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Quick and Dirty Penryn Benchmarks
An anonymous reader writes "So Intel has their quad-core Penryn processors all set and ready to launch in November. There are benchmarks for the dual-core Wolfdale all over the place, but this seems to be the first article to put the quad-core Yorkfield to the test. It looks like the Yorkfield is only about 7-8% faster than the Kentsfield with similar clock speeds and front-side bus."
Penryn? Wolfdale? Yorkfield? I wonder if Intel hasn't run out of names and started naming their processors after English Teddy Bears.
No great improvements in speed in next few yrs .. remember the Pentium 4 stagnation (never gone to 4GHz, didn't release more than one model in 6 months, etc.)
And of course.. 4 core CPU has no use at homes unless you are content creator. I'm software engineer, I don't think that any of my colleagues I work with knows how to write app that will take advantage of 2 cores; let alone 4.
Conclusion? 4 cores right now need much software support.
My recent experience with quad-CPU Xeon machines is that multithread performance for a single is VERY poor, even with great care in coding, presumably because of cache-sloshing between these physically-separate CPUs dropped onto one die.
(I compare with Niagara and even Core Duo which seem much better for threaded apps.)
Has anyone else tested threadability of these CPUs, and power efficiency, sleep states, etc?
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
"Who fucking cares anyway? All it shows is just how quickly AMD is disappearing into irrelevant-ville, just like Linux."
You shouldn't rule out the company that forced Intel into this pace. After all, it's remarkable what they did with the Athlon series when Intel's Netburst architecture proved inefficient. I agree that they are in trouble, but at least don't make quick assumptions before we get to see Barcelona.
Full Tilt
I would think that AMD would be providing Barcelona benchmarks hand over fist, at this point, if they had something...
There are two possible situations here:
a) Barcelona is faster than Intel's current line-up and does not want to see Intel up the pace more by releasing such numbers.
b) Barcelona is slower than Intel's current line-up and does not want its shares hit a new low, or perhaps buy some time to speed it up.
Full Tilt
a fake quote from nowhere about linux that's supposed to get good ratings and an ad in your sig for a poker site? How stupid do you think we are?
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
"Intel expects SSE4 optimizations to deliver performance improvements in video authoring, imaging, graphics, video search, off-chip accelerators, gaming and physics applications. Early benchmarks with an SSE4 optimized version of DivX 6.6 Alpha yielded a 116 percent performance improvement due to SSE4 optimizations." Not bad...
They could probably make better use of the die space of the 4th, 3rd, or even 2nd CPU core by putting things like cache there instead. And in another direction, go with SoC (system on a chip) or certain subsets thereof. Combined with serialized bus technologies, this should work while also reducing pin counts.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Seriously (partly, at-least) : How many penguins I will see during the boot-up? 4?
Read and Comment at my BLOG
!!!
AMD hasn't released benchmarks on pre-release silicon before. Why would they start now?
Penryn? Wolfdale? Yorkfield? Kentsfield? What are they doing here, making processors, or naming streets in a new upscale subdivision?
AMD rose to this position primarily because they didn't make Intel's mistakes - trying to force a new CPU architecture on the market (Itanium) instead of incrementally developing the X86 line, and focusing on clock-speed (P4) at the expense of performance per watt. Now that Intel is focused on performance per watt, AMD needs to find a new differentiator for their chips.
Perhaps they should start thinking about how to integrate a high quality Vista-capable GPU into their processors? (afterall they acquired ATI). How about sound cards, USB ports, et cetera. If they can fit 90% of a typical motherboard into the processor and usher in a new era of affordable and efficient computers while intel is busy playing with 64-core chips, why not?
"Yorkfield is only about 7-8% faster than the Kentsfield with similar clock speeds"
One of the main features of the Penryn family is the capacity for high clock speeds, so comparing with the same clock is meaningless.
And although the processor has other performance boosts, I suspect many of them come from SSE4, and nowhere in TFA have I seen any indication that the benchmarks were compiled with it in mind.
yeah.
that's why they call it chip real estate.
(Hyuck. Get it?)
Even though the processor itself is only slightly faster, doesn't mean that the market overall doesn't gain from this. Sure, there's no big leap in performance here (it's pretty much a die shrink), but in the end 45nm generates better economies of scale, and the average person ends up with a lot more than 7-8% improvement as they move up from their old P4 systems. More speed, less heat, better prices. Tech marches forth.
"Don't mind him - he's from Barcelona."
If AMD had Barcelonas ready at 2.5Ghz or more than we would sure have seen benchmarks already.
This coment was supposed to be on th AT&T batery exlosion article. Not funy here. :(
See, the dam batteries srew up everyting!
Barcelona is faster than Intel's current line-up and does not want to see Intel up the pace more by releasing such numbers.
That may have been true 6 months ago, but the K10 is supposed to be officially announced in about 16 days on September 10 (since AMD claims not to do paper launches it is supposed to be widely available then too... ymmv). AMD is not going to be able to stop benchmarks after it is released, and while Intel can adapt quickly, it can't turn on a dime in 2 weeks time. AMD has not been doing well in the PR and benchmarking battles since Core 2 came out, if K10 really was that amazing you would be seeing all the usual suspects putting out full reviews right now in order to generate hype. I'm leaning towards your second theory, and most analysts are too.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Not fake. Browse at -1 and you'd see the post he responded to.
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
Intel tends to do a release of a new architecture, then some refinements on that. While it would be cool to do a whole new architecture each time around, there's just not really money for that. This is one of the refinements. The chips are not likely to be all that much faster then their previous chips at the same clock speed because they are largely the same architecture. Mostly they are just a die shrink (which means lower power and probably better scaling and cost) and some new instructions, that aren't really used yet. They are still Core 2s.
However that doesn't mean that the next generation will be the same. Indeed, if Intel keeps with their plans it will be a new architecture and thus hopefully bring new speed increases.
As to using multiple cores, well if you don't know how, perhaps you'd best learn then? You not knowing how doesn't mean it can't be done, indeed it can be done and IS being done. Multi-core is just the way things are going, at least for now. Not only are desktops and servers headed that way, but even things like the Xbox 360 and PS3 are as well. It's simply time to start thinking about software in a different way. No longer is a big while loop the way to go.
Already that's happening. The number of games (and games are interesting to watch since they often ride the leading edge in terms of requirements) that makes use of two cores has risen dramatically. We are also seeing a couple games, with more on the horizon, that will support 4 cores. Things like AI and physics get executed in parallel, which makes it possible for them to be much more complex.
Finally, there HAVE been some cool developments on processors, just not ones that most hardware sites like to cover. Some time back Intel introduced a technology they call VT, which is basically instructions to allow you to virtualize the protection rings on a processor. Supposed to make for faster VMs. Currently the implementation is somewhat lacking, VMware claims it is slower than a well optimised software solution, though others dispute that claim (Xen likes VT). The new 45nm Core 2s add to the existing VT technology with what Intel calls VT-d. Basically the idea is to allow VM software to pass DMA access to their guests, but in a safe manner that can't hurt the host. This may not be exciting to everyone, but these advances are worthwhile, given that virtual computing is getting more and more use.
Processors may not be getting huge gains in single thread performance any more, but that doesn't mean they aren't advancing.
You can't rule AMD out but Intel sure has done just about EVERYTHING right since Conroe. They've been more open with the press (both financial and enthusiast) and have (for lack of a better expression) engineered the shit out of AMD. That said, it looked like Intel would never catch up during the prime of Athlon 64...of course Intel's resources and size give it an astronomical advantage. AMD will again have to be innovative in some way if it ever wants to catch up...Fusion maybe?
Dude, the guy's got an ad in his sig. Where do you think the AC 'quote' came from?
NEVER underestimate the huge number of virus / trojan / spyware and pop-up generating crapware that are running in parallel on average joe's computer.
Just think about the number of users who come into stores to buy "faster computers because the old one is getting too slow" when the old computer is crawling under an impressive amount of crapware.
They are the perfect target for those new multi-core processors :
- 1 core for running the OS, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word.
- All other core for running SPAM-spitting zombies.
Now, if you add Vista in the equation...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well, fortunately, some of this software has already been written just for you and your colleagues. Check out make(1) manual page — look for the -j option...
And no, it is not only for software engineering either. Every time I come back from vacation, I use make to convert my digital pictures from the lossless "raw" format of the camera to the lower resolution JPEG for the web-pages. Having four CPUs makes that process four times faster. Great idea, uhm?..
Your colleagues may be doofusen, but people, who will finally bring us reliable speech-generation and parsing (as an example) will certainly be smart enough to take full advantage of the multiple processors.
Meanwhile, you can schedule a meeting to discuss using OpenMP in your company's software... Compilers (including Visual Studio's and gcc) have been supporting this standard for some years now.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Gee, this is awfully convenient. "Hey folks! There's no point in waiting! Come on down and buy!" Just like the car dealers pushing out 2007 models with summer sales.
When decoding "full HD" h264, i.e. 40 Mbit/s BluRay or 30 MBit/s HD-DVD, with 1080p resolution, current cpus start to trash the L2 cache:
Each 1080p frame consist of approximately 2 M pixels, which means that the luminance info will need 2 MB, right?
Since the normal way to encode most of the frames is to have two source frames and one target, motion compensation (which can access any 4x4, 8x8 og 16x16 sub-block from either or both of the source frames), will need to have up to 2+2+2=6MB as the working set.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
There are certainly advantages to be had by implementing SIMD hardware, but Intel's been doing it in counterproductive and selfish ways since the start.
Remember MMX? Those instructions used the FP registers, so you couldn't do FP simultaneously; more important than performance was that Intel's competition couldn't run your code if you used MMX.
Remember SSE/2/3? Intel robbed silicon from the P4's FP capability, so the P4 and derivatives gave good math performance if you wrote with (Intel only!) SSE_latest_version and poor performance if you wrote easy, portable, STANDARD, code (did nothing special). Intel dangled the carrot with slightly increased performance if you wrote Intel-only code, and broke thumbs by hurting your performance if you opted for portable, maintainable, slicon-(and thus vendor-)neutral code.
If you're willing to trade vendor lock-in and high priced hardware for performance, the answer has been and still remains PPC/Power. Altivec performance has been much higher than contemporary x86/x87, IA64, and AMD64 parts' since it was introduced in 1999, and remains so today. And if you prefer general purpose parallelism to SIMD, look at Tilera and Niagara!
Show me ONE application running much faster with YET ANOTHER revision to Intel's vendor-locking SSE, and I'll show you MANY applications that abstain in order to maintain good performance on more hardware. Those that value performance over portability would be better off at least obtaining the best performance available since they're willing to pay that price in the first place, and that performance is not available on x86-64, or anything else made by Intel or AMD.
Altivec pisses me off because it's proprietary, but at least performance is very good.
SSE pisses me off because it's proprietary, and it doesn't even offer a much performance incentive.
You're an idiot.
Of course this isn't exactly random access (at least if you organize things right) and simply moving around 6MB times 50fps isn't a big deal anymore.
Just junk food for thought...