible kernel, if you compile it to be. There are various levels of pre-emptibility, depending on your needs. The in-kernel docs say that pre-emption is intended for desktop environments where perceived latency is a big deal, but servers will probably benefit from the lessened overhead of a non-pre-emptible configuration.

But the original poster's comment is still bullshit. Windows Vista is a microkernel? What has THAT guy been smoking? Multi-core designs aren't that different from multi-CPU configurations, and we already know from experience that Linux hasn't been sidelined performance-wise.

Actually, now that I think about it, the likeliest explanation is that the OP was just trolling.

Re:If only I/O speeds could also grow as fast

[Mad Merlin]

Let's consider the example of my laptop hard drive. It's rated at a data transfer rate of 150 MB/s.

A SATA 1 interface can transfer at a maximum of 150 megs/s, but your hard drive can't. On sequential reads, you're unlikely to see much higher than 40 megs/s, even 7200 RPM desktop drives don't exceed 70 megs/s yet.