Personally I thought it started with an angst/anti-religion bent in the first 2 studio albums moving to I'm not sure what in The Fragile, although the first anti industry sentiments came out there (StarFuckers comes to mind). I saw that same bent in "The Hand That Feeds", although maybe I need to go back and listen to it with a different mindset.
Personally, I liked "Getting Smaller" best, although I thought the album as a whole . I'm looking forward to getting the new one. (NIN is one of the few bands I'll buy without hearing most if any of the songs. I've been surprised, but not disappointed so far) I'm glad he's backed off the artistic bent he went with The Fragile.
Pretty Hate Machine sounds like it's primarily against organized religion, the Catholic Church specifically. Intertwined there is the teenage angst of getting royally screwed over by a puppylove crush.
Or at least that's how I perceived the title, Head like a Hole, Sanctified, and Ringfinger among others.
I have always been and continue to be primarily interested in the technical aspects of CPUs. In some respects you could say I am an Intel fanboy because I have unwavering confidence in their long term vision and ability to continue the advancement of microprocessor technology. I have primarily used Intel chips since the 8080 and while the Motorola chips had nice general purpose registers, I held on and waited for Intel to evolve the way I wanted. Then you and I are of differing opinions. I do not think Intel has a good vision of the future, nor even of the present. C2D was a reactionary CPU developed from in house technology solely in response to AMD's Opteron/FX line of CPUs that were just killing them. Itanium, their idea of the future, appears largely dead, with an ever declining marketshare. The DEC Alpha chip would have been a better bet. Their monopoly pricing practices are now out in the open and are already having a negative effect. Their current price war intended at the minimum to drain AMD to stop innovation is in full swing, but will hopefully be too little too late. Even Intel can't bleed forever, especially if their marketshare shrinks by as much as AMD hopes it will.
very interesting application, and I'm guessing you have (a) controller systems that segment and hand out work to individual systems/processors for the Intel set to work more efficiently than AMD (given that 2P 51xx systems start to have memory bandwidth issues if multiple threads access shared memory across both processors - the same problem that exist with the quads, btw)
The most ridiculously equipped IO system I've seen are SGI systems, but that was years ago and haven't revisted for that level of bandwidth since, not being in the same market anymore.
Interesting discussion. I'm likewise about to setup a configuration for SOA/HA, but for data services which are slightly less, shall we say, IO intensive.;)
Check out this post and its parent for links and analysis of performance numbers. I'm not so sure that C2D does more work than AMDs CPUs, or at least not significantly more work per clock.
I would also disagree with your assessment of where AMD is w/ regards to Intel in terms of past history. This is more like AMD's K7 Athlon against Intel's P4. (ie, last gen against current gen). I'd cautiously predict a repeat of history when Barcelona comes out, especially given AMD's optimistically upwardly revised compartive performance numbers post pre-prod release (up to 50% better performance at equivalent clock speeds).
Lastly, I'd note that the quad C2Ds actually show the limitations of Intel's approach in that true multi-threaded performance suffers a tremendous drop in efficiency compared to dual core C2Ds, a drop I do not expect to see in Barcelona with its 4 core shared L3 cache.
All three use 90nm chips running on nVidia 590 SLI motherboards. So system power consumption numbers are skewed. Not only that, IIRC xbitlabs discovered that to fully load the C2D processor different tests had to be run. When both are fully loaded, the max power consumption is actually much closer.
That aside, I actually went through the process of detailing the performance differences between the two processors (C2D x6800 against the X2 6000+). The best C2D numbers I could come up with for something that stretches the CPU is DIVX encoding @ about 33% using the most favorable % numbers you can generate. Windows Media Player 9 and MPEG 2 encoding were both about 25%, and MPEG1 15%. Cache Memory (43%) and Multi-Core bandwidth (60% - need to see what they actually mean by this) were the only two clear artificial component benchmarks going to Intel. The rest were less than 10% in favor of Intel or in favor of AMD, with the Integer mark 35% in favor of AMD. The games show a median improvement of less than 20%, with a maximum of 36% in Sharky's reviews. I would have liked to have seen power graphs while generating those numbers, as that would have told us more about power efficiency.
So, in short, we have no real comparison with performance and power numbers. Performance-wise I'm somewhat underwhelmed by the C2D's improvements over AMD's offering but note that C2D is better, at least as far as games go, but not so much better as to make me buy one without evaluating AMD's new offering (which, btw, AMD has revised upwards to 50% better performance over an equivalently clocked C2D after releasing pre-prod sample)
Lastly, if you're looking in the server space, few if any of the linked performance numbers mean squat.
Opterons are upgradable with a chip replacement. Would you do this in a data center for x86? I have in the distant past but within the past 8 years, replacement made more sense, since most were 1 or 2P systems. For 4P or more it used to be specialized motherboards and chipsets that couldn't be replaced (in the x86 world). With Opterons, you can upgrade CPUs.
Having said all that, if you're never going to upgrade data center systems I'd have to evaluate Intel vs Opteron for 1 or 2P systems as I haven't done so in 6 months since the Woodcrest set came out with one exception. I noted that in heavily multi-threaded applications running across 4 cores with high memory bandwidth requirements that Woodcrest systems falter in performance (limits of the FSB). Also, the FBDIMMs required on 2P 51xx systems have much higher latency. It's highly depedendent on your application whether this will make or break the decision for you. If your system benefits from NUMA, then Opterons are the only way to go. It's much more complicated for me than a simple $$$/unit-compute or $$$/watt issue. It's a $$$/performance issue, where performance is full system based.
I'll refrain from talking about Barcelona at this point, since without benchmarked processors it's largely speculative as to the various things it will bring to the table that could change the equations.
In the 4 socket space, they are 48% of the entire 4 socket market, not just x86. I couldn't find a statistic on x86 alone.
As for 1-8 core market (pre-quad core) AMD had 26+% of the x86 market in either Q3 or Q4 of 2006. That's significant enough to break Intel's hold on the market. I couldn't find a statement about the 2 socket market as a whole or x86 alone, so I cannot break down the numbers any further than that. It was also without Dell, who sells about 1 out of every 5 PCs, although I don't know what their server numbers are.
However, if you realize that prior to 2004 AMD owned virtually 0% of that market....
I also haven't heard of a Woodcrest shortage. Everything I've seen in that space says that except for equivalent single socket solutions, Opterons are the better buy, especially considering the upgrade path.
From Anand, AMD, News.com and X-bit labs the numbers tell of an ever increasing marketshare for AMD. Note that this is for all servers, not just against Intel, meaning that Sun, IBM, and other servers are included. Then there's the 4 socket server category, where AMD has 48% of total marketshare in Q2 2006, and is the category I'd be more interested in as that is a true high-end server market. Then there's the Top 500 Nov 2006 List which lists 4 Opteron systems and a single Intel Itanium system in the top 10, along with 5 PowerPC systems. I should also note that only 31 Woodcrest systems are on the list vs 76 dual core Opterons.
Basically, AMD's server market share has been growing in leaps and bounds over the past 2 years, and has broken Intel's x86 monopoly in the space, especially once you exceed 2 processors. With Dell now finally offering AMD CPUs, I expect that number to grow.
I'm afraid you're incorrect on both. They compete with 3 year old tech roughly equivalent in both power and performance. Unless you're an Intel fanboi, of course. I'd expect Intel to at least blow away AMD with their new gen processor by at least a factor of 25% in both categories combined, or 50+% in just one, but they fail to do either.
If you have references that definitively state something else, please share. And no, the Anandtech article comparing the power and performance of C2D with AMD CPUs using a 590 SLI motherboard won't do. That motherboard chipset is a known powerhog. There are much more efficient AMD CPU/motherboard combinations.
Considering the Intel FSB is essentially slated for obsolescence within 1.5 years with the introduction of Nehalem, why would anyone design anything for the Intel FSB?
It's funny, ATM, AMD has the better bus/platform and Intel has the better core. Are you sure that Intel has the better core? The fact that AMD's current 3 year old best keeps up with Intel's newest best tells me that the question of who has the better core is an open one. Yes, I know Intel in single-threaded apps bests AMD, but it's by no means conclusive, since AMD is at least equal in several areas. So it's going to be interesting in the next few months.
For all those reasons and more, AMD most likely won't create a chip to run on Intel chipsets. Not only that, but why would they step back 2 steps to technology from the last decade? AMD is already far ahead on the technology provided by chipsets, and has a less expensive solution to boot.
Come to find in the 80 page manual written in poor English a tiny line about "Revision A of Willamette chips will not work on this motherboard." No reason listed, and not found anywhere in any of the reviews or forums I looked at. That's why you just buy AMD:)
I think this is Intel's lame attempt at competing in the HPC market. They're pulling out all the stops prior to AMD's Barcelona release. I can't think of any other reason for Intel to be going apeshit the way they are lately - announcing huge price cuts 4 months in advance to coincide with a competitor's next gen release and now opening up their FSB. All this started occurring just after the initial pre-prod Barcelonas became available. Coincidence?
Intel pulling their head out of their ass was interesting, too. If they hadn't of, they'd be facing a generalized collapse of their market right now. AMD was utterly killing them. Yes, that was interesting:) I'd make the argument that Intel already has a collapsed market: servers. Take a look what any halfway competent IT manager is buying for x86 server hardware. It's almost all Opterons. The server market collapse should continue with the consumer market shortly, thanks to several monopoly lawsuits coming to a close and just much better hardware from AMD. By collapse I merely mean the collapse of Intel's monopoly, a welcome thing. I don't for a second believe Intel will dissappear, although that's almost the case in the server market. I can only hope that Apple will add AMD processors to their lineup in the near future, even if it's only in their servers/Mac Pros.
I understand your statements about resources. But look at systems today. Can you honestly say that the current "normal" hardware couldn't easily be tweaked with minimal investment to easily handle a VM for your browser, email, and word processing client? That's what most common desktops run for 95+% of the populace, which also happen to account for most of the virus/worm issues. VMs could almost eliminate most of the issues associated with those vectors.
VMs do have overhead when run in software. But the new crop of CPUs will have hardware virtualization which should address most of the performance issues. I know that Sun hardware has been able to be configured like this for at least the past 8 years, and the performance hit was negligible.
Change is coming, time will tell if we accept it or not.
For some reason, I thought HTT had to be licensed. That aside, your insight as to Intel's reluctance is spot on. They've already had to eat crow thrice (I just had to use it:) this decade, with the AMD-64 implementation, the failure of Itanium, and the failure of P4. A fourth stating their entire architectural approach was incorrect might just doom them in mindshare to a complete failure.
I don't think that anyone that's truly interested in the technical aspects of CPUs thinks Intel is a leader in this decade. Since the AMD-64 and Itanium launches, that position has been firmly held by AMD which continues to extend that lead from everything I'm seeing. (For you Intel fanbois, that's even despite the C2D, which really is irrelevant in the world of servers). AMD's technical lead is pretty much cemented in the server world, and I wouldn't be surprised if Barcelona puts that market firmly out of Intel's reach. The current Opterons match Intel's best in equivalent configurations, but scale far beyond what Intel is capable of, and apparently Intel won't have an answer for at least another 12 months.
Intel has a PTP alternative to HT in the works, but it won't be ready until late 2008 (Nehalem) supposedly. By then, Barcelona will have been out for at least a year.
There was some discussion a few years ago about how the K8 core deviated from x86 internally, being more RISC than CISC allowing for greatly improved performance. I haven't seen anything similarly in-depth on the C2D's CPU internals, most articles seem to focus on the cache solution as that's apparently a new thing for x86.
From what I've read on K8L (K10, whatever it's being called this week) the internals have gotten a mixture of evolution of existing features plus a similar shared L3 cache. It's not clear if the AMD L3 cache is going to be quite as optimized as the Intel L2 cache solution, but I'd hazard a guess that it won't be.
I agree with you in general. This time, however, we're looking at a huge leap in 6-9 months. Quad procs at reasonable prices is what everyone is hoping for. If we get a huge performance boost at the same time, that's just icing on the cake. In any case, I don't expect to see huge further price reductions on current lines after the last major cut.
I must say that my experiences with 2.x are making me fall back to 1.5.x. There's something rotten with the 2.x release, and I'm not sure what it is, but the fact that I can outtype the system in a text area while responding to/. means that either I'm the world's fastest typist or that something's seriously wrong with this 2.x release I'm using right now. (I should note that spell checking has been turned off, but that has not eliminated the problem. My home system with no plugins (that's right, I went that far to browse/. with no adblock, flashblock, noscript etc) also has hesitations that 1.5x does not have.
Exactly. In 2008, Intel will finally address some of the biggest performance features in AMD's architectural stable. Whether it will be as effective as AMD's solution will remain unknown until the first CPUs come out and can be benchmarked.
Amazingly enough, 2008 is when AMD's 45nm process should hit full stride (although AMD historically has had some issues with die-shrink processes). AMD also still has SOI, which Intel won't be able to counter until that just announced new process (forgotten the name) hits sometime in late 2009 or 2010. And I'm sure AMD will be sitting still architecturally and technically while Intel catches up.
>despite some of the nifty architectural things they did recently to speed up C2D (integrated L2 cache for example).
The L2 has been integrated since the P3 brainiac. First, you're correct. Integrated L2 cache across 2 cores with cache lookup and control optimizations. Next.
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Personally I thought it started with an angst/anti-religion bent in the first 2 studio albums moving to I'm not sure what in The Fragile, although the first anti industry sentiments came out there (StarFuckers comes to mind). I saw that same bent in "The Hand That Feeds", although maybe I need to go back and listen to it with a different mindset.
Personally, I liked "Getting Smaller" best, although I thought the album as a whole . I'm looking forward to getting the new one. (NIN is one of the few bands I'll buy without hearing most if any of the songs. I've been surprised, but not disappointed so far) I'm glad he's backed off the artistic bent he went with The Fragile.
Pretty Hate Machine sounds like it's primarily against organized religion, the Catholic Church specifically. Intertwined there is the teenage angst of getting royally screwed over by a puppylove crush.
Or at least that's how I perceived the title, Head like a Hole, Sanctified, and Ringfinger among others.
very interesting application, and I'm guessing you have (a) controller systems that segment and hand out work to individual systems/processors for the Intel set to work more efficiently than AMD (given that 2P 51xx systems start to have memory bandwidth issues if multiple threads access shared memory across both processors - the same problem that exist with the quads, btw)
;)
The most ridiculously equipped IO system I've seen are SGI systems, but that was years ago and haven't revisted for that level of bandwidth since, not being in the same market anymore.
Interesting discussion. I'm likewise about to setup a configuration for SOA/HA, but for data services which are slightly less, shall we say, IO intensive.
Check out this post and its parent for links and analysis of performance numbers. I'm not so sure that C2D does more work than AMDs CPUs, or at least not significantly more work per clock.
I would also disagree with your assessment of where AMD is w/ regards to Intel in terms of past history. This is more like AMD's K7 Athlon against Intel's P4. (ie, last gen against current gen). I'd cautiously predict a repeat of history when Barcelona comes out, especially given AMD's optimistically upwardly revised compartive performance numbers post pre-prod release (up to 50% better performance at equivalent clock speeds).
Lastly, I'd note that the quad C2Ds actually show the limitations of Intel's approach in that true multi-threaded performance suffers a tremendous drop in efficiency compared to dual core C2Ds, a drop I do not expect to see in Barcelona with its 4 core shared L3 cache.
All three use 90nm chips running on nVidia 590 SLI motherboards. So system power consumption numbers are skewed. Not only that, IIRC xbitlabs discovered that to fully load the C2D processor different tests had to be run. When both are fully loaded, the max power consumption is actually much closer.
That aside, I actually went through the process of detailing the performance differences between the two processors (C2D x6800 against the X2 6000+). The best C2D numbers I could come up with for something that stretches the CPU is DIVX encoding @ about 33% using the most favorable % numbers you can generate. Windows Media Player 9 and MPEG 2 encoding were both about 25%, and MPEG1 15%. Cache Memory (43%) and Multi-Core bandwidth (60% - need to see what they actually mean by this) were the only two clear artificial component benchmarks going to Intel. The rest were less than 10% in favor of Intel or in favor of AMD, with the Integer mark 35% in favor of AMD. The games show a median improvement of less than 20%, with a maximum of 36% in Sharky's reviews. I would have liked to have seen power graphs while generating those numbers, as that would have told us more about power efficiency.
So, in short, we have no real comparison with performance and power numbers. Performance-wise I'm somewhat underwhelmed by the C2D's improvements over AMD's offering but note that C2D is better, at least as far as games go, but not so much better as to make me buy one without evaluating AMD's new offering (which, btw, AMD has revised upwards to 50% better performance over an equivalently clocked C2D after releasing pre-prod sample)
Lastly, if you're looking in the server space, few if any of the linked performance numbers mean squat.
Opterons are upgradable with a chip replacement. Would you do this in a data center for x86? I have in the distant past but within the past 8 years, replacement made more sense, since most were 1 or 2P systems. For 4P or more it used to be specialized motherboards and chipsets that couldn't be replaced (in the x86 world). With Opterons, you can upgrade CPUs.
Having said all that, if you're never going to upgrade data center systems I'd have to evaluate Intel vs Opteron for 1 or 2P systems as I haven't done so in 6 months since the Woodcrest set came out with one exception. I noted that in heavily multi-threaded applications running across 4 cores with high memory bandwidth requirements that Woodcrest systems falter in performance (limits of the FSB). Also, the FBDIMMs required on 2P 51xx systems have much higher latency. It's highly depedendent on your application whether this will make or break the decision for you. If your system benefits from NUMA, then Opterons are the only way to go. It's much more complicated for me than a simple $$$/unit-compute or $$$/watt issue. It's a $$$/performance issue, where performance is full system based.
I'll refrain from talking about Barcelona at this point, since without benchmarked processors it's largely speculative as to the various things it will bring to the table that could change the equations.
In the 4 socket space, they are 48% of the entire 4 socket market, not just x86. I couldn't find a statistic on x86 alone.
As for 1-8 core market (pre-quad core) AMD had 26+% of the x86 market in either Q3 or Q4 of 2006. That's significant enough to break Intel's hold on the market. I couldn't find a statement about the 2 socket market as a whole or x86 alone, so I cannot break down the numbers any further than that. It was also without Dell, who sells about 1 out of every 5 PCs, although I don't know what their server numbers are.
However, if you realize that prior to 2004 AMD owned virtually 0% of that market....
I also haven't heard of a Woodcrest shortage. Everything I've seen in that space says that except for equivalent single socket solutions, Opterons are the better buy, especially considering the upgrade path.
From Anand, AMD, News.com and X-bit labs the numbers tell of an ever increasing marketshare for AMD. Note that this is for all servers, not just against Intel, meaning that Sun, IBM, and other servers are included. Then there's the 4 socket server category, where AMD has 48% of total marketshare in Q2 2006, and is the category I'd be more interested in as that is a true high-end server market. Then there's the Top 500 Nov 2006 List which lists 4 Opteron systems and a single Intel Itanium system in the top 10, along with 5 PowerPC systems. I should also note that only 31 Woodcrest systems are on the list vs 76 dual core Opterons.
Basically, AMD's server market share has been growing in leaps and bounds over the past 2 years, and has broken Intel's x86 monopoly in the space, especially once you exceed 2 processors. With Dell now finally offering AMD CPUs, I expect that number to grow.
I'm afraid you're incorrect on both. They compete with 3 year old tech roughly equivalent in both power and performance. Unless you're an Intel fanboi, of course. I'd expect Intel to at least blow away AMD with their new gen processor by at least a factor of 25% in both categories combined, or 50+% in just one, but they fail to do either.
If you have references that definitively state something else, please share. And no, the Anandtech article comparing the power and performance of C2D with AMD CPUs using a 590 SLI motherboard won't do. That motherboard chipset is a known powerhog. There are much more efficient AMD CPU/motherboard combinations.
Considering the Intel FSB is essentially slated for obsolescence within 1.5 years with the introduction of Nehalem, why would anyone design anything for the Intel FSB?
For all those reasons and more, AMD most likely won't create a chip to run on Intel chipsets. Not only that, but why would they step back 2 steps to technology from the last decade? AMD is already far ahead on the technology provided by chipsets, and has a less expensive solution to boot.
I think this is Intel's lame attempt at competing in the HPC market. They're pulling out all the stops prior to AMD's Barcelona release. I can't think of any other reason for Intel to be going apeshit the way they are lately - announcing huge price cuts 4 months in advance to coincide with a competitor's next gen release and now opening up their FSB. All this started occurring just after the initial pre-prod Barcelonas became available. Coincidence?
Let's see - Excel existed prior to 87 (85) on the Mac. Was it tabbed then? If so - prior art right there.
Also, isn't the patent out of date? it's been 20 years, or pretty close to it.
I understand your statements about resources. But look at systems today. Can you honestly say that the current "normal" hardware couldn't easily be tweaked with minimal investment to easily handle a VM for your browser, email, and word processing client? That's what most common desktops run for 95+% of the populace, which also happen to account for most of the virus/worm issues. VMs could almost eliminate most of the issues associated with those vectors.
VMs do have overhead when run in software. But the new crop of CPUs will have hardware virtualization which should address most of the performance issues. I know that Sun hardware has been able to be configured like this for at least the past 8 years, and the performance hit was negligible.
Change is coming, time will tell if we accept it or not.
For some reason, I thought HTT had to be licensed. That aside, your insight as to Intel's reluctance is spot on. They've already had to eat crow thrice (I just had to use it:) this decade, with the AMD-64 implementation, the failure of Itanium, and the failure of P4. A fourth stating their entire architectural approach was incorrect might just doom them in mindshare to a complete failure.
I don't think that anyone that's truly interested in the technical aspects of CPUs thinks Intel is a leader in this decade. Since the AMD-64 and Itanium launches, that position has been firmly held by AMD which continues to extend that lead from everything I'm seeing. (For you Intel fanbois, that's even despite the C2D, which really is irrelevant in the world of servers). AMD's technical lead is pretty much cemented in the server world, and I wouldn't be surprised if Barcelona puts that market firmly out of Intel's reach. The current Opterons match Intel's best in equivalent configurations, but scale far beyond what Intel is capable of, and apparently Intel won't have an answer for at least another 12 months.
Intel has a PTP alternative to HT in the works, but it won't be ready until late 2008 (Nehalem) supposedly. By then, Barcelona will have been out for at least a year.
There was some discussion a few years ago about how the K8 core deviated from x86 internally, being more RISC than CISC allowing for greatly improved performance. I haven't seen anything similarly in-depth on the C2D's CPU internals, most articles seem to focus on the cache solution as that's apparently a new thing for x86.
From what I've read on K8L (K10, whatever it's being called this week) the internals have gotten a mixture of evolution of existing features plus a similar shared L3 cache. It's not clear if the AMD L3 cache is going to be quite as optimized as the Intel L2 cache solution, but I'd hazard a guess that it won't be.
I agree with you in general. This time, however, we're looking at a huge leap in 6-9 months. Quad procs at reasonable prices is what everyone is hoping for. If we get a huge performance boost at the same time, that's just icing on the cake. In any case, I don't expect to see huge further price reductions on current lines after the last major cut.
Basically, AMD gains 2 things by packaging multiple cores as in X2: marketing and cheaper multi-core systems.
With Barcelona they'll actually gain performance improvements with the addition of the shared L3 cache across all 4 cores.
You must be using FF 2.x.
/. means that either I'm the world's fastest typist or that something's seriously wrong with this 2.x release I'm using right now. (I should note that spell checking has been turned off, but that has not eliminated the problem. My home system with no plugins (that's right, I went that far to browse /. with no adblock, flashblock, noscript etc) also has hesitations that 1.5x does not have.
I must say that my experiences with 2.x are making me fall back to 1.5.x. There's something rotten with the 2.x release, and I'm not sure what it is, but the fact that I can outtype the system in a text area while responding to
Exactly. In 2008, Intel will finally address some of the biggest performance features in AMD's architectural stable. Whether it will be as effective as AMD's solution will remain unknown until the first CPUs come out and can be benchmarked.
Amazingly enough, 2008 is when AMD's 45nm process should hit full stride (although AMD historically has had some issues with die-shrink processes). AMD also still has SOI, which Intel won't be able to counter until that just announced new process (forgotten the name) hits sometime in late 2009 or 2010. And I'm sure AMD will be sitting still architecturally and technically while Intel catches up.
The L2 has been integrated since the P3 brainiac. First, you're correct. Integrated L2 cache across 2 cores with cache lookup and control optimizations. Next.