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AMD Launches Piledriver-Based 12 and 16-Core Opteron 6300 Family
MojoKid writes "AMD's new Piledriver-based Opterons are launching today, completing a product refresh that the company began last spring with its Trinity APUs. The new 12 & 16-core Piledriver parts are debuting as the Opteron 6300 series. AMD predicts performance increases of about 8% in integer and floating-point operations. With this round of CPUs, AMD has split its clock speed Turbo range into 'Max' and 'Max All Cores.' The AMD Opteron 6380, for example, is a 2.5GHz CPU with a Max Turbo speed of 3.4GHz and a 2.8GHz Max All Cores Turbo speed."
6200 series have shared FPU (floating point unit). Which means that there are less FPUs that there are processing cores. To multiply two floating point numbers cores are waiting in a queue until FPU is free to use, this happens when all cores are calculating at the same time. If you are doing intensive calculations this is going to be slower than if you used 6100 series. 6100 series have dedicated FPU for each core.
I know this because we were recently buying a new cluster for calculations using YADE software.
How, here's the question: how about 6300 series, is there a dedicated FPU?
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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I'm not even sure how you could post a story about AMD, what with it's recent decline this entire last decade, and not directly compare them to intel.
Are these even desktop or server chips? It's been so long since I bought AMD, I really couldn't tell you which line Piledriver sits in anymore, or if they've consolidated them.
The general gist I've read is that AMD is cheaper than Intel, and in the past has been "more green" due to power consumption, but with Ivy Bridge, your bang for the buck and much, much smaller lithography process has given intel the advantage in both areas.
moox. for a new generation.
AMD have been dying for 20 years now, its just fashionable for you followers to talk about it more in recent months.
They will probably die the year of the Linux Desktop.
Piledriver is the architecture, like Intel's Ivy Bridge is the architecture.
These are server chips. Best case, these are finally faster than their pre-Bulldozer parts in real, consumer desktop use. They will not beat an 8 core Sandy Bridge Xeon in FP-heavy applications, and power consumption is, at best, on the same level as the Xeons.
All they can do is work like crazy on their next line (Steamroller as it?) so they're truly competitive again.
Are these even desktop or server chips? It's been so long since I bought AMD, I really couldn't tell you which line Piledriver sits in anymore, or if they've consolidated them. The general gist I've read is that AMD is cheaper than Intel, and in the past has been "more green" due to power consumption, but with Ivy Bridge, your bang for the buck and much, much smaller lithography process has given intel the advantage in both areas.
Server chips. Opteron was always, and always has been about servers.
I am not a business owner and do not operate servers myself. For home usage, a low price CPU with adequate power will kick intel "we-cripple-all-but-i7-features" anytime in value for my $. I do not do geek pissing contests.
Tomorrow is another day...
Last year we bought some servers with 6 core cpu's
The. SQL 2012 came out with per core licensing
I did some quick math and its cheaper to buy new servers with 4 core cpu's than license SQL 2012 for 12 cores per server
These Opteron models are the new server line from AMD. The desktop version based on the same architecture (the Trinity alluded to in the summary) closed some of the gap against Intel. But Intel remains the market leader on single core performance, performance per core, and power utilization. AMD continues to push the number of cores upward more aggressively, but there's not many workloads where that matters enough for their slim advantage to result in a net win. And the lower efficiency means that sometimes even having more cores doesn't aggregate into enough speed to be a useful alternative. That leaves AMD to compete on pricing. And the CPU is a relatively small part of the total budget on larger servers. Load up a Dell 815 for example and you'll find the CPU pricing seems small compared to what filling its RAM capacity up costs. And then there's reliable storage, at a while higher price level altogether.
The rule of thumb I've been using for the last year, based on benchmarking of CPU heavy database work, is that I expect a 32 core AMD server to be about as fast as a 24 core Intel one, while using significantly more power. The 40% performance per watt gain claimed here--from AMD's own hand-picked best case scenario benchmark--is only enough to make the Intel performance and gap decrease in size, not go away. We'll see if these new Opterons benefit from the re-engineering work done recently more than the desktop ones did; so far it doesn't look good.
AMD had one period in the limelight. When the first good 64-bit x86 systems were Opterons launched in 2003, they had a really competitive product for servers. Intel was busy jerking off with Itanium at that time, was oblivious to power consumption (the Pentium 4 was the desktop processor available), and just generally executing terribly. It was like a textbook classic case where the near monopoly market leader was fat and dumb, and got its ass handed to it by its scrappy competitor.
It took Intel until 2006 to release its first Core microarchitecture chips and start acting right again. By 2009 they had jumped back ahead of AMD in every market again, with the Nehalem server chips. And that was it; Intel has stayed one to two generations ahead of AMD ever since.
MD continues to push the number of cores upward more aggressively, but there's not many workloads where that matters enough for their slim advantage to result in a net win.
I disagree: that's exactly what Xeon and Opteron are about. What differentiates those two from the Core and Phenom processors is that the former have multiple crazy fast and very expensive low latency links to allow glueless multi socket systems. Once you've got an (16)8 (hyper)thread Xeon or 16 core opteron and have more than one socket, you're already expecting a workload to scale to 32 distinct units.
Basically these chips only make sense for pretty parallel work loads.
Load up a Dell 815 for example and you'll find the CPU pricing seems small compared to what filling its RAM capacity up costs.
I use this as my go-to online quoter.
http://www.woc.co.uk/default6.aspx?nquoter=13
I have no affiliation except that I've bought such machines from them before.
Maxing out the RAM (512G) costs £3300. Maxing out the processors costs £2300. It's not quite as much, but it's substantially over half the price.
That said, I've heard rumours that the new opterons can drive 32G DIMMS, in which case you could load it up with 1T RAM for the low, low price of £30,000. In which case, your point certainly stands.
The 40% performance per watt gain claimed here--from AMD's own hand-picked best case scenario benchmark--is only enough to make the Intel performance and gap decrease in size, not go away
True, but the Opterons are substantially cheaper. If you factor in lifetime cost including bang for buck, power and cooling, it's basically a wash and really dependent on the specific workload.
If they have closed the gap this much, then they will be a substantially cheaper option overall.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Intel calculate their TDP based on full load which isn't necessarily maximum power use.
AMD calculate their TDP based on maximum power use.
They've been dying since Intel... bribed vendors not to use Opteron processors so that even when AMD were clearly superior, they could never get ahead of Intel. That of course meant that they never had the revenue to capitalise on their very substantial advantage. Intel, of course got away with paying only $1bn, substantially cheaper than it would have been not to engage in illegal business practicses.
FTFY.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The official tick-tock strategy goes back to the 2006 Core branding change. But Intel had been using two design teams to research and release alternate forms of optimization for a long time before that. In the mid 90's you could make out that one team focused on new architecture style features (386, Pentium) while the other was more about performance tweaking (486, Pentium Pro). The Itanium work spawned a new team altogether. The Core architecture was birthed from releasing that two of those paths--the one that let to the terrible Pentium 4 and Itanium products--had completely botched things. They pulled out of that tailspin by using the other active architecture at the time, the one that went from Pentium 3 to Celeron to Pentium M, as the basis for the new Core.
In some ways it's kind of a shame that it happened that way, because that was the last gasp for interesting new processor features from that style of design. We used to get major architecture changes: 8 to 16 to 32 to 64 bits, extra processing styles going from 387 to MMX to SSE. Now we get tick-tock, shrink and optimize. It's pretty boring.
Yes, they have a shared 256 bit FPU, but that can be split into two 128 bit parts. So no, multiplying two floating point numbers in two threads is performed immediately and simultaneously, the cores do not wait at all. I measured this on a previous generation Opteron 6234, the performance loss caused by running two threads on two cores of the same module vs two cores in different modules was barely measurable, 3%.
AMD had one period in the limelight. When the first good 64-bit x86 systems were Opterons launched in 2003, they had a really competitive product for servers
You're right about the one period in the limelight, but it began when they first released an Athlon processor, and it ended when Intel finally got control of their TDP, and thus it's substantially longer than you suggest, though the ending is the same.
Until recently the primary arguments for AMD were lower power consumption and better performance per dollar. Now neither are true, and the only argument is that it's cheaper. But if that's the case, and you do a little math, you can see that the argument is that you can get less for less, and if you're going to do that, why not buy something with an ARM processor, and no ATI graphics drivers?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Piledriver is the architecture, like Intel's Ivy Bridge is the architecture.
These are server chips. Best case, these are finally faster than their pre-Bulldozer parts in real, consumer desktop use. They will not beat an 8 core Sandy Bridge Xeon in FP-heavy applications, and power consumption is, at best, on the same level as the Xeons.
That's true. A 16-core Opteron has the same FP width as an 8-core Xeon, and a higher TDP for a given clock.
On the other hand, we buy almost all AMD because it lets us build cheap 1U or 2U 4-socket servers with 512GB of RAM each. 4-socket Intel chips (E5-4600 or E7) are much more expensive; mid-range servers work out to 50% more for Intel, and high-end servers about 80% more for equivalent speed.
From 1999 to 2003, AMD's Athlon was a moderately superior CPU to Intel's Pentium III competitor. More most of that time I felt that success was limited by AMD's lack of high quality motherboards to place the CPUs in. My memory of the period matches the early history of the Athlon at cpu-info. You can't really evaluate CPUs without the context of the motherboard and system they're placed into. And the Athlon units as integrated into the systems they ran on were still a hard sell, relative to the slightly slower but more reliable Intel options. That situation didn't really change until the nForce2 chipset was released, and now we're up to the middle of 2002 already.
I highlighted the 2003 to 2006 period instead because it was there AMD was indisputably in the lead. 64 bit support, nForce3 with onboard gigabit as the motherboard, the whole package was viable and the obvious market leader if you wanted high performance.
"Athlon 64" was released in December 2003 that beat P4 in all regards, price, power consumption, performance. Intel recovered from it only in January 2006 with first "Core" CPU. How does that make AMD to be in "decline entire last decade" pretty please?
Would I buy any current AMD processors for a server farm? Probably not.
The predecessors of this series, the Opteron 6200 is used in quite a few supercomputers. Actually I counted 21 Opteron bases systems in the last supercomputer top 100 list.
Geez man. The 486 and Pentium Pro were not performance tweaks. The Pentium Pro for example was a wholly new out-of-order design.