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AMD Finally Unveils Barcelona Chip
Justin Oblehelm writes "AMD has finally unveiled its first set of quad-core processors, three months after its original launch date due to its "complicated" design. Barcelona comes in three categories: high-performance, standard-performance and energy-efficient server models, but only the standard (up to 2.0 GHz) and energy-efficient (up to 1.9 GHz) categories will be available at launch. The high-performance Opterons, together with higher frequencies of the standard and energy-efficient chips, are expected in the out in the fourth quarter of this year.
But it's far from clear that this is the product that will help right AMD's ship."
Since it's essentially the same tech since their X2 design?
I get 2.7ghz out of a 2.0ghz rated X2 (on air).
Once again they have beaten Intel's prices by at least $100 so we all win.
Here's some benchmarking done by Anandtech.
And a performance preview for Barcelona desktop as well.
Full Tilt
"The delay puts the chip maker a full generation behind its archrival in terms of chip manufacturing processes. Intel's quad-core processor, which was launched in November last year, melds two of its duo-core processors into a single package."
Heh, shouldn't that be "full generation ahead" since AMD manages to put four cores on a single die?
The Techreport also has a review up: http://techreport.com/articles.x/13176/1. Barcelona is similar to Core2, clock for clock. It has better energy efficiency and SMP scaling. But the clock frequencies will need to come up in order to beat Intel's highest clocking chips in absolute performance.
I wonder how much these things will go for... I know they won't be cheap (in traditional terms), but since AMD has a history of comperable performance for less, I'm really curious how affordable these things will be. If the price is right, one of these may be in my near future...
One thing of note is that Motherboards already exist for this processor in fair number. The Barcelona uses a socket F (1207) which the current dual core Operons already use. That should give this processor a decent jumpstart in terms of people not needing to buy a new board to run it.
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AMD says it won't use the ACP number to compare the power consumption of its processors against Intel's.
Before everyone slams them for coming up with yet another cheesy marketing gimmick, I would point out that Intel has done this ever since the first of the power-sucking P4 line. They did it a bit less up-front, however, choosing to redefine "TDP" in their specs rather than give their numbers a new term (such as "ACP").
This still won't make for a completely fair direct comparison, because Intel's TDP refers to a sort of third quartile case rather than the mean. But better, anyway.
Perhaps more usefully, since AMD has published the ACP spec, even though they may refuse to run similar tests on Intel chips, you can bet the farm that 3rd-party results will come out over the next few days.
I don't understand why everyone always talks about AMD's problems. So what if they are not the forunners on every front. They still lead in other areas. Example from July's Inquirer http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=41 138&rfp=dta/
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Literally. I can't wait to get in our first DL585 G2 with 4 of these beasties and 64GB of ram. The only regret I have is that we probably won't use em for DB servers because of Oracle's asinine policy of charging per core, sometimes I wish we had gone SQL2005 for more stuff as it is going to scale better with improving hardware. Then again maybe the proliferation of quad core (and above) server cpu's will make Oracle rethink their pricing policy again. I hope they go to what the rest of the industry is doing and license per socket.
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Is that sometimes, you wind up losing the race. I think AMD tried to take a risky approach of putting all four cores on one die and they shot themselves in the foot. Now Intel got some sort of quad core out there. Even if it wasn't as good, it was still better than two completely separate 2 way chips, and now, Intel is circling the wagons to do its own native quad core implementation.
I fear that Barcelona might well wind up as the Great Eastern of chip making - an impressive technological first, but, too much at once. It's a shame too, as I really, really, love my Opteron line, and I know that I will yet again ruin my career writing some sort of multithreaded thing for Barcelona because it is so novel, even if AMD gets battered by a less than spectacular launch.
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RS
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If your database requirements are such that you could have use MSSQL instead of Oracle, you really should consider using PostgreSQL, as it is more featureful and costs nothing.
Uh, they are doing this to come closer to Intel's TDP numbers which have been average high use numbers instead of worst case for at least the last couple generation of chips. AMD is actually being much more upfront here by offering both worst case and average case numbers, I hope Intel follows their lead and offers both numbers.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
For a few years now, as that was the only platform that really, reliably ran Linux.
Intel's been good to us Linux folk, and Nvidia has been easy enough to deal with.
If AMD comes out with an end-to-end Linux solution, CPU, GPU, and a good Linux-friendly partner for chipset, I'll seriously consider switching back to AMD parts.
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vs. the old days. Until not too long ago, they charged based on "power units". What's a power unit you ask? 1 MHz on x86 was 1PU, 1MHz on sparc was 1.5PU, etc. (So for example your departmental e450 with four, 400 MHz cpus would be 4x400x1.5 = 2400 PUs.) How much did a PU cost in licensing? Well, you see, said the oracle salesman with a gleam in his eye, that all depends... That they've shifted to a flat rate per core is actually a big win over the old model for their customers.
AMD also has more energy-efficient chipsets with ECC DDR2 ram not the higher power useing FB-DIMMS also you have a lot more choice in chip set's with more pci-e lanes then intel 2p+ systems.
Ah, my bad, thanks for clearing this up...so that explains Intels ability to suddenly have lower power chips...so it is they that are playing with the numbers this time, interesting :)
The 2.0GHz Barcelona beats the 3.0GHz Xeon X5365 (Cloverton) on floating point. Barcelona specfp_rate2006 score is 73.0 to Cloverton's 66.9. Things can only get better as AMD cranks up the clock in the coming months.
If you scale the benchmarks to the same GHz rating you will see that clock for clock Barcelona is at worst on par with Intel's best chip, and at best 80% faster on floating point. This is really quite amazing when you consider it's using the same amount of power as the previous 2 core AMD Opteron.
Specs of the entire new Barcelons line-up, more details, and pricing are available here as well:
http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/AMD_Barcelona_Architecture_Launch_Native_QuadCore
Ah, my bad, thanks for clearing this up...so that explains Intels ability to suddenly have lower power chips...so it is they that are playing with the numbers this time, interesting :)
To some extent. The Pentium 4 is where this started. The Netburst architecture was very power hungry normally, but it's maximum power was insane. The graph of power consumption vs benchmark had a long "tail", which Intel sought to chop off. See, TDP is a real-life number, since it's used by OEMs and others to design thermal solutions for the parts. If the thermal solution is insufficient, then the parts fail. So it's not actually possible to fudge TDP numbers.
What Intel decided to do was implement an on-chip thermal diode and some logic that halved the effective clock cycle* if the temperature went above a certain threshold. What this meant is that based on how they programmed this logic, they could guarantee that the chip's power consumption would never go above a certain level no matter what code you were running. They had effectively lopped off the long tail. The downside is that if your application does draw more power than the limit, then you'll see vastly reduced performance because of the clock throttling. Most of the time this is transient so it's not that noticeable, but there were benchmarks out there that showed this effect very clearly. Like a certain game benchmark would get lower scores at 640x480 than 1600x1200 because at the lower res the game was cpu bound as was crossing the thermal threshold.
So theoretically with this feature Intel could fudge the numbers however they wanted and claim whatever TDP they desired. In practice they don't have that much flexibility because if they set the bar too low then their effective performance would suck, and their TDP numbers are set at average power + several standard deviations.
The main reason why Intel was able to suddenly have low power chips is because they ditched the Netburst architecture and went back to a design that was more balanced between high clock speeds and high IPC.
They kept the clock throttling logic, though, since it does still give them some benefit in reporting lower TDP numbers. AMD doesn't have this feature, so their TDP is truly the maximum power (as determined by running a "power virus") that you would ever see, even though it's unlikely. Since power has become ever more important as a marketing feature even outside of mobile, I'm not surprised that AMD would decide to start touting expected numbers vs maximum.
* Actually a 50% duty cycle of full speed for some number of microseconds followed by completely off.
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AMD only *just* opened up their specs though (though it's a fairly fast turnaround from buying out ATI), so it'll be a little while before ATI is well supported on Linux.
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specfp rate was running faster on pre-barcelona dual core Opterons than on Intel's dual core Woodcrest. The reason is no big secret: specfp is memory bandwidth limited and specfp_rate is specfp's running in parallel. Here is a good anandtech article on the subject.
We already know that AMD has superior memory performance. If you are doing bandwidth-limited floating point, Barcelona is the clear winner.
If you're making a general statement about floating point performance, you're wrong.
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I have owned a PC since early 95 and primarily for financial reasons and then because the Athlon range were, in my option, the best processors available I had not owned an Intel CPU for 12 years. Now for the first time I have an Intel chip, a Dual Core 2 Duo, in my laptop as AMD just can't compete on price or performance. My new desktop will have an Intel Quad core as Barcelona can barely compete with the 65nm chips and the new 45nm chips will just blow it away. Although Intel has it's fingers in many pies not just X86 doesn't Intel need a stronger AMD to stop the government getting involved in trying to limit it's activities to maintain competition?
When only measuring single core performance, clock for clock, Barcelona is on par with Cloverton.
Unfortunately processors are not generally sold "clock for clock." If you're on par clock for clock, but the other guy is clocked more than 50% faster than you... that could be trouble.
What good is an Intel chip that has fast floating point but the bus cannot feed it data fast enough?
Plenty good if the data can fit in cache, in which case the unit can be fed fast enough. For instance, say you're running LinPack. But then, who uses LinPack as a benchmark?
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
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What can I say? I'm disappointed that they stuck with a 3-issue architecture - while it is true that Intel's 4-issue setup is often data-starved, even with exceptional I/O performance AMD can only hope to match the Core platform in most situations. The lack of progress in their cache technology means AMD gets as much burden as benefit out of the L3 cache over 20ns access time!).
In the I/O arena, AMD potentially has the edge, and for HPC there's no question Barcelona will do well: this architecture is built for scaling beyond 8 cores (potentially as high as 8 sockets, 32 cores). The question is: how big is that market, and will it really pay-off for them?
In the meantime, small-scale servers and workstations are the majority of the market, and Intel still has a commanding lead in that space. Intel's introduction of the San Clemente Xeon chipset with DDR2 instead of FBDIMMs will not help things for AMD, because these systems can most certainly compete with AMD's low power consumption.
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I simply want to use the chip that gives me the greatest floating point throughput I can get.
Define throughput. At some point you need to decide if you are solving equations like LinPack or equations like spec_fp. One causes lots of cache misses and benefits from memory bandwidth, the other does not.
Right now that chip appears to be Barcelona.
Well that's a hypothetical statement based on perception of your needs and their marketing.
I'm not interested with hypothetical arguments
That explains why you're making them (???)
I am looking forward to using Barcelona processors because they will get my mathematical computations done faster.
Hypothetically. Are you going to hypothetically switch when Intel's Penryn with SSE4 comes out? What about Intel's Nehalem?
By the way, check out number 2 and 3 on your top 500 supercomputer list - they're Opterons.
And?? They were designed and built before Core 2 was released. Do you think I'm going to argue they should have used Pentium 4's? Those systems also make solid use of NUMA through a custom Cray crossbar (Seastar), and Intel doesn't have that. If they made them today I see no reason for them not to use Opterons. Do you have a computer with lots of Opterons and a Cray Seastar router on order?
The performance of those systems is measured using LinPack. As I mentioned at the beginning, declaring a 2.0 GHz Barcelona as having faster fp throughput than 3.2 GHz Core 2 depends wholly on which types of calculations you are doing. spec_fp does calculations that are memory bound, LinPack does not (at least not as much). Barcelona's faster fp throughput is not due to markedly superior fp unit (though it may be marginally better) but its onboard memory controller. If you need that sort of thing, great, go with barcelona. If you need raw speed on smaller units (under a couple of megabytes) chances are good that the higher clocked Core 2 with huge cache will win.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
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If you have 1 or 2 CPUs (i.e. you typically run "Standard Edition One" Oracle which limits you to 2 CPU sockets anyway), you are only charged per CPU *socket*, regardless of the number of cores per CPU - here's the details from the horse's mouth.
So a quad core single CPU server will set you back about 3,000 pounds + VAT in the UK in Oracle licencing (note: you've infuriatingly got to add 22% annual updates/support onto the base price - this is a con...you can't just buy annual updates with no support any more [used to be only 6% of purchase price...]).
Oh and in the first year, you can go to an Oracle reseller, who will typically roughly discount the updates/support (about 20%) and that discount is carried through to later years [which slightly strangely are handled by Oracle, not the reseller...].
The use glue? What. sort. of. glue?
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Its a little more complicated than that because with smaller features, your are susceptible to smaller defects. That is, a defect that is likely not to affect AMD's chip at 65 nm can obliterate Intel's 45 nm chip. So the likelihood of a defect isn't a linear relationship to area as you suggest.