AMD Demos Dual-Core Athlon 64
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Feb 24, 2005 10:12 AM
from the with-two-types-of-salsa dept.
from the with-two-types-of-salsa dept.
DigitumDei writes "Dual core chips came closer to reality as AMD demonstrated their Athlon64 dual-core offering. The 90nm technology chip will use the same 939-pin infrastructure and cooling solutions as the current Athlon 64 chips, meaning that upgrading to a dual-core chip from your current AMD64 will require little more than a BIOS update. Available in the second half of this year, the chip will be added to AMD's current line (Athlon64, Athlon FX, Sempron)."
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Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Interesting)
As I understand it, they work almost identically to a SMP setup, meaning they don't offer much of any performance benefit in most apps (particularly games). They draw more power, they run at higher temperatures, etc.
Is there something I'm missing? Or is this whole dual-core mess really just SMP on one CPU? Because from what I've read on the likes of Extremetech, Anandtech, and so on, I'm not finding any reason to be impressed.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Insightful)
But what's the processor utilization? On most systems, its usually less than 10 percent. So when a user does something, the bottleneck is usually not the processor. Its usually the hard drive.
Money would be better spent on RAID, rather than dual core or dual processor.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.hyperlogos.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday July 18, @08:19PM)
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Informative)
You're right about that.
Unlike CPUs which become worthless in less than 2 years, RAID h/w last a bit longer.
Some five years ago I bought an Ultra2Wide SCSI 320 card and a (at the time big) 8GB HDD - I paid $400 for the card and $250 for the HDD.
I still use the card - I haven't checked but it should be as fast as SATA II I guess - and the SCSI disk works too (although it's quite useless - I use it as dedicated swap disk).
In the meantime I went thru 3-4 generations of motherboards and CPUs (consecutive 100% wipeouts) and my RAID stuff still rocks...
By year's end I'll go not for a dual core CPU system but for what's today top of the line nForce4 system. Screw the hype.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.scottgant.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 31 2006, @03:12PM)
Pretty soon we'll talk ourselves into a corner where nothing speeds anything up and we were better off with a C-64.
(btw, I'm joking)
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://honeypot.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday November 15, @11:49AM)
That's most systems, but certainly not all. I wrote a web application in Zope that acts as a portal to our scanned document warehouse. Whenever a customer wants to access some of the data we're storing for them, we fetch a few TIFFs from a Samba filesystem, convert them into a PDF with ImageMagick, and send them out. A RAID wouldn't make a bit of difference to our setup, since even the comparatively slow network file retrieval is much faster than the image processing which is the real bottleneck.
Our system is idle probably 95% of the time. In fact, it currently has a 5-minute load average of 0.04. But in that other 5% of the time, we want it to respond NOW and not 30 seconds from now. This is a pretty common situation for server machines - relatively long periods of inactivity punctuated by short periods of frantic scurrying - and it seems reasonable that AMD is offering their 64-bit server chip with this feature.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday March 21 2005, @03:37PM)
So Intel is doing something crazy by making dual core processors because application haven't had to think about multiprocessors right?
Well, change is inevitable and developers can't stick their head into sand and stay that way forever. Intel recognizes that change has to occur in the development community to enhance performance their product line. What better way then introducing dual cores? This will force programmers to start thinking about programming their application with multi - user, threading, layer, etc' thus over time, the application will be better utilized for the future.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:4, Informative)
Typically 517 of those threads are asleep waiting for IO or a signal, and the one piece of information that you are currently waiting for is being processed in the single remaining active thread.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://theravensnest.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 07, @07:05AM)
Before I abandoned the desktop in favour of the laptop, I had an SMP system, and it was nicer to use than my faster UP system, since single-threaded computationally expensive things could be run on one CPU leaving the other one free for UI-related tasks.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.pvv.org/~teg/)
I don't understand the hype about dual core CPUs.
As I understand it, they work almost identically to a SMP setup, meaning they don't offer much of any performance benefit in most apps (particularly games). They draw more power, they run at higher temperatures, etc.
SMP without the mess (extra CPUs, cooling, expensive/complicated motherboards) and cost is definitely something to be impressed about.
It should give a big performance boost to a multi app and multi thread environment.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.aexin.com/)
The motherboards supporting dual core CPUs should be identical to those running single core CPUs. I guess this is where having the memory controller integrated into the CPU really pays off for AMD since it further simplifies mb design. But in the past SMP motherboards weren't THAT much more expensive (at the most $100 extra) than similar single CPU motherboards. The main cost associated with SMP setups were the very expensive SMP CPUs, which were anywhere from 1.5 times or more expensive than regular CPUs. The pricing of dual core CPUs remains to be seen, but I think it'll still be cheaper than 2 separate SMP-enabled CPUs.
However I completely agree with the rest of your post. Not having separate heatsinks, large motherboards, etc is a definite advantage. Just because of that the market acceptance will increase very rapidly. I wouldn't be surprised if games and other CPU intensive apps started supporting dual core CPUs soon.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://forkforge.org/)
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Interesting)
My first SMP system was a dual Pentium 133Mhz box. After that I never went back to a single proc... until the Pentium 4 came out. It's disappointing that this chip does not support SMP (except for the Xeon line). P4 hyperthreading helped bring back some SMP goodness, but it's still not as good as two real chips.
Personally I can't wait for dual core CPUs!
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its that Firefox can be run on one processor, while your MP3 player is running at the same time on the other. This in turn will speed up BOTH applications, since Firefox does not ever have to yield to the player, and visa versa.
Since there's more going on then just those two apps (various system process, etc), your machine should be faster as each process now only has to worry about HALF the number of processes it did before.
I don't understand why a largely tech audience misses that point. We're not in DOS anymore; the OSes we are using all run more then one process at a time.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if those applications were maxing the CPU to begin with. An MP3 player on a modern processor only utilizes around 1% of its capacity. Firefox a similar amount. They can easily share a CPU with 98% of its capacity to spare. They might run imperceptibly faster due to better cache utilization, but the reality is that almost every application spends 99% of its time waiting for something slower, like disk or network.
The only sort of application that a typical user (i.e. a non-developer) uses that's actually capable of maxing the CPU is, say, video editing, or a high-performance game.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe it's your operating system that sucks.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason most games don't get a performance boost from dual CPU's is because they aren't programmed to take advantage of the other CPU. How many end-users' home systems have dual CPU's? Hardly any of them. There was no reason for game makers to go through the effort programming for something that 99.99% of their customers can't use.
With the new dual core chips, technically it isn't anything groundbreaking but it will ensure that there's much more widespread adoption of multiprocessor systems. With more of the userbase using dual core CPU's, game makers will have a reason to program to take advantage of it, and you'll begin to see games that do see a performance increase when using dual CPU's (or dual cpu cores).
Most games are multi-threaded (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/~wowbagger/journal/87552 | Last Journal: Monday September 03, @08:07PM)
An SMP system can greatly benefit a game designed to be truly multithreaded.
Even if the game is NOT designed to be multithreaded, there is the fact that one core can be running the game, while the other core handles interrupts, operating system processing, and other tasks.
The days of your computer doing only one thing at a time are long gone.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Insightful)
Theoretically, the dual core clocks will add up to more cycles overall than a single core, but the single core will have more clocks per individual thread, so unless a game leverages threading very nicely in the processor intensive segments, a multi-core may be slower than a single-core for the high-end gaming scene, however for workstation/server/HPC fields, it is very exciting.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://bance.net/ | Last Journal: Sunday December 28 2003, @08:50PM)
While you're right that SMP offers little performance to most apps, I tend to run a lot of CPU hogs at the same time. Watch a DVD while waiting for a project to finish compiling or whatnot. It can also help keep runaway processes from sabatoging your system. I used to have a program that set its priority to 'AboveNormal' and would from time to time it would hang up in a loop. Since it was running at a higher priority, you sometimes couldn't bring up Task Manager to kill it off as the higher priorty thread always took precedant. And if all else fails, you can set up 2 SETI @ Home clients and process twice as many packets. But do your self a favor and set their priorty to 'Low'.
Also, you've got a chicken and egg problem. The reason there's so few programs that benifit from SMP is that there are so few computers that are SMP. When I was running some computer labs at a Big 10 university a few years back I was insisting on SMP workstations so that the CS students could learn to program multithreaded apps and see the benifits of it when it ran on 1 vs. 2 processors.
Lastly, my basement is very poorly insulated and gets a bit chilly in the winter. Anything to help warm it up and keep my fingers working properly is a good thing(tm)!
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Thursday October 14 2004, @09:23AM)
Ah, rejoice irresponsible youth! Right now a $25,000 8 CPU machine that can no longer keep up with a decent sized corporate database needs to be replaced with a $60,000 16-CPU machine. After dual core hits the market, it can be upgraded for the price of 8 new dual-core CPUs and a BIOS flash. Less money for hardware == more money for bonuses... W00T! W00T!
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Thursday October 14 2004, @09:23AM)
CPU load versus disk queue length versus memory page accesses. But no worries about my off the cuff example being the only case; a very popular move these days is to run VMware (or similar) on an 8 or 16 way machine in order to provide 20, 30, or more "servers" doing light to modest loads so introducing dual core CPUs will allow even more virtual servers hosted on a single physical box. The cost saving potential is TREMENDOUS.
And what makes you think the manufacturer of the two machines will allow this software patch
It only takes one manufacturer to advertise "Buy our 8 way single core now and upgrade to dual core on the cheap later!". You can buy an 8-way now with only 2 CPUs and add later; there's no reason why you won't be able to buy 8-way dual core capable with only a few single cores and upgrade/add CPUs for years. Big corporate servers costing serious money are upgraded and/or assigned to different roles for a long time compared to desktop PCs. It's a whole different world. One company *finally* decommissioned a quad PPro server and donated to a nonprofit I know. That's been in service 24/7 for what, 14 years? It was probably over $50K when new and they have to get their money's worth out of it. Anyway, the manufacturers know that most IT budgets are not unlimited and customers always like less expensive alternatives.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://haaspc.netfirms.com/)
from TFA:
For example, a processor with dual 2.0-GHz cores can deliver performance not all that different from a single-core 3.5-GHz part. More important, such a dual-core part will hold down power dissipation to a figure closer to that of a standalone 2.0-GHz CPU, allowing processing throughput to effectively double for not much more power.
and
At such speeds, single-CPU processors can often dissipate more than 150 W.
The dual-core Athlon 64 runs at a clock-speed of 2.4 GHz and has a maximum power dissipation of 100 W.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:4, Interesting)
I suppose if your idea of "most apps" is games, then this probably isn't an area that would be of interest to you
If you have any multithreaded app that is even remotely competently written, then it will benefit from dual cores or (possibly) hyperthreading. If your multithreaded app is full of "big locks", then dual cores won't help, and the application designer is a failure.
If you have a workload that has multiple processes running simultaneously, then it is also likely to benefit from dual core. It gets more interesting with business/server workloads, but "home users" can benefit two. Even something as simple as running xmms and gcc at the same time should go faster. Or running two instances of lame.
The real win with dual core comes from increased throughput. A single job/application/process isn't likely to go any faster, but a full workload of multiple, reasonably parallelizeable, tasks will be faster.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
The most relevant one to this discussion is my friends Abit BP6, Dual Celeron, setup. At the time he was running Dual Celeron 300s. Not that impressive right? Except that he was able to host our Unreal Tournament Server - and then join it with no lag for any of the players. Running Unreal Tournament by himself showed a 50% load on each processor. He was able encode MP3s, burn CDs, and play games simultaneously. Something I was not able to do, and wanted to for the sake of time saving. I did not want to choose one activity over another - a 'leisure' productivity issue if you will.
Fast forward to now. A nice dual cpu system would allow me to play games, encode movies / my audio files, simultaneously while running Distributed.net. Are dual core's absolutely necessary? No, but when you are doing some very intensive applications you can't do anything else. As well even though not all games are multi-threaded, various aspects of the game may be, the networking code/the sound code etc, meaning that the game may run somewhat better on a dual cpu setup.
Re:Am I Missing Something? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.hammerhead.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday November 13, @02:54AM)
Face it, the days of increasing clock speeds is over. It's done. Finished. Kaput. The low hanging fruit has all been eaten.
On the other hand, the multiprocessing benefits are huge and practically untapped. There is every reason to expect that in ten years we have 64 or 256 processors on a chip. People who hope to be working in ten years better learn how to write for these systems.
Compare the P4 to the Cell. The P4 goes to unbelievable lengths (even literally, in pipeline lengths!) to run at a high clock speed. Its contribution to global warming is substantial. It's expensive. And, it's an absolute dead end. Intel has already abandoned it.
The Cell has eight much-simpler processors along with its Power core. It can, and will, compute 10 times as fast as a P4, if programmed correctly. The game programmers are going to be pulling their hair out for the next couple of years, but they are going to be the high-demand programmers of the next decade as they are the first over the wall of significant multiprocessing.
Thad Beier
How much power is "reasonable"? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.lazylightning.org/)
They are seen as the solution to power-consumption problems that have come to the fore as clock-speeds have increased beyond 3.0 GHz. At such speeds, single-CPU processors can often dissipate more than 150 W. In contrast, dual-core parts can reduce power consumption to more reasonable levels. For example, a processor with dual 2.0-GHz cores can deliver performance not all that different from a single-core 3.5-GHz part. More important, such a dual-core part will hold down power dissipation to a figure closer to that of a standalone 2.0-GHz CPU, allowing processing throughput to effectively double for not much more power.
Yeah, great, so it reduces power-consumption to "more reasonable levels" yet in every article I have read on this no one really mentions much more than that. What's reasonable? Telling me twice the speed for not much more power doesn't mean anything to me (other than marketing doublespeak).
What I want to know is how much money these processors will save in power consumption compared to how much more they will cost over their single core cousins... No one has said anything about that yet.
Now, also, how many OSs (and applications) are prepared for dual-core support? Are there any available systems that are stable and do that?
Re:How much power is "reasonable"? (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday February 13 2006, @07:11PM)
I won't go into detail of applications since I have no idea which apps you're interested in, but Windows XP Pro supports dual cores (it runs its multi-core kernel even if you just have a Pentium 4 with hyperthreading).
Windows XP Home will not suffice though, which is a bit amusing since this might be the most common OS sitting in homes of gamers which are often the early adopters of this kind of tech nowadays. Unless they just pirated Windows XP Pro with a volume license key of course.
Windows XP Media Center Edition, and Windows XP Tablet PC will support multiple cores though, probably in the same fashion as Pro.
Another one may give details about the common Linux distros, but I'd be very surprised if this support isn't in by far most modern distros, or can be enabled fairly easily.
Re:How much power is "reasonable"? (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Monday June 05 2006, @05:03PM)
2000 had two entirely separate sets of system files, one each for uni- and multi-processor. Even if you added a second CPU, if you didn't have the multiproc HAL to begin with, it simply wouldn't work.
Because XP is just 2000 with a facelift, I suspect this won't have changed. You are correct that if your initial install was on a P4, which 'looks like' two physical processors, XP would have installed its multi-cpu core.
If, however, you are installing a dual-core Athlon in, chances are quite high that you didn't do your initial install on a P4. So you won't have the multiproc system files, and you'll probably have to reinstall to get the second proc going. (A 'repair' installation may be adequate, and would be much less painful.)
Linux works somewhat similarly, but fortunately you can replace just the kernel, rather than the entire OS.
Re:How much power is "reasonable"? (Score:4, Informative)
Fortunately, this is incorrect. As described in Microsoft's knowledge base [microsoft.com], a HAL change is all that is required to take advantage of the second processor. Windows NT 4.0, 2000, XP, and 2003 all are capable of this, although NT needed a utility uptomp.exe to accomplish this feat.
It is very common to have to do this on dual-processor capable servers when installing a second processor.
Re:How much power is "reasonable"? (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Saturday May 14 2005, @10:20AM)
Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP support 2.
Apple OSX supports 2.
FreeBSD support 4 (or more?). NetBSD supports 2 (or more?). OpenBSD is working on it (last I knew).
Linux 2.4.x and 2.6.x support 2+.
Sun Solaris has support 2+ for as long as I know.
AIX, HPUX, SCO Unix and all those support 2+.
Did I miss any?
Almost all OSes for the last several years have supported multiple processors natively. At worst these OSes would need a patch to update their SMP awareness.
Applications on the other hand, well they've been slower to change to a multithreaded moddel. Many server grade programs are ready. Most common desktop programs are not.
I have used a dual Athlon MP system for a long time now. The biggest difference I can tell you between dual 1.6GHz and single 3.2Ghz is that one process can not take over the processor. Even with modern preemption I can tell the difference when I have a second CPU processing my clicks and keystrokes. All I can say is "try one for a while, you'll get hooked".
Why not two different clock speeds? (Score:5, Interesting)
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's sister?
Re:Why not two different clock speeds? (Score:5, Informative)
If the clock multiplier is contained separately in each core, it would be possible - however, having different clock ratios on each core would considerably complicate the arbitration logic, since it would have to deal with different setup and hold timings when sending data to one core vs. the other - this would probably greatly increase your chances of inducing a processor error.
Trying to do this could also require a great deal more design difference between the two cores, which might cause many problems. It also would make it much more difficult to sell single core versions of dual core chips (i.e. one core fails, the other core is good - blow a few fuses to get the chip to look like a single core chip, and sell at as a single core)