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AMD's Six-Core Istanbul Opterons
EconolineCrush writes "AMD's latest 'Istanbul' Opterons add two cores per socket, for a grand total of six. Despite the extra cores, these new chips reside within the same power envelope as existing quad-core Opterons, and they're drop-in compatible with current systems. The Tech Report has an in-depth review of the new chips, comparing their performance and power efficiency with that of Intel's Nehalem-based Xeons. Istanbul fares surprisingly well, particularly when one considers its performance-power ratio with highly parallelized workloads."
Istanbul runs your shells
Through shaves as tight as Dardanelles.
Use Opteron and the gallant foamy,
And thus avoid Gallipoli.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Or isn't that anyones business but the Turks?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Over 9000!!!!1
get a couple of these to test? Sounds like we could get some pretty good number-crunching results.
That's nothing compared to 14 cores.
Does the Istanbul have Extended Page Table support like Nehalem does? This is supposed to give a big performance boost to virtual machines, though I haven't seen any hard numbers. Any info?
Mmmm...yeah, but wasn't Constantinople sacked by the Turks, thereby causing the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire?
Oh, wait, I think I get it now... ;)
My blog
You think it's crazy? It is crazy. But I don't give a shit. From now on, we're the ones who have the edge in the multi-core game. What part of this don't you understand? If two cores is good, and four cores is better, obviously six cores would make us the best fucking processor that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the CPU game by clinging to the two-core industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, six cores is the biggest chance of all.
Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don't tell me what to inventI tell them. And I'm telling them to stick two more cores in there. I don't care how. Make the cores so thin they're invisible. I don't care if they have to cram the sixth blade in perpendicular to the other five, just do it!
Harnessing muli-cpu machines with these installed is going to be.... Interesting.
Deleted
I'll be finally able to run Crysis at a decent framerate.
egyptian civilization started well around 4000 BC and lasted until 400 BC. thats around 3600 years.
eastern roman empire is from ad 250 ish to ad 1453.
EVEN if you add entire roman empire history unto that, which makes from 500 BC to 1453 AD, it still makes 2000 years. doesnt come anywhere near egypt.
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Harnessing muli-cpu machines with these installed is going to be.... Interesting.
No more interesting than existing many-core machines.
Seriously, having a couple dozen or more cores is nothing new.
yeah, but wasn't Constantinople sacked by the Turks
see what happens when you don't have enough stock to satisfy consumer demand :)
http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3571
Includes information about virtualization performance: http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3571&p=9
Conclusion:
"The six-core Opteron is not an alternative to the mighty Xeons in every application. The Xeons are more versatile thanks to the higher clockspeeds, higher IPC, Hyperthreading and higher bandwidth to memory. The Xeon 55xx series is clearly the better choice in OLTP, ERP, webserving, rendering and there is little doubt that it will continue to reign in the bandwidth intensive HPC workloads. There are two types of applications where we feel that the AMD six-core deserves your attention: decision support databases and virtualization."
And nothing of value was posted.
Meet Quintippio: The new 15-Blade Mega Shave!
Show your beard who's boss!
From http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T2/features.xml
"Features and Benefits
With eight cores and 64 threads on one chip, integrated 10 GbE networking, crypto, and PCI-Express expansion, you have the jump on anything else on the market. The opportunities for system consolidation and virtualization are here like never before. Consumes less power per core and thread than any processor in its class - without compromising on performance. The UltraSPARC T2 processor gives OEMs a massively threaded, multi-core alternative to more power-hungry, less threaded processors from competing vendors."
[...] Not only that, but it's hitting the market early. AMD had originally planned to introduce this product in the October time frame, but the first spin of Istanbul silicon came back solid, so the firm pulled the launch forward into June. Even with the accelerated schedule, of course, Istanbul comes not a moment too soon, now that Nehalem Xeons are out in the wild.
Does anyone else think that this seems a little convenient? I'm really hoping that they didn't just tone down the testing to make it to market. I'm thinking they'll go to market and then quickly release a new revision to fix the corners that they cut the first time around. I hope I'm wrong, but AMD has been slipping lately.
Any EE's out there know the process well enough to confirm or deny my suspicions?
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Yeah, but will it run a hackintosh?
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
It's the applications.
Actually, you might have a point -- I honestly don't know how well OS kernels are implemented for this sort of thing. On the other hand, Linux has been ported to machines with more cores (and CPUs!) than that before. Worst case, the kernel-level stuff won't receive a boost -- your filesystem won't go much faster -- but how much of your CPU time is currently spent there?
No, most CPU time is spent in applications, as it should be. And that's where you have the issues you describe -- either there aren't separate threads, or there are, and they're synchronized with locking. And yes, Erlang does solve a lot of that, without needing to change the OS at all.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
ancient egypt is THE source of many of your philosophies and sciences. from 1000 BC and onwards, early greeks were coming to egypt for education. egypt had 2 schools - school of life, and school of death. school of life was teaching stuff related to this world, ie, medicine, land registry, writing, government, and school of death taught stuff pertaining to abstract world. not to mention that many of the professions people identify themselves today originated in egypt.
even before knossos was known, medicine men and wise men of egypt were world renowned, even legendary in their time. a LOT of stuff that is ascribed to greeks were what greeks learned in egypt.
brush up on your history.
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Constaninapole wasn't sacked by Turks. It is conqured by them. Also Constantinapoles name was Istanbool before roman occupation..
So if somebody builds a cluster using three of these six core processors, does that make it the Beowulf Cluster of the Beast?
How many of your favorite app already re-written to take advantage of the additional cores?
How many of your favorite compiler already re-designed to generate codes that uses additional cores?
How many of your favorite boss already re-wired to fuss about the additional cores?
Intels next processor will go to Eleven!
When asked by the reporters, as to why Eleven was chosen as the target number of cores, Nigel said
It's six louder than AMD! I mean faster...
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
Energizer corporation is now seeking to purchase AMD and fold it into the Schick lineup, in order to one-up Gillette's vibrating razor.
the real news here is not the extra couple cores, but coherency snooping. this feature will make 4/8s machines far more attractive; it doesn't hurt that with 48 cores and 32 ddr3/1333 dimms, you have quite a monster. _and_ incidentally something that Intel can't currently answer.
there's no question that nehalem has put a serious dent in the market, but Intel's going quite slow in rolling out higher-end products. yes, a nehalem socket delivers about 50% more bandwidth than a current opteron socket, but show me the 8s nehalem machines. nehalem-ex is coming, but how soon and at what price?
one thing I haven't seen is any attempt to measure real SMP performance on new-gen chips. I don't mean something like Stream or VMs, where there is no real sharing inherent to the workload. how long does it take to exchange a _contended_ lock between cores (in the same socket vs remote)?
finally, the real question is whether there is actual demand for more-core chips. I'm in HPC, and we always want more, and throw good money. but it has to be smart more - the 6-core core2, for instance, was just asinine because even 2c core2 is drastically memory-bandwidth-starved. nehalem-ex seems quite promising, but if it's cheaper to cluster dual-socket machines rather than pay the premium for 4s's, the 4s market will be stunted and less successful in a self-fulfilling way...
http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t5440/specs.xml
4 UltraSparc T2 processors with 4 processors x 8 cores per processor x 8 threads per core = 256 threars
Press "Get it". Prices start from $91,995.00 with 256 threads and $51,795.00 with 128 threads
Huh? If you take the founding of the Eastern Empire to be Constantine's moving the capital to Byzantium (renaming it Constantinople), that's 330AD to its fall in 1453. Dynastic Egypt traditionally dates back to somewhere around 3100BC, and the end is usually marked as the fall of the Ptolemaic Dynasty in 30BC. So the Byzantine Empire lasted a little over 1,100 years, whereas Egypt lasted three thousand years.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Tried pricing up a decent box for some heavy-lifting, there's just so much complexity out there! It's hard to figure out where the bleeding edge is and where the most effective bang for the buck zone is behind all the blood. 286, 386, 486, a man used to be able to tell where computers sat! And then all that Pentium bullshit started. I don't know what the fuck I'm looking at. I'm crossing my fingers and going with a Tom's Hardware recommended build list.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Uhhharg. I thought that song was hilarious the first time I heard it. But it's turned into a mind-worm that goes round and round every time I hear "Istanbul". And I hear it a lot because I'm writing documentation for an Istanbul-based server.
Just for that, I'm going to force you to watch this really dumb video. You are required to drink a V8 every time you spot a geographical blooper.
Actually, a lot of Greeks find this song extremely unfunny, because the name change reflects the way Greek communities have been forced out of Asia Minor since the Turkish conquest. In particular, the official name change occurred after the collapse of the Turkish Empire, which coincided with a lot of violence directed at Turkey's ethnic minorities. Everyone's heard about the Armenian massacres, but the remnants of Turkey's Greek-speaking communities also had a hard time of it.
And yeah, there was violence the other way. So what?
We run a lot of commerical OCR (as in millions of images), which is extremely processor-intensive, disk-intensive, memory-intensive, you name it. Our current main OCR server is a dual quad-core Xeon X5355 box with 16 GB of RAM. Our OCR software multithreads and the processor is no longer the bottleneck -- it's now disk I/O. While current drives continue to increase in size, their read / write speed is what keeps us from getting work done faster. It now takes several orders of magnitude longer to build, and then export, for example, a 2 GB batch than it does to recognize it, and the holdup is entirely due to disk I/O.
SSDs help. We recently upgraded our server's OS drive to two Intel Extreme 64GB SSDs in RAID 0 (also using part of the array as a "scratchpad" for the OCR batches), and that cut the disk I/O time approximately in half -- but we're still talking almost an hour for your typical 2 GB batch. Time is money, and we'd gladly throw more money at faster infrastructure were it available. SSDs are still way too expensive to replace our existing main storage arrays, though.
So, while I appreciate continuing work in processor speed and density, I'd say I'd rather see a commensurate increase (and reduction in cost!) in disk speed at this point. Just my .02.
Anyone have any clue how Nehalem and these multicore AMD beasts would compare for video editing or render farm applications?
Between the Old Kingdom and the Ptolemaic Dynasty, Egypt was conquered by
The Sea People
The Nubians (Kush)
The Assyrians
The Persians
Alexander
The Ptolemaic era was the last time a culture with any kind of connection to the Old Kingdom ruled Egypt but it makes no sense to talk about the time from the Old Kingdom to the Ptolemys as the duration of the "Egyptian Empire"
Actually, the only time when Egypt really had an empire (a small one) was the New Kingdom. That period was 1550-1070BC and considerably shorter than the duration of the East Roman Empire. Even concatenating the Old and New Kingdoms and ignoring the intervening conquests and chaos, you only get 1580 years, which is similar to the East Roman Empire.
If that's the case, then you'd better include the Latin Empire into your counting of years for the Byzantine Empire. That was a major interruption of the political continuity of the Empire (and pretty much lead to its final decline).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Is your disk I/O more bandwidth-intensive (smaller amount of large operations/files) or operations-intensive (lots of small operations)? Actually, either way you might want to check out Fusion-io's productions (Product page - http://www.fusionio.com/Products.aspx; spec sheet1 - http://www.fusionio.com/PDFs/Fusion_Specsheet.pdf; spec sheet2 - http://www.fusionio.com/PDFs/Fusion_ioDriveDuo_datasheet_v3.pdf). It's pricey, but you said you're not afraid to throw money at it :)
Performance specs from the glossies for a 160GB unit:
IOPS in mixed r/w: 120,000+ (4k packet size)
Read Bandwidth: 1.0 GB/s (32K packet size)
Write Bandwidth: 1.5 GB/s (32K packet size)
Yes, I did mean one hundred twenty THOUSAND IOPS (try beating that with SAS!) and the bandwidth is in gigaBYTES per second, not gigaBITS. Yes, the IOPS rating is for a single unit, not an array of any kind. And yes, these are measured speeds, not interface speeds (SATAII has a 3 Gbps interface speed, but try to actually squeeze all of that bandwidth out of there on a sustained basis). No, I don't work for these guys, but this kind of storage performance just blows my mind. I can't wait to see a 10 Gbps SAN slapped full of 16 or 20 of these things...
Cost is about $20/GB.