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AMD's Showcases Quad-Core Barcelona CPU

Posted by Zonk on from the four-times-the-fun dept.

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."

3 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. AMD64 is very fast by GreatDrok · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In my own benchmarks (generic C integer and floating point scientific code) I have found that the Core Duo and Core 2 Duo aren't all that quick compared with an AMD64. Clock for clock the AMD64 Opterons we have are about 50% quicker than an equivalent Core 2 Duo for integer work. I know this doesn't agree with all the usual magazine benchmarks but they are heavily biased towards using SSE instructions where possible and it is SSE where the Core 2 Duo has been a real improvement over previous Intel designs and also bests the AMD chips. Hopefully, AMD has recognised this and the new SSE implementation will bring them back on par with Intel for these benchmarks but even today an AMD64 processor is a beast and more than a match for anything Intel produces.

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    "I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
  2. Re:Intel's Responds by pchan- · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Lets make a Octa-core processor!"

    Oh, here's one. Though it's been out since before Intel had quad-core chips.

  3. Re:Well.... by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ---That sounds very interesting. Would you mind providing a link to the literature that discusses that ? I have some trouble figuring out the thermodynamics of this. Perpetum mobile and such, you know....

    Of course. It, at first, sounds too good, but here you go.

    Rolf Landauer showed in 1961 that reversible logic operations could be performed by neither using energy or taking heat out. The same could not be said for irreversible logic operations.

    "Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process" IBM Journal of Research Development 17 (1973): 525-32, IBM PDF

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    In 1973, Charles Bennett proved that any computation could be derived from purely reversible computing.

    Charles H. Bennett "Logical Reversibility of Computation" IBM PDF

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    Later on, Fredkin and Toffoli presented a review of the ideas of reversible computing. The essential idea is that you can save all intermediary states between an algorithm to get the answer, and then reverse the process so that no energy is used, and generated no heat. Fredkin also indicates that if we switched from irreversible to reversible computing, we would expect to lose no more than 1% efficiency.

    International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21 (1982):219-53 PDF

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    And as an unsubstantiated claim, I remember hearing that due to heat/radiation sources, that volatile memory gains errors of 1 bit per billion with a time from 1 minute to 1 day ( I forget the exact time). To correct this would only require the entropy of deleting that incorrect bit. In other words, 10^8 or so magnitude heat shrinkage. But trust the stuff above.

    (Many of these ideas were taken from "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil from page 130)

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