It'll be interesting to see what happens to these teachers after the charges brought against students in recent months.
No it won't. Not much will happen to them. Unlike the student who was arrested a while ago for completing his essay assignment as sked, these teachers will not be arrested. At best they may be fired after a couple months of looking in to it. They will probably only get a slap on the wrist. Don't forget that America in not interested in protecting children. This is a perfect example. By pulling this stunt, the teachers were able to scare the kids and permanantly brand the image of terrorists into the Children's minds. It doesn't matter that the thing turned up to be a hoax, the less educated/experienced of the kids will live with fear for quite a while, perhaps their whole lives. The teachers are acting much as the rest of America acts. It more important to mold children into the "American Cog" than to treat them fairly, or to give them an education. I mean, after all, what about the terrorists?
Again, AMD will never switch to Intel's FSB. Intel's bus is slower, hotter, and larger (in terms of pin count). Please go google for HyperTransport and do some research. I think you'll see that HT is one of AMD's strongest technologies and Intel's FSB is one of their weakest. There it no way AMD would trow away a major advantage over their competitor, and further, there is no way AMD would allow their socket future to be controlled by a competitor. The idea is so far from reality, I don't even see why posters keep bringing it up again, and again, and again...
I'm not complaining about the move, I just found the article a bit sparse on details and the statement at odds with common sense. Is it fully open, or does it require licensing? What is AMD's take on this news? How much re-work will be required to move AMD's processor cores to the intel bus? Will they gain performance or lose it in the translation?
Intel is not trying to open their bus up to AMD. That is not at all the goal. First of all, access to the the Intel bus requires a license. I'm not sure Intel would even grand AMD one for a sane price. Second of all, AMD would in no way want Intel's bus. As has been the hot topic of discussion for over a year, AMD's HT (HyperTransport) point-2-point links are faster both in terms of bandwidth, and latency than Intel's FSB. HT uses less pins than Intel's bus, and HT devices are simpler, cost less, and use less power. HT is a pretty neat and effective technology. Intel's FSB on the other hand, is much the same as it was around 10 years ago. To answer your question, AMD would take a massive hit by going to Intel's POS bus. It's funny, ATM, AMD has the better bus/platform and Intel has the better core. No one here seems to realize that AMD would never be willing to throw out their main advantage right now... AM2 isn't the issue. The issue is HT. Hell, even IBM announced that Power7 will use AMD's HT links. No one will be dropping HT for the POSFSB any time soon.
Intel/AMD are only opening their sockets/buses in an attempt to get third party developers to make FPGAs, JAVAics, and other accelerators. AMD has had some luck with this, and one can buy co-processors that drop into an AMD socket today. Intel is trying to get the same benifits, but I don't really see the point until Intel can get CSI working and drop the antiquated FSB.
This is the same old crap about "Science can't prove that the Sun will rise tomorrow, thus the Universe is unknowable."
One may be able to predict future outcome based on current/past state with some degree of accuracy, but claiming that anything can ever be KNOWN smells of religious fanaticism to me. Science is built to adapt, not to "prove" antiquated theories and latch on to them forever.
Of course reality exists when you aren't looking.
I would argue that perfect destruction and recreation of reality would be impossible for us to detect. Much as a virtual machine can start and stop its unknowing inhabitants at will, I don't see any compelling reason why we couldn't exist in a similar confinement. I certainly don't agree that this is a simple matter of common sense as you imply.
Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science.
I realize that there is more to CS than programming, but I would be surprised if theoretical computer science, which is more math intensive, would be that much more appealing. . . . Any way you go, I don't see how to remove the nerd factor from CS.
Dell Poweredge SC1420 with dual Xeon 2.8GHz processors
While I can't seem to find all the information on the SC1420, it appears as though this product uses processors from the Prescott generation of Intel CPUs. Some chips from this group support "Vanderpool", Intel's hardware virtualization solution, but not all do. The presence or absence of this feature could greatly impact the performance penalty faced by operating a virtualized computing environment. Further, Intel's new Core2 based CPUs feature a hardware virtualization implementation which may have vastly different performance characteristics. AMD's K8 family supports hardware virtualization as well. I'm excited about their new line of CPUs based on the K10 (Barcelona) core, which feature "NestedPageTables," which are supposed to greatly reduce overhead by doing memory translations in hardware instead of in software by the hypervisor.
All I'm really trying to say is that this article really is only a single data point. I wouldn't let their results influence your overall view of virtualization in any way...
Sure, performance is not the only factor. Intel does get some points for having a great combination of outstanding performance and very good thermal characteristics. Core2 is a great architecture, and I don't think anyone is trying to say otherwise. However, many people take Intel's general win and skew this into the claim that Intel and Core2 are the best for everything, which clearly is not true. The tactics used in the past by many reviewers have been to run overclocked Intel chips against stock AMD chips. This isn't exactly "cheating," but it ensures that Intel will be in the top stops on the charts. Also, many reviewers simply choose to skip the benches AMD is strong at, like Cinebench and POV-Ray. I'm not here to claim any one chip beats the hell out of the other, I just wish a lot of the fanboyism and Intel's reviewer payments would go away so we could get more reviews like TechReport's, which show many of the strong points and weaknesses of both sides.
Intel > AMD at high end, Intel >= AMD at low end, Core 2 > A64, Intel finally has a lead in both architecture design and process (65nm).
I would agree with that as a generalization, but I still think it is very important for people to consider the applications they use most often. TR's benches clearly show that someone working primarily with POV-Ray would get better performance for $599 with AMD than for $999 with Intel. I agree that Intel takes the overall win, but blanket statements like this really fail to catch the areas where some chips shine and others do not.
While the review is not perfect, it is a breath of fresh air compared to many of the tactics reviewers often use to skew the results in the favor of one company or the other (usually Intel). Tech Report presents benchmarks that each side wins. AMD takes a clear win in Cinebench and POV-Ray and some minor wins in a couple of other areas. It is good to see AMD get some accurate representation in a time when most are happy to claim that Conroe and the Core2 arch cannot be beaten. AMD's new architecture (new core enhancements as well as quad-core) will come out at the end of the second quarter this year, and if their claims of performance improvement on the per-core level is accurate, I think we may see another stage in the never ending game of leapfrog. Anyways, I'm pleased to see a mostly accurate review, even if I disagree with the commentary at times.
If the copyright holders are unwilling to sell a copy of a digital work, how can it possibly be morally wrong to obtain your own copy at zero cost to the original owner? The owner can't even try to claim that they lost "potential sales", because they were not selling copies in the first place.
This 40% faster than Clovertown claim is only referring to FP code. The integer side is not nearly as clear. Expect AMD to improve integer performance over K8, but I don't expect any miracles. Here is a small list of improvements Barcelona will have over K8:
- Double L1 cache bandwidth
- Double FP units
- Single-cycle SSE (vs K8's 2-cycle)
- More fast-path decoding
- Double TLB size
- Independent DDR channels
- More cache (L3)
- Out-of-Order loads
- New instructions (LZCNT, POPCNT, EXTRQ/INSERTQ, MOVNTSD/MOVNTSS)
- Double prefetch (from 16 bytes -> 32 bytes)
- Larger Branch Target Buffer
- Larger Out of Order (OoO) buffers
- Support for new HT standard (3.0)
Yet, someone please explain why all managers seem to believe that he copper pipes soldered together will hold and throw them fortunes? Is it the attractivity of the gamble in and on itself?
Intel will be first to market with QC chips. At that time, Intel's product will be better... because AMD won't have one yet. That is why Intel is taking the route it is. Good for business? Maybe... it just puts Intel that much furhter behind in the long run, only for some short term gains... I don't have a business degree, but I don't think it's worth it.
Intel's QC is really an MCM, or multi-chip-module. That means they have literally grabbed two Conroe (Core 2 Duo) chips off of the assembly line, and mounted them in a single package. From the outside it looks like a single chip, but inside, it has two, separate peices of Si, connected over the FSB. That is the problem: the two chips are connected to the same bus. A single chip presents one electrical load on the bus, and two chips present two loads. This means that the speed of the bus needs to be dropped. That is why kentsfield will have a slower bus speed than normal chips. If you think about it, this is the exact opposite of the situation you want. You have just added a core, so it would be nice to add more bus bandwidth. Instead, the Intel solution lowers the overall bus bandwidth, not to mention that it is a shared bus. The two cores fight each other over a very slow external bus, and this creates a performance bottleneck.
When all four cores are on a single peice of Si, all sharing a L3 cache, the chips don't need to fight over the external bus as much. The cores can share information between them internally, and do not need to touch the slow external bus to perform cache coherency and other synchronization. Also, true QC chip presents one load to the outside bus. This means that the bus speed does not need to drop because of electrical load.
There are many people who don't care how the cores are connected as long as the package works. The point is that the way the cores are connected have a direct impact on performance. We'll be talking about Intel vs. AMD cache hierarchy in 2007 when AMD uses dedicated L2 and shared L3 while Intel uses only shared L2. Expect cache thrashing on Intel's true QC chips with heavily threaded loads when it comes out. Next I'll hear people say that the cahce doesn't matter as long as it works. As long as it works for what? Single-threaded tiny-footprint benchmarks like SuperPi or Prime95? How about a fully threaded and loaded database or any other app that will actually stress more than the execution units?
Note to AMD: We don't care about the implementation details. We care about performance, cost, and power consumption; the clock speed, cache sizes, and how cores talk to each other is irrelevant.
AMD it taking the route that will give better performance. I hear you saying that soldering some copper pipes with rubber-bands would be fine as long as it would perform. The point is that it will work... just not very well.
If you don't think I'm right, look at Intel's own product roadmap. They plan to release a new version of Kentsfield that has all four cores on one peice of Si, with a shared cache, just like AMD is about to do... only later in 2007 after AMD's version comes out. When the two major chip companies move in the same direction, usually that means it is the right one. The only difference is that AMD is going to get there sooner because they didn't bother to play around with this MCM (Multi-Chip-Module) junk. Intel just wants to get to market first; they don't seem to put quality first.
I won't buy any AMD processors anymore until AMD clears its socket plans and guaranties a minimum of 3 year availability for processors on a socket.
I suppose that means you won't buy an Intel chip either. Look at what happened with Conroe. Core 2 Duo uses a socket with the same name as the P4 socket, the same number of pins too. But guess what? When Conroe came out there were less than a handful of reasonable boards out of the hundreds of models out, that would actually support it. The voltage requirements changed slightly, the BIOS requirements changed, and the end result was that upgrading to Conroe on a given board was hit or miss. I fail to see how Intel's MB upgrade situation is any better than AMD's. It sounds to me like you're falling for Intel's game: "We kept the socket name and number of pins the same, so that means we have better socket longevity." Sorry, but I'm not falling for it. I've read too many horror stories on the forums from Conroe upgraders that thought they could use their current P4 boards.
Don't get me started on Intel's TDP scam either (AMD's = max, Intel's = average). AMD may not always have the best tech, but I find them to be a much more straight-forward company, with fewer sneaky games designed to trick customers.
And why are we posting a story about AMD's tech said/written by an Intel employee? Sounds like it was biased before it even started to me.
Intel had what, 5 years to top K8 and 5%-10% better speeds was the best they could manage?
Well, it depends. Core 2 is really good at 32-bit single threaded tasks that fit inside a 4MB cache or have sequential memory access patters. On these workloads Core 2 will wipe the floor with AMD's K8, hands down. Just look at SuperPI scores for an example.
Here's the question though: What happens with heavily threaded 64-bit tasks that use much more than 4MB of memory in a random access pattern? AMD's K8 wipes the floor with Core 2, hands down.
There is a reason most gamers/encoders buy Core 2 for their desktops and many businesses and universities buy K8 Opterons for their servers and HPC centers.
As a side note; does anyone have any info on what AMD are planning, if anything, to compete against the Core 2 Duo in the near future? I read something a while back about them switching to 65nm at a new fab, but I don't follow the processor market that closely anymore.
AMD has a couple of interesting products comming out:
- First is 4x4, comming out in 4Q2006. This is essentially a dual-socket platform designed for the high-end desktop and low-end workstation/server market. This isn't a product for everyone, but it will make for a very price attractive dual-socket workstation. To start with, it will support two dual-core chips for a total of four cores. AMD has stated that later, when they release quad-core chips, 4x4 will support two of them for a total of eight cores. It's a niche market, but a neat idea.
- Second, AMD is releasing a new core in 2Q2007. This core has double the number of FP (floating point) pipelines, double the L1 cache bandwidth, larger reorder buffers, a L3 cache, and will come in dual and quad-core versions. This chip is going to be a beast, and will be supported in any current socket AM2 mother board. For more, read this: HardOCP, HardOCP. This new core is the direct answer to Core2/conroe, and I expect it to be a good one. It looks really good on paper, and after seeing AMD's delivery of K8, I expect the new core to live up to the hype.
What ever happened to evauating the performance of a chip based on the actual application that is going to be run? I can honestly tell you right now that almost every application that is memory bandwidth limited is going to perform better on an AMD K8 chip than Core2/conroe. The K8's integrated memory controller supports much better memory throughput.
I suppose it is out of style to recognize the good and bad charictaristics of each offering. The current trend is to call one the all around "winner" and call everyone else a fanboy..
The main issue I have with this is distance. From the perspective of the accused, the laws were made by a big group of old men and women, hundreds if not thousands of miles away. The lawmakers are so far removed from the citizens that they don't ever totally understand the repercussions their laws are going to have on the public. If we remove the human judge, we will be bound just that much more completely by unjust laws that have unintended consequences.
Human oversight would be better than nothing, but I think it is very important to put a person in the court room so they can fully understand the specifics of the case and any special circumstances that may exist.
I'm not convinced a computer would be any less easy to "hack" than a human anyways.
We live in a world where we are all criminals. Don't think you break any laws? Think again. Everyone who is old enough to read this post has broken many laws in their life, even if they were minor laws.
When you live in a world where everyone is a criminal, the idea of a computer judge is very scary. The computer will not be able to make common sense decisions about what needs to be done to arrive at the judgement that is best for everyone.
In a world with imperfect laws, enforcing the laws perfectly is immoral, unjust, and IMHO, just insane.
'There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with'. - Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
1) Steal 1000 e-passports.
2) Duplicate and sell them to people who look similar.
3)...
4) Profit!
Intel's own tech docs
on
IBM Opts for AMD
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· Score: 4, Informative
Intel's own tech documents state that their famous "Micro-Ops Fusion" does not work in 64-bit mode. This feature is one of the main features that make the Core2 architecture as fast as it is. Losing this knocks performance down around 5 to 6 percent, which puts Opteron just that much closer.
No one is trying to say that Woodcrest isn't a good 64-bit chip. We are just telling it like it is: woodcrest does not gain much from 32 -> 64-bit code (in some cases it is a bit slower), while the Opteron gains decently almost across the board.
Way to post an article that is over a year old. The is just silly. The article lists the old order of product releases; the new order is actually reversed. Move along, nothing to see here. Google news will do much better.
We all know that school has nothing to do with learning math or science or a language. Public elementary and high-schools are designed to break the will of students and turn them into submissive subjects so they will be ready for the rest of their lives. School is a social thing. I learned more math, science, and english from my father than I ever did in school. Academically, school was a fucking joke. Socially, it was a huge challenge.
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It'll be interesting to see what happens to these teachers after the charges brought against students in recent months.
No it won't. Not much will happen to them. Unlike the student who was arrested a while ago for completing his essay assignment as sked, these teachers will not be arrested. At best they may be fired after a couple months of looking in to it. They will probably only get a slap on the wrist. Don't forget that America in not interested in protecting children. This is a perfect example. By pulling this stunt, the teachers were able to scare the kids and permanantly brand the image of terrorists into the Children's minds. It doesn't matter that the thing turned up to be a hoax, the less educated/experienced of the kids will live with fear for quite a while, perhaps their whole lives. The teachers are acting much as the rest of America acts. It more important to mold children into the "American Cog" than to treat them fairly, or to give them an education. I mean, after all, what about the terrorists?
Again, AMD will never switch to Intel's FSB. Intel's bus is slower, hotter, and larger (in terms of pin count). Please go google for HyperTransport and do some research. I think you'll see that HT is one of AMD's strongest technologies and Intel's FSB is one of their weakest. There it no way AMD would trow away a major advantage over their competitor, and further, there is no way AMD would allow their socket future to be controlled by a competitor. The idea is so far from reality, I don't even see why posters keep bringing it up again, and again, and again...
I'm not complaining about the move, I just found the article a bit sparse on details and the statement at odds with common sense. Is it fully open, or does it require licensing? What is AMD's take on this news? How much re-work will be required to move AMD's processor cores to the intel bus? Will they gain performance or lose it in the translation?
Intel is not trying to open their bus up to AMD. That is not at all the goal. First of all, access to the the Intel bus requires a license. I'm not sure Intel would even grand AMD one for a sane price. Second of all, AMD would in no way want Intel's bus. As has been the hot topic of discussion for over a year, AMD's HT (HyperTransport) point-2-point links are faster both in terms of bandwidth, and latency than Intel's FSB. HT uses less pins than Intel's bus, and HT devices are simpler, cost less, and use less power. HT is a pretty neat and effective technology. Intel's FSB on the other hand, is much the same as it was around 10 years ago. To answer your question, AMD would take a massive hit by going to Intel's POS bus. It's funny, ATM, AMD has the better bus/platform and Intel has the better core. No one here seems to realize that AMD would never be willing to throw out their main advantage right now... AM2 isn't the issue. The issue is HT. Hell, even IBM announced that Power7 will use AMD's HT links. No one will be dropping HT for the POSFSB any time soon.
Intel/AMD are only opening their sockets/buses in an attempt to get third party developers to make FPGAs, JAVAics, and other accelerators. AMD has had some luck with this, and one can buy co-processors that drop into an AMD socket today. Intel is trying to get the same benifits, but I don't really see the point until Intel can get CSI working and drop the antiquated FSB.
This is the same old crap about "Science can't prove that the Sun will rise tomorrow, thus the Universe is unknowable."
One may be able to predict future outcome based on current/past state with some degree of accuracy, but claiming that anything can ever be KNOWN smells of religious fanaticism to me. Science is built to adapt, not to "prove" antiquated theories and latch on to them forever.
Of course reality exists when you aren't looking.
I would argue that perfect destruction and recreation of reality would be impossible for us to detect. Much as a virtual machine can start and stop its unknowing inhabitants at will, I don't see any compelling reason why we couldn't exist in a similar confinement. I certainly don't agree that this is a simple matter of common sense as you imply.
Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science.
I realize that there is more to CS than programming, but I would be surprised if theoretical computer science, which is more math intensive, would be that much more appealing. . . . Any way you go, I don't see how to remove the nerd factor from CS.
Dell Poweredge SC1420 with dual Xeon 2.8GHz processors
While I can't seem to find all the information on the SC1420, it appears as though this product uses processors from the Prescott generation of Intel CPUs. Some chips from this group support "Vanderpool", Intel's hardware virtualization solution, but not all do. The presence or absence of this feature could greatly impact the performance penalty faced by operating a virtualized computing environment. Further, Intel's new Core2 based CPUs feature a hardware virtualization implementation which may have vastly different performance characteristics. AMD's K8 family supports hardware virtualization as well. I'm excited about their new line of CPUs based on the K10 (Barcelona) core, which feature "NestedPageTables," which are supposed to greatly reduce overhead by doing memory translations in hardware instead of in software by the hypervisor.
All I'm really trying to say is that this article really is only a single data point. I wouldn't let their results influence your overall view of virtualization in any way...
Sure, performance is not the only factor. Intel does get some points for having a great combination of outstanding performance and very good thermal characteristics. Core2 is a great architecture, and I don't think anyone is trying to say otherwise. However, many people take Intel's general win and skew this into the claim that Intel and Core2 are the best for everything, which clearly is not true. The tactics used in the past by many reviewers have been to run overclocked Intel chips against stock AMD chips. This isn't exactly "cheating," but it ensures that Intel will be in the top stops on the charts. Also, many reviewers simply choose to skip the benches AMD is strong at, like Cinebench and POV-Ray. I'm not here to claim any one chip beats the hell out of the other, I just wish a lot of the fanboyism and Intel's reviewer payments would go away so we could get more reviews like TechReport's, which show many of the strong points and weaknesses of both sides.
Intel > AMD at high end, Intel >= AMD at low end, Core 2 > A64, Intel finally has a lead in both architecture design and process (65nm).
I would agree with that as a generalization, but I still think it is very important for people to consider the applications they use most often. TR's benches clearly show that someone working primarily with POV-Ray would get better performance for $599 with AMD than for $999 with Intel. I agree that Intel takes the overall win, but blanket statements like this really fail to catch the areas where some chips shine and others do not.
While the review is not perfect, it is a breath of fresh air compared to many of the tactics reviewers often use to skew the results in the favor of one company or the other (usually Intel). Tech Report presents benchmarks that each side wins. AMD takes a clear win in Cinebench and POV-Ray and some minor wins in a couple of other areas. It is good to see AMD get some accurate representation in a time when most are happy to claim that Conroe and the Core2 arch cannot be beaten. AMD's new architecture (new core enhancements as well as quad-core) will come out at the end of the second quarter this year, and if their claims of performance improvement on the per-core level is accurate, I think we may see another stage in the never ending game of leapfrog. Anyways, I'm pleased to see a mostly accurate review, even if I disagree with the commentary at times.
If the copyright holders are unwilling to sell a copy of a digital work, how can it possibly be morally wrong to obtain your own copy at zero cost to the original owner? The owner can't even try to claim that they lost "potential sales", because they were not selling copies in the first place.
This 40% faster than Clovertown claim is only referring to FP code. The integer side is not nearly as clear. Expect AMD to improve integer performance over K8, but I don't expect any miracles. Here is a small list of improvements Barcelona will have over K8:
- Double L1 cache bandwidth
- Double FP units
- Single-cycle SSE (vs K8's 2-cycle)
- More fast-path decoding
- Double TLB size
- Independent DDR channels
- More cache (L3)
- Out-of-Order loads
- New instructions (LZCNT, POPCNT, EXTRQ/INSERTQ, MOVNTSD/MOVNTSS)
- Double prefetch (from 16 bytes -> 32 bytes)
- Larger Branch Target Buffer
- Larger Out of Order (OoO) buffers
- Support for new HT standard (3.0)
Yet, someone please explain why all managers seem to believe that he copper pipes soldered together will hold and throw them fortunes? Is it the attractivity of the gamble in and on itself?
Intel will be first to market with QC chips. At that time, Intel's product will be better... because AMD won't have one yet. That is why Intel is taking the route it is. Good for business? Maybe... it just puts Intel that much furhter behind in the long run, only for some short term gains... I don't have a business degree, but I don't think it's worth it.
Intel's QC is really an MCM, or multi-chip-module. That means they have literally grabbed two Conroe (Core 2 Duo) chips off of the assembly line, and mounted them in a single package. From the outside it looks like a single chip, but inside, it has two, separate peices of Si, connected over the FSB. That is the problem: the two chips are connected to the same bus. A single chip presents one electrical load on the bus, and two chips present two loads. This means that the speed of the bus needs to be dropped. That is why kentsfield will have a slower bus speed than normal chips. If you think about it, this is the exact opposite of the situation you want. You have just added a core, so it would be nice to add more bus bandwidth. Instead, the Intel solution lowers the overall bus bandwidth, not to mention that it is a shared bus. The two cores fight each other over a very slow external bus, and this creates a performance bottleneck.
When all four cores are on a single peice of Si, all sharing a L3 cache, the chips don't need to fight over the external bus as much. The cores can share information between them internally, and do not need to touch the slow external bus to perform cache coherency and other synchronization. Also, true QC chip presents one load to the outside bus. This means that the bus speed does not need to drop because of electrical load.
There are many people who don't care how the cores are connected as long as the package works. The point is that the way the cores are connected have a direct impact on performance. We'll be talking about Intel vs. AMD cache hierarchy in 2007 when AMD uses dedicated L2 and shared L3 while Intel uses only shared L2. Expect cache thrashing on Intel's true QC chips with heavily threaded loads when it comes out. Next I'll hear people say that the cahce doesn't matter as long as it works. As long as it works for what? Single-threaded tiny-footprint benchmarks like SuperPi or Prime95? How about a fully threaded and loaded database or any other app that will actually stress more than the execution units?
Note to AMD: We don't care about the implementation details. We care about performance, cost, and power consumption; the clock speed, cache sizes, and how cores talk to each other is irrelevant.
AMD it taking the route that will give better performance. I hear you saying that soldering some copper pipes with rubber-bands would be fine as long as it would perform. The point is that it will work... just not very well.
If you don't think I'm right, look at Intel's own product roadmap. They plan to release a new version of Kentsfield that has all four cores on one peice of Si, with a shared cache, just like AMD is about to do... only later in 2007 after AMD's version comes out. When the two major chip companies move in the same direction, usually that means it is the right one. The only difference is that AMD is going to get there sooner because they didn't bother to play around with this MCM (Multi-Chip-Module) junk. Intel just wants to get to market first; they don't seem to put quality first.
I won't buy any AMD processors anymore until AMD clears its socket plans and guaranties a minimum of 3 year availability for processors on a socket.
I suppose that means you won't buy an Intel chip either. Look at what happened with Conroe. Core 2 Duo uses a socket with the same name as the P4 socket, the same number of pins too. But guess what? When Conroe came out there were less than a handful of reasonable boards out of the hundreds of models out, that would actually support it. The voltage requirements changed slightly, the BIOS requirements changed, and the end result was that upgrading to Conroe on a given board was hit or miss. I fail to see how Intel's MB upgrade situation is any better than AMD's. It sounds to me like you're falling for Intel's game: "We kept the socket name and number of pins the same, so that means we have better socket longevity." Sorry, but I'm not falling for it. I've read too many horror stories on the forums from Conroe upgraders that thought they could use their current P4 boards.
Don't get me started on Intel's TDP scam either (AMD's = max, Intel's = average). AMD may not always have the best tech, but I find them to be a much more straight-forward company, with fewer sneaky games designed to trick customers.
And why are we posting a story about AMD's tech said/written by an Intel employee? Sounds like it was biased before it even started to me.
Intel had what, 5 years to top K8 and 5%-10% better speeds was the best they could manage?
Well, it depends. Core 2 is really good at 32-bit single threaded tasks that fit inside a 4MB cache or have sequential memory access patters. On these workloads Core 2 will wipe the floor with AMD's K8, hands down. Just look at SuperPI scores for an example.
Here's the question though: What happens with heavily threaded 64-bit tasks that use much more than 4MB of memory in a random access pattern? AMD's K8 wipes the floor with Core 2, hands down.
There is a reason most gamers/encoders buy Core 2 for their desktops and many businesses and universities buy K8 Opterons for their servers and HPC centers.
As a side note; does anyone have any info on what AMD are planning, if anything, to compete against the Core 2 Duo in the near future? I read something a while back about them switching to 65nm at a new fab, but I don't follow the processor market that closely anymore.
AMD has a couple of interesting products comming out:
- First is 4x4, comming out in 4Q2006. This is essentially a dual-socket platform designed for the high-end desktop and low-end workstation/server market. This isn't a product for everyone, but it will make for a very price attractive dual-socket workstation. To start with, it will support two dual-core chips for a total of four cores. AMD has stated that later, when they release quad-core chips, 4x4 will support two of them for a total of eight cores. It's a niche market, but a neat idea.
- Second, AMD is releasing a new core in 2Q2007. This core has double the number of FP (floating point) pipelines, double the L1 cache bandwidth, larger reorder buffers, a L3 cache, and will come in dual and quad-core versions. This chip is going to be a beast, and will be supported in any current socket AM2 mother board. For more, read this: HardOCP, HardOCP. This new core is the direct answer to Core2/conroe, and I expect it to be a good one. It looks really good on paper, and after seeing AMD's delivery of K8, I expect the new core to live up to the hype.
Quite correct.
What ever happened to evauating the performance of a chip based on the actual application that is going to be run? I can honestly tell you right now that almost every application that is memory bandwidth limited is going to perform better on an AMD K8 chip than Core2/conroe. The K8's integrated memory controller supports much better memory throughput.
I suppose it is out of style to recognize the good and bad charictaristics of each offering. The current trend is to call one the all around "winner" and call everyone else a fanboy..
I suppose "criminal" does only apply to a subset of the current legislature. Thanks for the correction.
The main issue I have with this is distance. From the perspective of the accused, the laws were made by a big group of old men and women, hundreds if not thousands of miles away. The lawmakers are so far removed from the citizens that they don't ever totally understand the repercussions their laws are going to have on the public. If we remove the human judge, we will be bound just that much more completely by unjust laws that have unintended consequences.
Human oversight would be better than nothing, but I think it is very important to put a person in the court room so they can fully understand the specifics of the case and any special circumstances that may exist.
I'm not convinced a computer would be any less easy to "hack" than a human anyways.
I find this idea very scary...
We live in a world where we are all criminals. Don't think you break any laws? Think again. Everyone who is old enough to read this post has broken many laws in their life, even if they were minor laws.
When you live in a world where everyone is a criminal, the idea of a computer judge is very scary. The computer will not be able to make common sense decisions about what needs to be done to arrive at the judgement that is best for everyone.
In a world with imperfect laws, enforcing the laws perfectly is immoral, unjust, and IMHO, just insane.
'There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with'.
- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
1) Steal 1000 e-passports. ...
2) Duplicate and sell them to people who look similar.
3)
4) Profit!
Intel's own tech documents state that their famous "Micro-Ops Fusion" does not work in 64-bit mode. This feature is one of the main features that make the Core2 architecture as fast as it is. Losing this knocks performance down around 5 to 6 percent, which puts Opteron just that much closer.
xbitlabs has some more details.
No one is trying to say that Woodcrest isn't a good 64-bit chip. We are just telling it like it is: woodcrest does not gain much from 32 -> 64-bit code (in some cases it is a bit slower), while the Opteron gains decently almost across the board.
Friday 06 May 2005, 10:15
Way to post an article that is over a year old. The is just silly. The article lists the old order of product releases; the new order is actually reversed. Move along, nothing to see here. Google news will do much better.
We all know that school has nothing to do with learning math or science or a language. Public elementary and high-schools are designed to break the will of students and turn them into submissive subjects so they will be ready for the rest of their lives. School is a social thing. I learned more math, science, and english from my father than I ever did in school. Academically, school was a fucking joke. Socially, it was a huge challenge.