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."

Comments

Istanbul runs your shells

[smittyoneeach]

Istanbul runs your shells
Through shaves as tight as Dardanelles.
Use Opteron and the gallant foamy,
And thus avoid Gallipoli.
Burma Shave

Re:Istanbul runs your shells

[drinkypoo]

Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
So if you were waiting for a core called Constantinople
It's been released as Istanbul.

Wasn't it called Constantinople?

[OzPeter]

Or isn't that anyones business but the Turks?

Re:Wasn't it called Constantinople?

[underqualified]

no no no. that was the beta version.

Fuck Everything, We're Doing Six Cores

[iamdrscience]

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!

No.

[Timothy Brownawell]

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.

Re:No.

[default luser]

You've already made this comment before, and I've already responded, so I'll keep it short and sweet.

If you're using a slow 2.2 GHz Quad core, that's not the fault of the industry, that's the fault of YOU. I have already made it clear that the top-end Core 2 Duo chips would run circles around your P4, but apparently you'd prefer to pretend they don't exist. As for your dog-slow quad core, that was YOUR purchasing decision. You can purchase MUCH FASTER quad cores today for reasonable prices, but apparently you're still suck in the year 2006.

The reason Core 2 / Quad destroys the P4 despite having a slower clock speed: Core 2 ups the Instructions Per Clock versus the Pentium 4. The increase is between %60 and %100 more IPC. If you read my previous response to you on the subject, you'd actually know that, instead of continuing to spout your ignorant bullshit.

And if you can't find a video codec with multiple core support, you're looking in the wrong place. Video decode is one of those embarrassingly-easy things to parallelize, and so your "boast" is really just outing you as a lazy bastard who can't take five seconds to search Google.

Re:Finally

[Kotoku]

I'll be finally able to run Crysis at a decent framerate.

Just in time to be behind the curve for Crysis 2!

Another test at anandtech.com

[IYagami]

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."

Scary Quote from the Article

[Gazzonyx]

[...] 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?

Re:Scary Quote from the Article

[dpilot]

I'm in the silicon business. Not CPU, but still silicon.

It sounds as if AMD budgeted time for another pass at the design, and turned out not to need it. The amount of time they pulled out of the schedule looks more like a silicon pass than short-cutting testing and validation. Adding that extra pass, and making sure it was scheduled is probably a result of having been so badly burned last time, but that's good. You can always be a hero by doing better than plan.

Re:EPT?

[KonoWatakushi]

AMD has supported nested page tables since the Shanghai series processors.

it's interesting, but not becase of 6c

[markhahn]

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...