CPU Competition Heating Up In 2012?

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?"

Comments

Evolutionary!

[Sponge Bath]

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.

Re:Evolutionary!

[TheRaven64]

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

Re:Evolutionary!

[QuantumRiff]

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.

Re:Evolutionary!

[msobkow]

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.

Too many other bottlenecks

[na1led]

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.

Re:Too many other bottlenecks

[AngryDeuce]

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.

Locked down

[tepples]

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?

Small SSDs are cheaper

[tepples]

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.