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The Gigahertz Race is Back On
An anonymous reader writes "When CPU manufacturers ran up against the power wall in their designs, they announced that 'the Gigahertz race is over; future products will run at slower clock speeds and gain performance through the use of multiple cores and other techniques that won't improve single-threaded application performance.' Well, it seems that the gigahertz race is back on — a CNET story talks about how AMD has boosted the speed of their new Opterons to 3GHz. Of course, the new chips also consume better than 20% more power than their last batch. 'The 2222 SE, for dual-processor systems, costs $873 in quantities of 1,000, according to the Web site, and the 8222 SE, for systems with four or eight processors costs $2,149 for quantities of 1,000. For comparison, the 2.8GHz 2220 SE and 8220 SE cost $698 and $1,514 in that quantity. AMD spokesman Phil Hughes confirmed that the company has begun shipping the new chips. The company will officially launch the products Monday, he said.'"
This reminds me of the sign at the local breakfast shop (paraphrased): "Use coffee: do stupid things faster".
Yeah, this is cool, no doubt. How many users actually *use* how much power they already have? I use a lot, but it's mostly dependent on the graphics card.
No sane person actually believed that the gigahurtz race was over. But who cares about it anyway, just more power for a little faster operation.
I muchly prefer a fanless processor.
I was kind of hoping the gigahertz race would end so Microsoft would have to stop making each version of Windows slower than the last.
So take a top end 3GHz model and underclo it and reduce its voltage. You still get good performance, with lower power consumption.
^_^
You'd be surprised how much more _can_ be made with a CPU.
E.g., sure, we like to use the stereotypical old mom as an example of someone who only sends emails to the kids and old friends. Unfortunately it's false. It was true in the 90's, but now digital cameras are everywhere and image manipulation software is very affordable. And so are the computers which can do it. You'd be suprised the kind of heavy-duty image processing mom does on hundreds of pictures of squirrels and geese and whatever was in the park on that day.
And _video_ processing isn't too far out of reach either. It's a logical next step too: if you're taking pictures, why not short movies? Picture doing the same image processing on some thousands of frames in a movie instead of one still pictures.
E.g., software development. Try building a large project on an old 800 MHz slot-A Athlon, with all optimizations on, and then tell me I don't need a faster CPU. Plus, nowadays IDEs aren't just dumb editors with a "compile" option in the menus any more. They compile and cross-reference classes all the time as you type.
E.g., games, since you mention the graphics card. Yeah, ok, at the moment most games are just a glorified graphics engine, and mostly just use the CPU to pump the triangles to the graphics card. Well that's a pretty poor model, and the novelty of graphics alone is wearing off fast.
How about physics? They're just coming into fashion, and fast. Yeah, we make do at the moment with piss-poor approximations, like Oblivion's bump-into-a-table-and-watch-plates-fly-off-superso nic engine. There's no reason we couldn't do better.
How about AI? Already in X2 and X3 (the space sim games) it doesn't only simulate the enemies around you, but also what happens in the sectors where your automated trade or patrol ships are. I want to see that in more games.
Or how about giving good AI to city/empire building games? Tropico already simulated up to 1000 little people in your city, going around their daily lives, making friends, satisfying their needs, etc. Not just doing a dumb loop, like in Pharaoh or Caesar 3, but genuinely trying to solve the problem of satisfying their biggest need at the moment: e.g., if they're hungry, they go buy food (trekking across the whole island if needed), if they're sick, they go to a doctor, etc. I'd like to see more of that, and more complex at that.
Or let's have that in RPGs, for that matter. Oblivion for example made a big fuss about how smart and realistic their AI is... and it wasn't. But the hype it generated does show that people care about that kind of thing. So how about having games with _big_ cities, not just 4-5 houses, but cities with 1000-2000 inhabitants, which are actually smart. Let's have not just a "fame" and "infamy" rating, let's have people who actually have a graph of aquaintances and friends, and actually gradually spread the rumours. (I.e., you're not just the guy with 2 points infamy, but it's a question of which of your bad deeds did this particular NPC hear about.) Let's not have omniscient guards that teleport, but actually have witnesses calculate a path and run to inform the guards, and lead them to the crime. Etc.
Or how about procedurally generated content? The idea of creating whole cities, quests and whatnot procedurally isn't a new one, but unfortunately it tends to create boring repetition at the moment. (See Daggerfall or Morrowind.) How about an AI complex enough to generate reasonably interesting stuff. E.g., not just recombine blocks, but come up with a genuinely original fortress from the ground up, based on some constraints. E.g., how about generating whole story arcs? It's not impossible, it's just very hard.
And if you need to ask "why?", let's just say: non-linear stories. Currently if you want, for example, to play a light side and a dark side, someone has to code two different arcs, although most players will only see one or the other. If you add more points and ways you can branch the story (e.g.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
AMD64 has 16 registers
AMD seems to be working on putting a GPU in ther CPU
Memory used to be managed by a dedicated chip -- the northbridge. But AMD moved it into the CPU because it was faster that way.
The APIC? But anyway, the slow part of interrupt handling is done in the OS kernel, which runs on the CPU. So I'm not sure how much a chip would help there.
I'm not an expert, but my guess is that because computers are all-purpose devices. Specialized hardware can accelerate something like encryption or audio mixing, but there doesn't seem to be all that much of that sort of thing that's still worth accelerating. Most people don't need to encrypt the huge amounts of data that would make a dedicated accelerator make much of a difference. Notice also how now almost nobody buys sound cards anymore, because you can just mix sound in hardware.
Low thermal dissipation is a much more prevalent theme for AMD than it is for Intel, especially outside of the notebook sector. Yes, Intel has some 1.06 and 1.20 GHz Core 2 Duo ULVs for laptops and those have a 10-watt or so thermal dissipation while AMD's lowest-TDP mobile chips rate in at 25 watts (Turion 64 MT/Sempron.) Intel also has the single-core Core Solo series at 1.06-1.33 GHz that dissipates 5.5 watts. However, those chips are very rarely seen in any notebooks larger than a 12" screen size. You'd be much more likely to see a 31-watt Core Duo or 34-watt Core 2 Duo sitting in an average laptop than a 10-watt C2D ULV. AMD's Turion X2s have similar TDPs, ranging from 31 to 35 watts. All of the processors have similar frequency and voltage scaling mechanisms and battery life is roughly similar.
For desktops, most of Intel's newer Core 2 Duo processors have an average thermal dissipation of 65 watts. The fastest Core 2 Duo, the 2.93 GHz X6800, has a 75-watt average TDP. The quad-core chips range from 105 watts for the 2.40 GHz Q6600 to the 130-watt QX6700. These chips have a very reduced version of the SpeedStep that Intel puts in its laptop chips. The lowest core speed of the 800 MHz FSB chips is 1.20 GHz and 1.6 GHz for the 1066 MHz FSB chips. AMD's current new desktop processors start from a maximum thermal dissipation of 35 watts for the single-core Sempron EE and go up to 45 watts for the Athlon 64 single-cores (Lima), 65 watts for the Athlon 64 X2 models from the 3600+ to the 5200+, 89 watts for the 5400+ and 5600+, and 125 watts for the X2 6000+ and FX-70 series. The AMD chips all clock down to 1 GHz at idle. AMD also rates the chips on their absolute maximum thermal dissipation rather than an average thermal dissipation like Intel does, so a 65 watt AMD chip will usually end up drawing less power than an Intel 65-watt chip. The AMD chips also draw significantly less power at idle due to their lower clock speed.
The scenario is much the same for servers. AMD has their High Efficieny line of dual-core chips that draw 68 watts, the normal line that draws 95 watts, and the SE line that draws 125 watts. Intel has a few low-voltage Xeons, but those are very uncommon and pretty much limited to blade server vendors. AMD sells its Opteron HEs through a wide range of vendors.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
This is a desperation move. AMD is back on their heels and their recovery plan is too far off in the future. In hopes of saving face they are pulling the only lever they have, clock speed.
Not so. AMD never said that they wouldn't increase clock speed on their CPUs. In fact, that's pretty much standard practice to get higher performance. So now their manufacturing process is capable of producing 3 GHz CPUs in sufficient volumes to sell, and they're selling them. As the process is refined there may be faster CPUs.
Intel does the same thing. As the manufacturing process is refined they are able to produce more and more CPUs at higher clock speeds. It's not a sign of anything other than business as usual.
Funny, Intel was chumped by AMD just like this a couple of years ago, why did AMD let themselves get tagged back? Intel woke up in a major way. Can AMD? Doesn't look too good...
AMD has more than just clock speed coming, Barcelona (aka K10) is supposed to be shipping in the next month or two. That's generally expected to take back the performance crown from Intel, and even if it doesn't it should at least eliminate the performance gap. For purposes of historical reference, AMD pretty much bitchslapped Intel when they released the Athlon 64. It took Intel 4 years to finally catch up to AMD and pass them with the Core 2 architecture, and even today the Opterons are still higher performers on 4 and 8 processor systems. If Barcelona turns out to be as fast as or faster than Core 2 (and by all rights, it should be) then it will have taken them only 1 year to catch up. Conroe was "previewed" at Spring IDF in 2006, but didn't ship until several months later.
As for why it's taken AMD a year to catch up, it takes quite a long time to design, layout, test, and debug a new CPU. Once all that is done the manufacturing process has to be designed and tested too. Then the CPUs have to actually be produced, and once production has started it takes almost 2 months to go from silicon wafers to functioning CPUs. However, something to keep in mind is that Intel is a much, much larger company than AMD and that Intel runs severals CPU design teams concurrently, while AMD doesn't. Intel has several times the number of designers, engineers, and fabs that AMD does. Because of their resources, Intel is able to completely scrap a CPU project and switch to something else if they need to. AMD can't, or at least not without seriously hurting the company. The fact that AMD is even competitive with Intel says quite a lot about the talent they have in-house.
The thing that I find most interesting was that last year when Intel was on the ropes, they offered the IDF preview to select web sites in order to generate buzz and FUD regarding Intel vs. AMD. And it worked too, because for 3 months everybody was talking about how Intel was king again even though they still hadn't shipped any Conroe CPUs. This year they're doing the same thing with their new Penryn architecture, and they don't appear to be on the ropes. Why would you tip your hand early if you don't have to? That indicates to me that Intel is concerned about something, and I suspect that something is Barcelona.
Even more interesting is that none of the previews compare Conroe with Penryn at the same clock speed. Most of the benchmarks that I have seen show a roughly 20% performance advantage for Penryn. But the Penryn CPU was running at about 14% higher clock speed, a 25% higher FSB, and with 50% more L2 cache onboard. Now who's playing the Gigahertz Game? I suspect that if you overclocked a Conroe and it's FSB to reach the same speeds, you probably would see little to no difference with Penryn. Which means that Intel's response to the all-new Barcelona is going to be...you guessed it...run up the clock speed and slap on some cache, because we're in for a bumpy ride.
Penryn is mostly just a die shrink. All things equal (clock, FSB, cache) it should not be any faster or slower than a Conroe.
Moving to 45nm gives you extra headroom for clock speed, extra transistor budget, etc. So they might just be demoing systems with similar power envelopes/cost/whatever.
Throw some SSE4 enabled apps in the mix and the Penryn would outperform an equalized Conroe by a fair margin.