Inside AMD's Phenom Architecture

An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek has uncovered some documentation which provides some details amid today's hype for AMD's announcement of its upcoming Phenom quad-core (previously code-named Agena). AMD's 10h architecture will be used in both the desktop Phenom and the Barcelona (Opteron) quads. The architecture supports wider floating-point units, can fully retire three long instructions per cycle, and has virtual machine optimizations. While the design is solid, Intel will still be first to market with 45nm quads (the first AMD's will be 65nm). Do you think this architecture will help AMD regain the lead in its multicore battle with Intel?"

Comments

Sorry what?

[tomstdenis]

I had a 2P dual-core opteron 2.6GHz box as my workstation for several months. To be honest I couldn't really find a legitimate use for it. And I was running gentoo and doing a lot of my own OSS development [re: builds].

While I think quad-cores are important for the server rooms, I just don't see the business case for personal use. It'll just be more wasted energy. Now if you could fully shut off cores [not just gate off] when it's idle, then yeah, hey bring it on. But so long as they sit there wasting 20W per core or whatever at idle, it's just wasted power.

To get an idea of it, imagine turning on a CF lamp [in addition to the lighting you already have] and leave it on 24/7. Doesn't that seem just silly? Well that's what an idling core will look like. It's in addition to the existing processing power and just sits there wasting Watts.

Tom

Re:Sorry what?

[LurkerXXX]

Certain apps get a big boost from quad cores, lots of others don't. Some of those apps aren't for servers. For example, if you happen to do a ton of video editing, a quad core might be a good choice. I'll agree with you for most of us it's silly on the desktop right now. That won't necessarily be true in a few years when they write a lot more apps that need and take advantage of multithreading.

Re:Sorry what?

[LurkerXXX]

That being said, it's a lot easier to get a 10 GHz computer with 4x2.5GHz CPUs, than it is to make a single 10 GHz CPU.

That's the entire answer right there.

Re:Sorry what?

[somersault]

Also your computer tends to be doing quite a lot in the background (especially with lots of 3rd party crapware/virus scanners/firewalls loaded onto it) rather than just running whatever app you currently want to be using. It's nice to be able to experience the full potential of one core in the app that you do want to use while leaving another core to handle background services, though I don't know if Windows automatically organises processor time to do that kind of thing, and I've never tried splitting my tasks over my 2 cores manually. I guess my system is nippier than my old single core one, though the thing is that you tend not to notice stuff that *isn't* there (ever got a shiny new graphics card and just been like "oh.. everything's the same but without the slowdowns!" .. can be kinda anticlimactic!)

Why the fuss over 45nm?

[Smidge204]

Ultimately, it's performance that makes a successful product, not gigahertz or nanometers.

Sure, the 45nm process has great potential for better performance and higher efficiency, just like faster clock speeds had great potential - until AMD made a better architecture and achieved better performance at a lower clock speed than Intel's offerings at the time.

Let's wait and see how it really performs before passing judgement.
=Smidge=

less power

[twistedcubic]

Actually, I just got a 65W Athlon X2 4600+ from Newegg which uses less power than my current 6 year old Athlon XP 1800+. The motherboard (ECS w/ ATI 690G) I ordered supposedly is also energy efficient. I guess I could save $60 by getting a single core, but almost all single core Athlons are rated at more than 65W. Why buy a single core when it costs more long term and is slower when multi-tasking?