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.'"

Comments

Better quad-core how?

[Kjella]

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...

Re:Better quad-core how?

[bluSCALE4]

That's because you're not aware of the power of using the GPU in coordination with the CPU. Folding certainly shows GPU as a force not to neglect. You also fail to realize into your comment that quad cores are two dual cores. AMD and Motorola would do this sort of thing to claim next tier technology when in reality they were today's tech on steroids (They often fix GHz speeds with two CPU sets). Now, for some reason, AMD has opted not to do that and we'll see the true worthyness of this strategy with the release of the true quad core.

Re:Intel was never the choice for Quad Cores, sinc

[qbwiz]

"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.

Re:That's what you get...

[Inoshiro]

"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. "

1987 called, they want to use more than 64k of RAM. How can they do that without going to 32-bit?

2007 called back, just to let you know that 4gb of RAM was $150. That's right, $150. At that point, a lot of people are starting to wake up to the unpleasant smell of Intel's PAE (that's right, segmenting, but with 32-bits!). We're also living with the limitations of the 32-bit tlb and the paging methods used. I have a machine here with 4gb of RAM, and it's not unusual because of how cheap RAM is. Linux can run it as 4gb of RAM in 64-bit mode no problem, or I can run in 32-bit with 3.6gb of RAM because the PCI bus and other devices all map to that high region (just like everything above 640k was mapped to devices back in the 20-bit addressing days). Windows 32-bit does the same thing.

Now, while Linux 64-bit is stable and mature (having been something I've used for 3 years, after which most of the userspace apps have been cleaned up to work), Windows 64-bit is still not all there. Naturally, the proprietary apps will always live in the land of 32-bit. Supreme Commander, a recent DX10 game, has a lot of 32-bit troubles -- running out of RAM and crashing. One of the things you have to do to play it well is add /3GB to your boot.ini, and patch the EXE to enable larger address spaces for userland applications.

Now, 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago, that would not have been even on the radar screen. Now that you can buy 4gb of RAM for less than $200 (CAD or USD), and now that we have games and applications that need it (beyond the VFS cache; go look at some series SQL applications or scalable web applications), I think you're way off base, and you sound like someone talking about how 64k of RAM (the 16-bit addressing limit) is more than enough for anyone.

If all you're doing is sysadmining mom-and-pop's micro website that runs fine with 1 or 2gb of RAM, you'll never know this. If you're sysadmining a company that relies on this stuff, and has a cluster of machines that need to be up and running with gobs of RAM to buffer slower disks and backplanes, you'll know better. When normal users can get 4gb of RAM for next to nothing, the server machines better have at least 32gb of RAM.

Re:Intel's sever / workstation chip sets suck

[Maniac-X]

Intel has had an 8-core platform since last summer. Are they talking about "native" quad-core? Does a slight technical difference matter when one exists and one does not exist? How do we know "native" quad-core is better than dual-dual-core-on-a-single-chip?

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.