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AMD's Showcases Quad-Core Barcelona CPU
Gr8Apes writes "AMD has showcased their new 65nm Barcelona quad-core CPU. It is labeled a quad-core Opteron, but according to Infoworld's Tom Yeager, is really a redefinition of x86. Each core has a new vector math processing unit (SSE128), separate integer and floating point schedulers, and new nested paging tables (to vastly improve hardware virtualization). According to AMD, the new vector math units alone should improve floating point operation by 80%. Some analysts are skeptical, waiting for benchmarks. Will AMD dethrone Intel again? Only time will tell."
I don't care if it's 65nm, 45nm or 10mm - that's a completely irrelevant (to me as a user and purchaser) implementation detail. I care about the results - how fast is it for my workloads? How much is it? How much power does it use?
Obsession about process size is sillier than obsession over clock speeds.
If AMD can produce a better performing chip at 65nm, then who the hell cares if Intel - or anyone else - move to a 45nm process?
Advanced users are users too!
"Will AMD dethrone Intel again?" Dear AMD, meet Larrabee. http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37 548
AMD might kick Intel in the nuts a little but definitely not dethrone.
As long as AMD and Intel continue to chase each other in the x86 market, high end chips become low end in the span of six months. Just keep buying 6 months behind the press releases and you get great processors for next to nothing.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
45nm is not inherently "better" than 65nm any more than 3Ghz is inherently "better" than 1Ghz. A smaller process size is a means to an end, it's not an end in itself.
The end is the delicate balance of improving power / watt while increasing overall performance and keeping the price down. If AMD can deliver a chip that does a better job of that at 65nm than an Intel 45nm one, then the AMD chip is not somehow "worse" than the Intel one just because it doesn't use 45nm. That's just stupid.
I'm not saying AMD can do that, but I think that criticizing them for not being ready for 45nm yet is more than premature.
AMD's actually guilty of the same flawed logic though - their criticism of Intel's 4 core processor being just 2 dual cores stuck together is just as pointless. It doesn't matter what matters is how well the processor meets the requirements of its target market.
Advanced users are users too!
read the article, that is an x86 GPU it wouldn't be able to compete with general purpose CPUs
Or did you actually think that those "stupid" CPU designers for all this years, battling with heat dissipation, never thought of, oh.. simply replacing the nand gates with reversible Fredkin and Toffoli gates and 'poof' magically all the heat issues are gone, processors will run @ hundreds of GHz, the wold's electrical power consumption will go down and the geeks won't be able to boast about their huge ass sinks anymore...
Feature size has denominated progress (as measure either by raw performance or performance per watt) over an unbroken 30 year period. Do you recall the very passionate debates about RISC vs CISC? Did a RISC design at one feature size ever beat a CISC design at the next shrink? I think not. Design has never mattered anywhere near as much as feature size. Not that you can't get design wrong. But then you can get a shrink wrong, too, and end up with 1% yields. AMD managed briefly to remain competitive with Intel playing a full shrink behind when Intel did that rather stupid marketron-driven face-plant into the thermal wall (against good advice from their Israel team, who later came to the rescue with Core Duo).
With the recent skyrocket of leakage current, the holy grail of feature size is somewhat tarnished, but it still dominates the performance curve. You completely missed the relationship between feature shrinks and the performance crown. If Intel has better process technology than AMD (almost always) and AMD has a better design (most of the time since the Athlon was first launched) and both companies shrink every 18 months following the Moore projection (that unbroken 30 year historical trend) and AMD always shrinks 9 months behind Intel, then the performance crown will pass back and forth exactly as often as either company announces their next product.
So I agree with you: feature size has no importance to the customer who wants performance for their dollar. Except that you can set your clock by it and project ten years into the future effective performance levels of shrinks we haven't even seen yet. Except for that part, yeah, I'm with you.
Well, until you show us your source code those numbers are as believable as anything else one might randomly type here...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
When you say you've tried "adding other optimizations," are you referring only to other GCC optimization flags? If your program's algorithms have any moderate degree of parallelism and you haven't tried vectorization either by compiler (GCC and ICC can both do this) or by hand, the benchmark you've done is not unlike a race where no one is allowed to shift out of first gear. Can you go into any more specifics about how this program does sequence comparisons?
Also, the disappointing numbers from the G5 may be partially explained by the fact that its integer unit has higher latency than the other desktop processors in that list. The G5 isn't exactly known for blistering integer performance, anyway.
Which part of "2009 timeframe for Larabee" did you fail to understand? Both AMD and Intel have other things in store for 2 years away and it's not clear which is going to be better. AMD seems to be moving in the same direction of many microcores with its ATi GPUs (google for it on inquirer) and currently they have more experienced engineers on it, so it's a bit premature to discount them. Intel on the other hand has to execute a first-gen GPU on par with ATi's. And I'm curious what is nVidia thinking of all this.