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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."
The way AMD and Intel are improving the processor speed is very impressive. I/O speed is going to become an even clearer bottleneck now.
Everyone know that in Barcelona they take Ciesta. So don't plan on using you computer between noon and 1.
We are all just people.
FTFS:
You'd think since the blog got right that Barcelona is the upcoming processor from AMD, and since Clovertown is a processor codename from Intel, that the summary could have gotten it right too. Do submitters not read the articles either anymore?
Now, landing thrusters.. landing thrusters, hmm. Now if I were a landing thruster, which one of these would I be?
Whether AMD or Intel is producing the fastest, cheapest, most scalable, or most efficient processor at the moment is not terribly important.
What *is* important is that when you have two companies in genuine fierce competition at the bleeding edge of technology and performance, they extract an impressive amount of productivity and effort out of their engineering and science assets. Free markets are at their best when all the major players have a healthy fear of the capabilities of their competitors.
While there are arguments both positive and negative toward the (somewhat) recent AMD/Dell alliance, this is one more indication that AMD is making even more progress in the processor market. Once considered the 'most bang for your buck' AMD is truly making a name for itself as a formidable competitor.
One of the fundamental principles of capitalism is that competition spurs growth and progress. This is a case in point.
Unless AMD employs completely incompetent morons as engineers, of course "Barcelona" should be faster than "Clovertown". Clovertown was released half a year to a year before Barcelona.
The tables have turned. Even though Clovertown is not a "true" quad-core (aka a single die), Intel has a huge head start on AMD on quad core. Intel will be pushing forward with their 45nm technology and pushing out yet more models by the time these arrive. With their fabrication prowess, I would expect the gap to increase over AMD. Since dumping NetBurst, Intel is finally battling AMD in an sport they can potentially win.
Yes, there were four cores. Two cores on one chip, two cores on the other. They key words from the titles you quoted are "platform" and "multi-socket", neither of which imply a single die with four cores.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Linux is a preemptible kernel.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
All Intel has to do is turn up the clock the day before Barcelona ships. We already know that the Core 2 Duo chips are very overclockable, and getting another 40% -- or even 50%+ out of them -- shouldn't be a problem.
The performance a chip can get with overclocking is way higher than what the manufacturer can deliver in final products. They have to be highly reliable at their specified clockspeed with (relatively) poor cooling, and while meeting the given voltage and thermal dissipation specifications. I've seen the Core 2 over-clock to 3.5 GHz (with conventional cooling) online, but how many of those are doing it at the stock Vcore while staying within the 65 watt TDP?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I am a sysadmin, and I've seen super weight systems taxed to the extreme. The best servers don't boast of the fastest clock speed; they have the best i/o buses, tight integration of the hardware and software, and more importantly, reliability. These are the reasons I've seen that amd makes a better choice than Intel. Intel is all about FUD, increasing the clock speed at any cost and in general, very unreliable systems that act strangely when pushed under heavy processor load.
I'd choose AMD over intel anyday - i've liked their strategies always, and in the server arena they are the best x86 player. But the bottom line still remains, sun's sparc line,ibm's ppc one and hp's rule. They have been in the business for quite some time, and they frankly know what they are doing.
Intel, its not late to figure out the economics. Corporations choose the best machine for the job while running their servers. No one chooses cheap when they are shopping for their new database server. The big bucks are in the hell expensive servers, and not in the mom-and-pop line. You can sell 1,00,000 cheap servers instead of 1000 expensive ones. But the margins are higher ony in the latter.
Microsoft: "You've got questions. We've got dancing paperclips."
...if there was a similar competition in the OS market. You wouldn't need these mammoth processors in the first place. And having one would be a huge benefit, not a marginal one.
We are talking a SERVER line of cpus here. EE chips are a desktop cpu brand.
For servers TDP is incredibly important, because server rooms are air-conditioned, a room full of higher TDP cpus costs much much much more to run from an electricity point of view.
That's not to say that they won't overstep their vcore or TDP limits to get the upper hand on performance, but that wouldn't win them the performance/watt ratio crown that's the all-important stat for server cpus.
but not on the scale that an officially sanctioned PC-version of OSX would be.
Officially sanctioned on what tiny subset of the PC hardware that's out there? Apple could never support the huge x86 hardware base out there, in fact a big part of their quality success comes from them having tight control on both the hardware and software aspects of their platform.
Also they could never handle the tech support calls. "Why doesn't my ISA-bus hand-scanner from Windows 3.1 work on OSX?"
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)
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
The TDP and voltage levels are part of the platform specification. Intel can't just up them without requiring motherboards, cooling units, etc, to be upgraded to handle the new spec. They might get away with it for some consumer level stuff, but not in the server market where Clovertown and Barcelona are competing. The server folks are going to want some substantial lead-time to rejigger everything to meet higher TDP and Vcore specs.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Expect them to step outside them the moment competitive advantage requires it.
That would be, eight or twelve years ago. Or is it next year? Or do the facts show that they know they'd be creamed, and the PR disaster would make the Pentium floating point bug look like a company picnic?
Personally, I think they know more about what they're doing than some overclockers. Have you ever read an Intel datasheet? Have you ever read ANY IC datasheet?
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.
Jeez, of course AMD's right. Take a look:
Population of Barcelona: 1,673,075
Population of Clovertown: 5601 (or less)
Barcelona is vastly superior.
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 way they spun it, you can also claim they changed their strategy from slow to expensive.
Since you were very snotty to someone who replied to you, I'm posting the snotty version of my reply... There is a point at which one must face facts. Since the AMD 64 line, AMD has had the superior cpu over the P4. The AMD line was, with few exceptions, cheaper, cooler, faster, and as stable, if not more so, and it did that while still including your precious protection against forgetting to put on the heatsink. Is that something you do often? Yes, the Athlon line was neck-and-neck with the P3, the Athlon XP line did well against the P4 until the end, the 64 line, like I mentioned, kicked ass until the Core 2 Duo came out, something you might not be aware of since you're posting problems with AMD cpus that haven't been an issue since 2001. Yes, the Core 2 line is awesome, but for high-end server work (expensive stuff), the AMD architecture still has some very nice things going for it.
I have pulled the heatsink from an old Northwood, and, let me say this - the results are not pretty. The system crashed almost immediately.
The Tom's Hardware tests you are probably referring to were pretty clearly faked.
And, more to the point, when was the last time that you saw heatsink fell of of a system while it was operating? Fan failures, yes. Heatsinks falling off - not unless the box is dropkicked. Was it? Tell that to the people who have been running Opterons successfully for years in server environments. Tell that to Dell, to HP, to Sun, to IBM, or to the millions of people who use AMD CPUs every day. AMD CPUs have had on-die thermal management since Athlon 64, and chipset-implemented thermal management since the Athlon XP.
Intel's thermal montior (TM1) feature has been the source of hell for lots of users. It's a good idea, poorly implemented - instead of halting the system or producing an error, the system continues to run - poorly. It makes it difficult to diagnose whether or not the heatsink is working properly, unless you use tools which detect throttling, which, unfortunately, aren't bult in to Windows.
RAID 0 doesn't automatically ensure that both/all drives will read/write at the same time. In fact, RAID 0 is typically configured NOT to optimize that. Large interleave sizes, the ones typically used, optimize for multiple concurrent requests, not parallel throughput. Furthermore, each drive in a SATA system will get its own SATA link, so unless you are attaching a RAID 0 box via a single SATA link, your entire point is specious. Even if you had 2 RAID 0 drives with a small interleave attached via a single SATA 150 link, you've proven that 150 MB/sec is fast enough.
AMD has yet to release a quad-core CPU. The whole QuadFX(aka 4x4) is a dual-processor system that is designed to be a consumer level platform that supports two processors. The reason for QuadFX to be worth looking at as a platform is that you will be able to swap out the two dual-core processors for two quad-core processors starting around the middle of 2007.
AMD is really starting to hype their true next generation core design, not just quad-core. This is something that many people seem to be closing their eyes to about this particular issue. The current AMD processors are based on the AMD K8 design(regardless of fab process, amounts of cache, or tweaks to the design). The new stuff being released this summer is based on what is called the K8L design. Yes, it's still the same basic design as the current K8, but you could say that Intel's Core designs are based on the Pentium-M, which was based on the Pentium 3, which was based on the Pentium 2, which was based on the Pentium Pro. Obviously there will be similarities here to previous processors, but the progress between the last implementation from either company should not be ignored.
The Pentium-M was a great laptop processor, but if you tried to make it compete without a LOT of changes with the desktop processors from AMD or Intel at the time, it would NOT have done well on the desktop except in the low power usage area. So, how many changes did Intel make to turn it into the Core line of processors?
The Athlon 64 is a great processor, but AMD knows that it doesn't compete well against the Core line of chips. So, they are doing to it what Intel did to the Pentium-M, do a HUGE overhaul of the design. Intel hyped their Core chips well before release, even while the Pentium 4 was being beaten left and right by the Athlon 64, so now the shoe is on the other foot. If the new K8L design is as good as the hype indicates, then not only will the AMD quad-core beat Intel's quad-core by a good amount, but dual-core processors based on the same design should also compete very well, though probably not quite as well as the quad-core.
The reason why quad-core might compete better is based on the connections between the CPU and memory. Remember that Intel is still using the CPU-chipset-memory design while AMD connects the CPU to the memory directly. As a result, when you go from dual-core to quad-core on a native design, Intel processors will still need to go through the chipset to get to the memory. Unless the bus speed is really increased to provide that extra bandwidth, the Intel processors will end up starved for memory. In fact, that's a part of why you see so much cache on Intel processors currently, to compensate for the old design that Intel is still married to.
Intel still hasn't released a native quad-core implementation btw, they need to go through the system bus to connect each pair of cores on their "quad-core" processors.