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AMD Packs Six-Core Opteron Inside 40 Watts
adeelarshad82 writes "Advanced Micro Devices has launched a low-power version of its six-core Opteron processor in time for VMworld, a key virtualization show that opens on Monday. The six-core AMD Opteron EE consumes 40 watts, and is designed for 2P servers, among the most popular in the virtualized server space."
Here are a few quick bits from the article:
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
6 x 1.8 = 10.8
2 x 3.2 = 6.4
If you can take full advantage of the six cores, there's a lot more computational power despite the slower clock speed.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
This is a server processor. If you are either gaming or compiling on your server, you are doing something wrong. My servers here at work tend to do a high volume of low processor intensity transactions... therefore, more cores (and more simultanious transactions) is far more important than high speed.
Also, by shoehorning this into a 40w envelope, they're obviously going for power efficiency over horsepower. Interesting fact: power usage is one of the largest costs of a data center, and it's growing.
I've seen it before, usually used in a context where you have 2P, 4P, 8P = dual-processor, quad-processor, octo-processor machines because noone wants to go around remembering what that should be abbreviated like. Of course, with cores per chip varying widely just saying you have a DP/2P machine says little these days.
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With AMD's reputation for producing hot-running processors
What reputation? Since the days of the original Thunderbird core (which still ran cooler than comparable P4s, though admittedly didn't have meltdown prevention circuitry), AMD has consistently given Intel a run for their money in that regard.
Now, the Atom has finally brought Intel back to the realm of "reasonable", but it doesn't seriously compete with AMD, it competes with VIA (and poorly at that - The Nano blows the Atom away, clock for clock and Watt for Watt).
Don't get me wrong, Intel has certainly regained my respect when it comes to performance, but to call AMD the toaster requires ignoring the past 10 years.
CPU speed has stagnated
It hasn't stagnated at all. You're equating cycle rate with performance, that's incorrect.
Each processor architecture does a different amount of work each cycle. Counting only the number of cycles is like comparing the running speed of two men by the number of steps they take each minute - but one guy may be a midget and the other eight feet tall. Clock speeds remain similar but performance doesn't correlate.
For example, a 3Ghz P4 isn't even half as fast as one core from a 3Ghz Core i7. The number of instructions per clock have been continuously improving with each new architecture.
Phenom is faster than Athlon X2. Phenom II is faster than Phenom.
Core 2 is faster than Pentium 4. Core i7 is faster than Core 2.
So you can have what you want - improvement continues in both per-core performance and the number of cores.
That worked great for the Pentium 4, didn't it? Faster clock != more instructions per second. The only way to get close to 4GHz on the Pentium was with a 31-stage pipeline. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_pipeline
This means, on an instruction like if(a+b>c){}, the actual branch gets delayed by about 20 cycles if the processor guesses incorrectly whether the if statement should execute or not. Add the overhead due to such a fast clock (the P4 could only have 4 logic gates per pipeline stage due to the speed).
I'll keep my more efficient, better laid out processors over raw GHz, thank you very much.
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