Slashdot Mirror
AMD Quad-Core Opteron (Barcelona) Tech Report
crazyeyes writes "AMD has been very tardy with Barcelona. Countless AMD fans have eagerly awaited a new processor. As the day draws closer, TechARP takes a look at the upcoming quad-core AMD Opteron. Is there more to it than just its four processing cores? Will it be the Intel-killer that AMD promised long ago? From the article: 'AMD is in the same boat as ATI. Delays after delays of their long-awaited Barcelona core not only ensured the dominance of their rival, Intel, in the desktop processor market, it also ensured that Intel would be the only choice for those who want a quad-core processor. Although that wait will end in August, 2007 when the Barcelona is finally launched, it remains to be seen if AMD's new processor will be able to inflict serious damage to Intel's dominance.'"
I recall Intel was up in a fuss when AMD released the 64 bit chips. The market 'ooh'd and 'aahd' in delight of the new architecture, supposing that it would herald in a new era of computing in a similar way that the jump from 16 to 32 did.
The reality of the situation became that the great majority of Athlon64 users were running 32 bit apps, and continue to do so.
There has yet to be a dire 'need' for 64 bit processing, much to the similar way that there isn't a dire need for more than 4 GB of ram in a desktop machine.
At work, I'm the Sysadmin for a dedicated hosting company (Linux, mostly Gentoo), and even in that market I don't know of any of my users running 64bit. any performance advantages are outweighed by incompatibilities and plain old PITA to get things working.
That said, the delay in developing these quad core procs shouldn't put that big a dent in the pocket / market share of AMD simply because it's a niche market that has yet to be widely adopted.
This is not the greatest
Intel basicly took a big hammer to any AMD claims of "more affordable quad-core" with their cut today from $530 to $266 for the cheapest quad core, which I doubt AMD can do much better than. I also don't expect them to top the QX6850 for performance right off the bat, since they clearly fail to do so in dual core. AMD is bleeding a lot of money right now and Intel knows to push when it hurts. Right now AMD is staying competitive but with the massive cuts to margins it can't be good for neither profits nor R&D. Intel is not going off on a huge strategic blunder like the PIV or Itanium again, this time they're on the ball and overclocking results suggest they have a lot of headroom.
The latest batch of ATI cards have failed to compete with the 8800GTX and instead compete against lower clocked cards, presumably again with cut margins. Right now AMD and ATI to me look like two second place companies, and if they try to integrate closer they'll drag each other down. I'm certainly not inclined to buy those two as a package...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Guess what? The market doesn't give a shit, they just want multiples of 4 in one socket, period. Even AMD admits it was a mistake not to go MCM; Intel got the drop on them, and has deepened their lead quite substantially, leaving AMD sitting on their hands with no competitor for far, far too long (and their upcoming competition will quite frankly devastate them in the short run, however in the long run...).
Intel had the option to rest on its laurels; they don't like to work any harder than necessary to remain on top, and the Core marchitecture gave them a huge.. well I'll say it.. "Leap Ahead" of the competition. Unfortunately, Intel's more of a bunny; hop a few times then get tired and sit around, whereas AMD is more of the turtle (slow to market, but rather constant). Well all know who wins the race.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
"True" QC, "fake" QC, what does it really matter? The only things that really matter in the end are performance and price (and possibly power dissipation). From the standpoint of a consumer, the internal technology has no importance at all.
Now, if you said that "true" quad core was going to make the chips be twice as fast as Intel's, at half the price, then that would be interesting. Of course, you could say that the chips would twice as fast at half the price, and that would be just as interesting - the technology has nothing to do with it.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Geeks love to work themselves in to a lather over technical difference but to the end user, quad core is just 4 processors in a single socket, doesn't matter how it is delivered. Now if the Intel solutions performs poorly because of the 2x2 design then it could be a problem. However, thus far, it doesn't seem to. On the kind of apps that can use the power (like a 3D renderer for example) they just shine.
In the end it doesn't matter how it is delivered, it matters who can deliver the good performance per $$$. Intel's quad core chips go a long way to doing that in the markets that can use them. The reason is it gets expensive to add physical processors to a board. A single socket board might be $100, but the same thing in a dual socket variety can be $400-600 and you don't even want to see the prices on quad sockets. Thus being able to drop 4 cores in to a standard desktop board, even if they aren't a monolithic 4 core package, is a good deal for many.
Technical arguments and contrived benchmarks mean nothing. The only things that matters is how fast it runs the things you actually, really do, and how much it costs.
It's not all about multi-threaded programs - being able to run multiple single threaded programs concurrently is also important.
Actually it makes a lot more difference than you'd think. This is most evident in caches. Intel's quadcore has two shared L2 caches (one per two cores). AMD has a full L2 cache per core AND a shared 2mb L3 cache. Intel doesn't have an L3 cache on any of their stuff. Besides that, HTT is a lot faster than Intel's dated FSB. More bandwidth and faster aggregate links means that yes, the native quadcore will be a lot better.
Aside from that, AMD also still has much better memory performance via the on-chip memory controller, and doubled-width op registers from the last gen AMD stuff.
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?_
If AMD wanted to, they could have hads Intel's style "quad core" long ago.
And yet they don't, and they just posted a $600 MILLION loss in one quarter. The difference between what AMD lost and Intel made last quarter is almost 2 billion dollars. Maybe you should take your market genius over there and help them turn it around.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Vista 64-bit and Xp 64-bit work just fine, thanks. I'm running Vista-64 right now. We make a fair bit of use of both at work, for precisely the reason that we have apps that run out of 4GB of RAM.
As for your drivers comment, well let's see here: Intel has 64-bit XP and Vista drivers for their motherboards (and by extension graphics) and NICs as far back as their 865 series (anything older doesn't support 64-bit CPUs). Vista-64 has native support for older nVidia chips (GeForce 2 is the oldest I've tried) and nVidia provides downloadable drivers for their 5 (FX) series and newer. ATi likewise has support in the OS for some older chips, and downloadable drivers for the 9500 and newer for XP-64 and Vista-64. Broadcom has XP-64/Vista-64 drivers out for all their NICs (both 44XX and 57XX series). LSI has 64-bit drivers for, well, all their products that I can see for XP and Vista (and Linux and Solaris). Colorvision has 64-bit drivers and is Vista compatible. Logitech, Microsoft, and Saitek all have 64-bit drivers and support apps out for their input devices.
I could go on but basically any modern hardware seems to have no problems at all with 64-bit drivers. In fact, on all the 64-bit Windows systems I've set up, I've never encountered a component we didn't have a driver for. I'm not saying there aren't some oddballs out there, I'm saying that the vast majority of stuff DOES have a driver and thus it is a non-issue.
When you are countering some FUD, please don't spread your own. You may to like MS OSes, that's fine, but it is a lie to say that finding drivers for 64-bit Windows systems is hard. The vast majority of devices, including specialty devices (I've got 64-bit Vista drivers for my colorimeter and StudioCanvas for example) have 64-bit drivers. It is just a non-issue. Far more rare is 64-bit software, but thankfully 32-bit software runs without problems on the 64-bit OS.
Its not the size that counts, its how you use it. ;)
Per core cache is faster than shared cache.
L3 is better as well because it means it can be used to transfer data between cores instead of main memory.