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CPU Competition Heating Up In 2012?

Posted by Unknown on from the lots-of-fancy-devices dept.

jd writes "2012 promises to be a fun year for hardware geeks, with three new 'Aptiv-class' MIPS64 cores being circulated in soft form, a quad-core ARM A15, a Samsung ARM A9 variant, a seriously beefed-up 8-core Intel Itanium and AMD's mobile processors. There's a mix here of chips actually out, ready to be put on silicon, and in last stages of development. Obviously these are for different users (mobile CPUs don't generally fight for marketshare with Itanium dragsters) but it is still fascinating to see the differences in approach and the different visions of what is important in a modern CPU. Combine this with the news reported earlier on DDR4, and this promises to be a fun year with many new machines likely to appear that are radically different from the last generation. Which leaves just one question — which Linux architecture will be fully updated first?"

25 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Evolutionary! by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Evolutionary upgrades to intel processors and memory standards, titanium is not dead yet, AMD still can't keep up and ARM rules low power applications. Yes, it will be a landmark year for processors.

    1. Re:Evolutionary! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Funny

      I think the news is that MIPS is not dead, it's just pining for the fjords.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    2. Re:Evolutionary! by QuantumRiff · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Why do people keep saying AMD can't keep up? because they don't compete in a market you care about?

      My wife's laptop has an AMD E-350.. its got an ATI video card built onto the cpu.. it sucks down a whopping 9 watts, making her super light 10.6" laptop last about 7 hours.. 4GB of ram, 500GB hard drive, can stream HD video without a hiccup, and it was $350.. about what you would pay for a nice video card.. I would say AMD is competing rather well..

      In the server space, were ditching Intel as fast as we can.. because for our loads, a 16 core Opteron runs oracle at the same speed as a 12 core Intel (CPU usage is not our limiting factor, disk IO is for our databases) and the difference in price last time we looked was about $7k for a Dell R815 spec'd the same as a Dell R810 with dual CPU's.. That difference is a Fusion IO card, or almost another tray of drives.. which would really help IO.

      --

      What are we going to do tonight Brain?
    3. Re:Evolutionary! by msobkow · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Unfortunately most tests aren't covering anything business related like calculating join tables and processing large volumes of relational data. Instead, they report on things business could care less about, like the time it takes to transcode a video file or it's ability to render videogame graphics.

      The simple truth is that there are very few CPUs currently on the market which aren't perfectly capable of handling business application processing like document editing in a very acceptable fashion. In fact, the issue with even the "slow" CPUs is the time it takes to load and initialize an application, not in it's responsiveness once the application is loaded. That would seem to be more of a question of storage bandwidth than it would be of processor horsepower, but reviewers still blame the CPU for the performance.

      For that matter, even the video playback reviews are kind of pointless. Once you have enough snort to render video without dropping frames or tearing, any extra power is pretty much pointless for video processing. While you can start turning on options in the video pipeline, the truth is the effects of those options are virtually unnoticeable unless you use a super-high resolution screen to display expanded video.

      I think Windows RT is going to wake up a significant portion of the population to the benefits of low-power ARM processors in the real world.

      The business market requirements are not the same as the general gaming/video market's requirements.

      --
      I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
    4. Re:Evolutionary! by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Interesting

      My wife's laptop has an AMD E-350.. its got an ATI video card built onto the cpu.. it sucks down a whopping 9 watts, making her super light 10.6" laptop last about 7 hours.. 4GB of ram, 500GB hard drive, can stream HD video without a hiccup, and it was $350.. about what you would pay for a nice video card.. I would say AMD is competing rather well..

      Which laptop is it? There seem to be a distinct lack of super light laptops of late. My eee 900 at 935g is currently lighter than any netbook on the market and the Asus UX-21 seems (at 1.1Kg) to be the joint lightest non netbook.

      What is it? It sounds pretty good and I want one...

      In the server space, were ditching Intel as fast as we can.. because for our loads, a 16 core Opteron runs oracle at the same speed as a 12 core Intel

      That's what I found a while back, when everyone said Intel was faster: the 12 core 6100s could cram more FLOPS into 1U than the best Intel 4 socket boxes, and at a considerably lower price. Intel have substantially improved their offerings since then (AMD has not by quite so much), but the price of RAM crashed, making the CPUs and system boards a much larger fraction of the cost, increasing the advantage of AMD further.

      I actually did the calculation, since I had to budget the 5 year cost, including electricity and cooling and rack space. The AMD systems chew more power, though not as much as the raw CPU differences, since with RAM maxed out, that is a significant fraction of the power draw.

      End result was that the AMD systems were substantially cheaper in compute peak performance per $ and in 5 year compute power per $.

      Actually, the performance is very application dependent. Some codes suck on AMD, others (rarer) had the PhenomII macthing an i7 for speed.

      Intel still have the single thread performance crown, which is really useful on the desktop and laptop. If you're buying a 4 socket machine, it's a fir bet that your task is parallelizable, which reduces the advantage of intel in the 4 socket market.

      For single socket stuff that isn't too performance sensitive, AMD has the additional advantage that cheap consumer level boards support the otherwise expensive enterprisey features of ECC memory. If you care about that sort of thing, then getting a Phenom II is much cheaper than a 1 socket Xeon.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    5. Re:Evolutionary! by QuantumRiff · · Score: 2

      Sorry, i lied a bit.. its an 11.6" screen and it has a C-60 CPU, not an e-350.. looking at the specs, it looks like its half the power, and a bit slower than the "E" class. but still perfect for what she does.

        there are several models of the Acer Aspire One that carry them, think the one I picked up was this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215172
      I picked hers up at costco for $350..

      --

      What are we going to do tonight Brain?
    6. Re:Evolutionary! by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2

      I am kind of figuring its going to be amazing if it lasts two years, so dirt cheap is best.

      My experience is limited to Asus (eee 900), but the interesting thing about those netbooks was that the only thing sacraficed was speed. The build quality was excellent, surprisingly so.

      Over the years, I've been kind of smug when other's vastly more expensive laptops have started to develop cracks, bad hinges, failing screens, broken power connectors, etc etc.

      I've used mine a lot: it's about 4 years old and I've done a lot of travelling with it (though less now than I used to), and it's still in excellent condition (with the exception of the right mouse button, but multi-touch is a perfectly find workaround). The PSU also broke recently. They use a standard connector, so an old maplin generic supply worked until the £10 replacement arrived.

      Actually, curiously, the improvements in Linux power management have been more than matching the age related degradation of the battery, so the battery life is still better now than it was new.

      The build was nothing like super cheap nasty brick laptops it was contemporary with.

      IOW you mey be pleasantly surprised.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    7. Re:Evolutionary! by mhajicek · · Score: 2

      In the CADCAM world we're still aching for faster single-thread execution. Adding cores is kind of a nice side, meaning I can surf with a bajillion tabs open to various forums without slowing down the toolpath verification running on the other screen, but there's isn't much I can do right now to make that verification process faster. Some functions simply need to run sequentially, which means I need a faster clock to make any significant improvements.

  2. Too many other bottlenecks by na1led · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Fast CPU and Ram is great but we are still limited to slow crappy Hard Drives (SSD's too expensive) and OS's / Software that don't take advantage of current technology, let alone next generation.

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    -- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
    1. Re:Too many other bottlenecks by AngryDeuce · · Score: 4, Informative

      SSD's too expensive

      Regular hard drives were just as expensive (if not more so) when they were at a comparable point in their development and life-cycle

      Here is an awful-colored chart showing price per MB over the years. It's not so much that SSDs are really that expensive, it's that traditional HDDs have gotten ridiculously cheap, and capacities have grown beyond the storage needs of most average people. I remember actually filling up hard drives and having to buy larger and larger disks to hold my shit every couple years, but the 500 GB WD in my most current build is running at 40% capacity and I've got a lot of media on there.

  3. All that's great but by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 2

    When is the battery problem going to be solved? Yes I know batteries have been getting better over the years, but devices these days have a hard time saying alive more than 24 hours doing anything useful these days.

    All these wonderful gadgets all end up sucking pond water from the bottom because you need to tether them to a mains socket every few hours...

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:All that's great but by Idbar · · Score: 2

      Batteries have a bit of a slower pace. But the more power budget you give to designers, the more features they add and more power they consume. If some people is fine with having a device recharged every 24h, many people (designers) will work with that budget in mind.

    2. Re:All that's great but by msobkow · · Score: 2

      And how many people stay up 24 hours at a stretch using a battery powered device?

      Sure I can see the need for longer than a 12 hour lifetime in a few cases, like someone who's "off roading" and can't plug in while they're sleeping, but for the vast majority of the population they just need it to function while they're awake, charge while they're sleeping, and that's more than they need.

      As I've never seen a battery powered portable device that requires you to shut down in order to plug in the power supply to recharge, and I've never seen one that couldn't charge while still running, your complaint is pointless nitpicking about numbers that have no practical meaning in the real world.

      --
      I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
    3. Re:All that's great but by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Unless you want something with the energy density of thermite

      Thermite doesn't have an especially high energy density. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_density.svg

      Pure aluminium has a moderate energy density. Once you mix in the iron oxide in stochiometric quantities, the energy density goes down by quite a bit (factor of 4). That still puts it as better than any known battery technology, but only by a factor of 2 for zinc air and 5 dor li-poly. All the common fuels have a much higher energy density.

      The reason that thermite burns so hot is that the products of combustion have a fairly low specific heat capacity and there is no need to heat up a huge bunch of useless nitrogen (compared to burning fuel in air).

      Bottom line is that thermite beats existing battery tech by a wide margin, but falls very far short of common fuels.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
  4. Locked down by tepples · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How many of these CPUs will appear only in devices with cryptographically locked bootloaders? The license agreement for Microsoft's forthcoming Windows RT operating system, for example, explicitly bars device manufacturers from allowing the end user to install a custom signing certificate. And even on devices that do allow homemade kernels, how many devices incorporating these non-x86 CPUs will have driver source (or even proper data sheets) that allow support for all the SoC's features in a freely licensed operating system?

  5. Small SSDs are cheaper by tepples · · Score: 5, Insightful

    slow crappy Hard Drives (SSD's too expensive)

    SSDs aren't too expensive if you don't need to keep your library of videos available at a moment's notice at all times. There exist affordable SSDs that are big enough to hold an operating system, applications, and whatever documents you happen to be working on at a given time.

    1. Re:Small SSDs are cheaper by Pewpdaddy · · Score: 2

      SSD's currently can easily be had at $1 a gig, and even less in some cases. That being said a 120g drive is more than enough for your OS and applications/games you run. Edit the registry to load your profile off an secondary drive and viola. SSD hawtness... I saw a marginal increase when I moved to my SSD. I'm a gamer so thats my benchmark mostly; SWTOR for instance loaded a good bit faster.

    2. Re:Small SSDs are cheaper by wbo · · Score: 2

      I have a similar setup (128GB SSD). You make it sound easy. I tried several ways to move everything over to a hard drive so that nothing user-related was stored on the system/boot SSD. I tried hard links, fiddling with the registry, changing environment variables, but in the end I gave up and kept the stub of my user directory on C: where Windows seemed to want it, and moved all the individual directories (Documents, Music, Pictures, etc.) using the "right-click and use Location tab" approach. Microsoft does NOT make it easy to do this elegantly for all users. Everything I tried either didn't work in the end (e.g., trying to do it via a hard link for the whole Users directory), or was a horrible kludge that left dribbles of user profile stuff on C:, or it didn't recognize things had moved when you try to create new users, or similar "close but not quite" breakage. Either I'm dumb, or you found a magical way to do it easily and effectively. Do share.

      It is actually fairly easy to configure Windows to put user profiles for all users on a different drive than the boot (system) drive, however it must be done when first installing Windows.

      As far as I am aware Microsoft does not officially support moving user profiles after the OS is installed. There are ways to do it, but as you found they all have their problems. By doing it during the OS install pretty much all of the problems are avoided.

      The option to change the location for user profiles is not exposed through the graphical installer for Windows but it can be configured by using an Unattend.xml file by setting the FolderLocations key to point to the drive you want the data to reside on. You can either create the file manually or use the free Windows AIK to do it.

      You can use the FolderLocations key to move several key folders and one of which is the User profile folder.

      If you have never installed Windows using the unattended setup before you may want to experiment using a VM before doing it on real hardware just to make sure you have your Unattend.xml file doing what you want it to.

      The only problem with this is some of the junctions created on the system drive will continue to point to the wrong location. You can find more information on this in MS KB929831. An easy way to fix this is to create a junction at c:\Users pointing to the new user profile location. (For instance on one of my systems I have a junction at C:\Users pointing to F:\Users). This neatly fixes this issue and as a bonus fixes any applications that have hard-coded paths for user profiles.

      I have been running my home system like this for the past 2 years and have not encountered any problems.

  6. 64 bit ARMv8 by Lazy+Jones · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The 64 bit ARM architecture for server CPUs is much more interesting ...

    --
    "I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
    1. Re:64 bit ARMv8 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      No, it's not.

      ARM cpus are actually pretty lousy when it comes to computations/watt. That crown goes to low-end celeron CPUs, by a massive margin. It's just that ARM can operate in the very low-end power sipping envelope that a smartphone/tablet demands.

      You have to remember that these new arm SOCs are actually not very fast when compared to desktop CPUs. The lowest-end single core celeron murders the highest-end quad core arm SOC in terms of computational power. This is the real reason you don't see ARM based desktops.

      Now, it's interesting that you can cram hundreds of arm cores in to a small rack mount chassis.. But how useful that is has yet to be proven.

  7. Never by stooo · · Score: 2

    >> When is the battery problem going to be solved?

    Never. How do you want to "solve" that "problem" ?
    System power is a design issue, but the current state of the art is not really problematic. Of course, if you want turbo-gaming for 12 hours, it's heavy. But else ....

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    aaaaaaa
  8. "Heating up"? by ewg · · Score: 2

    Please don't use the phrase "heating up" referring to CPUs, even as a metaphor!

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  9. I'm shocked... by macromorgan · · Score: 2

    The Itanic hasn't sunk just yet.

  10. CPU Wars? New Boxes? What? Why? by David_Hart · · Score: 2

    I have a quad core i5 desktop and I rarely use it now except for home video encoding/decoding and editing and to stream media to my TV, and most of that is offloaded to the GPU. I use my PS3 and Wii for game playing. Even my relatively new HP DM4T (2010) laptop has been gathering dust lately. I've been spending most of my time, like most people, on my tablet, a HP Touchpad running CM9 android.

    For personal use, CPUs simply do not matter any more, just battery life...

    For corporate use, CPUs matter as we keep trying to pack more application servers on VM machines.

  11. First you have to know that unlocked devices exist by tepples · · Score: 2

    The license agreement for Microsoft's forthcoming Windows RT operating system, for example

    I missed the part where you were forced to buy Microsoft devices

    That or you missed the "for example".

    instead of employing a little forward-thinking and buying a device without a locked bootloader.

    To employ forward-thinking and buy an unlocked device, first you have to know that unlocked devices exist. For example, in the United States market, the most popular handheld gaming devices with physical buttons are the DS series and PSP series. Only hardcore geeks ever mail-order a GP2X product, for example; non-geeks don't even know they exist.