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AMD's Piledriver To Hit 4GHz+ With Resonant Clock Mesh
MojoKid writes about some interesting news from AMD. From the article: "Advanced Micro Devices plans to use resonant clock mesh (PDF) technology developed by Cyclos Semiconductor to push its Piledriver processor architecture to 4GHz and beyond, the company announced at the International Solid State Circuits Conferences (ISSCC) in San Francisco. Cyclos is the only supplier of resonant clock mesh IP, which AMD has licensed and implemented into its x86 Piledriver core for Opteron server processors and Accelerated Processing Units. Resonant clock mesh technology will not only lead to higher clocked processors, but also significant power savings. According to Cyclos, the new technology is capable of reducing power consumption by 10 percent or bumping up clockspeeds by 10 percent without altering the TDP."
Unfortunately, aside from a fuzzy whitepaper, actual technical details are all behind IEEE and other paywalls with useless abstracts.
it's all vaporware till they ship, and it works.
if they pull it off though, might give Intel a run for their money again, it's about time!
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
for a single executing thread of a specific bit width GHz means everything.
The trick is can they scale it to multiple cores/threads, while lowering their power to match Intel's performance/Watt at the high end of the compute arena. If they can do that they will once again pull in DC customers.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Man, I had to read that 4 times and I'm still not quite exactly sure what you're saying.
Let me give it a stab.
Unless it can provide competition for Intel's CPUs at the same price level, and not use a ton more power to do it (as they have been doing recently), I don't think there is any point in caring.
Communication isn't just about belching words, but actually putting them down so people can understand them.
So why post an article that contains no meaningful information?
Oh wait . . . never mind. I forgot where I was.
Intel is already running at 4GHz+. Ok not officially, but it is almost impossible to find a Sandy Bridge K series that won't easily overclock to 4Ghz or more. I bumped my 2600k to 4GHz. No voltage increase, no messing around, just turned the multiplier up. Zero stability issues, doesn't even draw a ton more power. Basically they are just being conservative for thermal reasons.
The 22nm Ivy Bridge is soon to launch as well. Never mind any potential better OCing, it is faster per clock than SB. Well SB is a good bit faster than Bulldozer (who's architecture Piledriver uses) per clock, sometimes more than a bit (depends on what you are doing).
So no, they'd need way more speed to give Intel any kind of run for their money, unfortunately. What they really need is a better design, something that does better per clock, but of course new designs take a long time and BD itself was quite delayed.
Remember the one and only time AMD did eclipse Intel was during Intel's P4 phase. Intel had decided to go for low work per clock, high clock speed. Well speeds didn't scale as they'd hoped and the P4 was not as powerful for it. AMD chips were tops. However the Core architecture turned all that around. It was very efficient per clock, and each generation just gets better. Meanwhile AMD stagnated on new architectures, and then released Bulldozer which is not that great.
Also they have to fight the losing fab battle. They spun off their fabs and as such aren't investing tons of R&D in it. Well Intel is, and thus are nearly a node ahead of everyone else. Other companies are just in the last few months getting their 32nm node and 28nm half-node production lines rolling out products to retail channels. Intel has their 22nm node process complete and is fabbing chips for retail release in a couple months. So they've got that over AMD, until other fabs catch up, by which time Intel will probably have their 14nm half-node process online in Chandler (the plant construction is in full swing).
Sadly, things are just not good in the x86 competition arena. AMD competes only in a few markets, and Intel seems to edge in more and more. Servers with lots of cores for reasonable prices seems to be the last place they really have an edge, and that is a small market.
I don't want to see a one player game, but AMD has to step it up and this unfortunately is probably not it. If they make it work, expect Intel to just release faster Core i chips with higher TDP specs. The massive OCing success shows they could do so with no problem.
Single core performance is all that matters when processing a toolpath for CNC machining.
Rubbish. There is no way your CNC machining app will even get close to the minimum latency that a single AMD core is capable of. What you are really saying is that your vendor is slow to get a clue about parallel programming.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Maybe it will catch up to the Sandy Bridge Core i5 now?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Have gnu, will travel.
and has been for at least 5 years. A theoretical 10% performance boost? Gimme a break. I upgraded from a Core2Duo E6600 @ 2.4GHz to a quad core i5 2600k which runs at an overclocked 4.5GHz on air... Day to day, the new rig delivers a *mostly* perceptible performance advantage, but nothing earth shattering... I give you several recent changes that felt bigger:
1. Moving from hard drive to SSD
2. Moving from a DirectX9 class GPU to a DirectX 11 GPU (at least in games).
3. Move from pre-JIT JS browser engine to a JIT-engined browser.
As far as desktop CPU development goes, I think the future is largely about optimizing software for the multi-core architectures, not adding Gigahertz.