AMD Launches Counterstrike Against Core 2 Duo 277
DigitalDame2 writes to mention a PC Magazine article about the AMD 4x4 enthusiast platform, which is meant to counter Core 2 Duo. The article observes that AMD is now facing many of the same business practices it used in its war against Intel. From the article: "While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, improvement can often be a slap in the face. Intel's C2D was designed with both low power and performance per watt in mind, two key design metrics that helped AMD cut into Intel's market share with the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 X2. And, as preliminary numbers have indicated and final performance reviews now show, the C2D has learned its lesson well: its performance now tops AMD's Athlon 64 architecture by a substantial margin."
4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else (Score:5, Interesting)
Why?
Consider the cost of Athlon X2 processors:
http://www.pricewatch.com/cpu/442067-1.htm [pricewatch.com]
The least expensive Athlon X2 costs a cool 300 bucks, while the mid-range Core 2 Duo (Conroe) E6600 costs $315 (projected wholesale price).
Now factor in a more expensive (because of 2 processor sockets) 4X4 motherboard, two Athlon X2 chips at $300, and you wind up with a $350 to $400 surcharge for being an AMD fanboy.
The situation gets worse if you want a high-end system:
Two FX-62 will set you back $1045 + $1045 = $2090
http://www.pricewatch.com/cpu/992212-1.htm [pricewatch.com]
and while this combination is expected to outperform a single Core 2 Duo at $1057
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=E6800&btnG=Se
factoring in the more expensive two-socket motherboard expect to pay a cool $1100 more than for the E6800 system.
Personally, I'll probably buy an E6600 ($315) or an E6400 ($240) as soon as they become available.
Re:4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else (Score:5, Informative)
Re:4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else (Score:2)
I could have 4 AMD cores, sure, but they'll still be 2.0 GHz no matter what I do, and cost me twice the price + extra expensive and buggy SMP motherboard. The Intel will be faster per clock and have a billion extra clock cycles per process/second.
AMD lost me here.. They need to convince me they will continue to lower prices and maintain a competitive product. At this point I'm not convince they can catch up to Intel again.. Intel has greater market s
The name certainly is (Score:2)
I think the new "4x4" processors will essentially be rebranded Opterons from the 2xx series. So if you really want it and are willing to pay up, you can have a "4x4" AMD system now.
Re:The name certainly is (Score:2)
But since they've just kept us consumers locked out of the SMP Opterons with their socket 939 I feel like they intentionally tried to slow progress towards multi-cpu desktops.. Now they're all for it? Hypocrites!
Re:4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else (Score:2)
Re:4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else (Score:4, Informative)
The article says otherwise.
Re:4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else (Score:3, Insightful)
They even talked about 8x8 (2x 4 core CPUS). Just 4x4 strikes me as wasted power that the vast majority of enthusiasts would never touch. Most of the time the 2nd core is barely used even now.
Gillette has already created a version of this overkill in shaving:
Mach 5 [cnn.com]
Platinum Mach 14 [jt.org]
5 Blades! [theonion.com]
Re:4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else (Score:2)
Personally, I'm dying to get my hands on an 8+ core workstation.
Re:4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a software engineer working at The Internet Archive, and I write parallel software every day (sometimes with PVM for "real" applications, but more often as throwaway perl slammed out on the command line, using open3() to open several simultaneous subprocesses, sometimes fed data by the parent but more often each reading from a different data file). Much of what I do is "trivially parallelizable", meaning it's pretty easy to make scale across multiple processors or machines. It is my impression that most real-life problems seen by most businesses are trivially parallelizable, with the rare exceptions hogging all the attention by dint of being more interesting.
My workstation is a single-processor machine, but I have at my exclusive disposal a dual-xeon machine and two AMD dual-core machines. I'm always scp'ing my work up to them from my workstation so I can take advantage of their multi-process goodness. (Developing while ssh'd into those machines is usually not a good idea, since the network likes to go down or slow down a lot between Archive HQ and our datacenters, and our HQ firewall blocks PVM so I can't just make my workstation the PVM master node with the other three machines slaves.)
When I read this article, my initial reaction was "Enthusiasts, hell! I want as many of these as I can get for servers!" (assuming this 4x4 product is significantly cheaper than current dual-opteron products -- we're a non-profit, without a lot to spend on hardware, and we're always running on the edge of starvation. But maybe that's a bad assumption and these will be prohibitively pricey).
If someone offered me a 4x4 or 8x8 for my desktop, though, I'd accept it gladly, and make good use of it, parsing/analyzing Archive metadata, processing multiple simultaneous http streams (we use a lot of http-rpc here, and xml data representation which means each http-rpc stream can suck down a lot of processing power), md5'ing multiple files in parallel, and the like. I'd probably also make more extensive use of bzip2 than I do currently :-)
My datasets commonly consist of hundreds or thousands of files, each of which can be processed in parallel, so I can keep throwing cores at the problem with near-linear scalability until I grind against disk or bus bandwidth limits (at which point the data needs to start out distributed in order to keep scaling).
Just my $0.02
-- TTK
Re:4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else (Score:4, Interesting)
Writing parallel software is not that hard. By the time you've written a couple of enterprise applications, you know the basics, because there your software has to sync across multiple boxes. Syncing on one box is all the easier. Parallel software is really close to trivial, you need only know how to a) synchronize and b) partition workloads. A is very easy, and B is only hard some of the time (for many media tasks, B is utterly trivial).
Pretty much (Score:2)
Re:4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else (Score:4, Insightful)
Not sure if Intel is trying to salt the fields here, but AMD did not drop prices at all until they were forced to over the last couple years. Benchmarks can be somewhat unreliable, but with enough reading you can find how the midrange CPU's compare to each other. Since AMD also dropped the 939 socket, I'm going to look real hard at Intel as I have to update RAM and mainboard the next time I do a major update. Were I buying today, it would be Intel - that has not been the case for me since I replaced a 450 mhz slot 2 xeon with a 700mhz slot A thunderbird. I'm not the type of guy to buy an FX or Extreme! Edition of anything, but when I stack up what kind of bang for the buck I can get between $200-500, AMD has a real problem on their hands. Both the X2 and Core 2 Duo are solid technology, but I will not pay for 'brand'. The AMD kit is going to have to drop a fair bit more to be competitive in the landscape I buy in.
Re:4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else (Score:2)
Same here. Oh, well, what's one less AMD fanatic? They'll never miss us.
Re:4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else (Score:3, Insightful)
I have an Intel machine now, and both of
Wake me up when it's really a 4x4. (Score:5, Insightful)
Two cores per processor times two processors ought to be called a 2x2, and a 4x4 ought to mean a four-socket mobo with four quad-core processors, for a total of 16 cores. Similarly, what they're calling an "8x8" ought to be called a 2x4, or maybe a 4x2, since it's four processors times two processors per core.
For an 'enthusiast' product -- which they're apparently hoping to sell to people who have a clue -- that's a stupid way to name it. Plus, as multi-processor, multi-core systems become more prevalent in the future, it would be nice to have some clear nomenclature to describe them. AMD is just starting everyone off on the wrong foot by calling their dual-core/two-way systems "4-by-anythings".
Clarification (Score:2)
What I should have said was that it doesn't have any single part with four of anything in it, so it's not as though they're doing a "four-way" something times four of them, which is what "4x4" logically suggests, IMO.
Re:Wake me up when it's really a 4x4. (Score:3, Informative)
I completely agree with your post. but I will point out a 4x4 pickup has 4 driving wheels out of 4 wheels, and a 2x4 has 2 driving wheels out of 4.
so a 4x4 processor (uses a stupid analolgy but..) has room for 4 cores, all 4 supplied. so the 2x4 would be a dual core in one slot, or 2 single cores thus room for 4 "cores" but only 2 supplied thus 2x4. the 8x8 thus the first 8 describes the number of "cores", the second 8 w
Re:Wake me up when it's really a 4x4. (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, ummm, I'm sure it does make sense really...
Re:You are Right: AMD may Die (Score:5, Insightful)
Their server chips will continue to sell well. Opteron is still very competitive in multiprocessor systems.
There will still be people buying AMD processors based on price and past performance. If you've got some market share people will come back to you for upgrades.
AMD has other sources of income than just CPUs. Their flash memory is the most obvious one.
AMD made a name for itself as being a low cost alternative to Intel years ago. This trip into the high end is a new thing and it made them a nice pile of money to invest in the next generation due out next year.
All of that being said, I'm still going to be buying a Conroe. But your predition of the company going under is a major exaggeration. They will most likely be back and strong around a year to a year and a half from now.
umm? comparison to Intel please... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:umm? comparison to Intel please... (Score:2)
Re:umm? comparison to Intel please... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:umm? comparison to Intel please... (Score:2)
Counterstrike (Score:4, Funny)
Performance improvement? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Performance improvement? (Score:2)
Another OCP comparison [hardocp.com], without GPU limitations.
Re:Performance improvement? (Score:2)
It was all GPU (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It was all GPU (Score:2)
Re:It was all GPU (Score:2, Insightful)
But my opinion is that if they're testing the CPU, they should test at 800x600, simply to factor the GPU out of the equation. If they're testing for a particular game that's one thing, but they're supposed to be testing the CPU. Even if they pulled the 800x600 out into a separate table for compari
Re:Performance improvement? (Score:2)
Re:Performance improvement? (Score:2)
Performance number? (Score:4, Interesting)
Doesn't AMD already label their processors with a relatively meaningless number designed to... say... redefine how consumers think about processor speed?
Was that a highly effective marketing technique? I mean, I guess it did get people to think about speed, and it helped convince many people that GHz isn't the be-all and end-all of processor comparison. But at some point won't people just be annoyed by the mess of pretend numbers AMD is throwing around to "make us think?"
Re:Performance number? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Performance number? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Performance number? (Score:2)
The old timers, such as yourself, that think GHz ratings mean anything anymore are just wandering around blind. Intel proved that themselves with the switch from Pentium 4 to
Re:Performance number? (Score:2)
Fanboyism... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's about Goddamn time! (Score:2, Funny)
We need corporate wars to thin things out. Fuck'n A! The Governments of the World are just too incompetent! It's obvious that the MBAs of the World need to unite and show these Bozoes how to fuck'n do it!
Yes siree, profit above all else! Fuck these Goddman bald monkeys!
Hey, I'm not done yet! Put those fucking jackets away!!! Hey!!! Mmmmmmmm!mM!M!M!M
Put in straight jacket and sent to a Ph.D business program.
Re:It's about Goddamn time! (Score:2, Informative)
AMD Launches Counterstrike Against Core 2 Duo We need corporate wars to thin things out. Fuck'n A! The Governments of the World are just too incompetent! It's obvious that the MBAs of the World need to unite and show these Bozoes how to fuck'n do it! Yes siree, profit above all else! Fuck these Goddman bald monkeys! Hey, I'm not done yet! Put those fucking jackets away!!! Hey!!! Mmmmmmmm!mM!M!M!M Put in straight jacket and sent to a Ph.D business program.
That is funny, not flamebait. Mod Parent u
"well.. my dad can beat up your dad!" (Score:5, Insightful)
So we'll have to buy TWO processors to compete with what Intel is doing with one? If they're aiming for the Enthusiast market they have to remember that "enthusiasts" have price constraints (usually referred to as "wife")
I could be wrong. But I really don't think I am.
Re:"well.. my dad can beat up your dad!" (Score:2, Funny)
Intel responds with Core 4 Quadro (Score:2)
Mega-Core-8-octo Pentium-Z MMVII Pro ultra-thread 999 energy-star
Re:"well.. my dad can beat up your dad!" (Score:4, Interesting)
The 4x4 initiative basically looks like DP for the desktop, which Intel offers as well (although Xeon only).
imho, the really interesting thing about 4x4 is the possibility of plugging in a coprocessor in the future.
For example, you may settle for a single Athlon64 X2 in a 4x4 board for now, and add a physics/video/dsp/whatever coprocessor in the future.
That's wild speculation, of course, but it does make the 4x4 setup intriguing as a future-proof product.
--
Re:"well.. my dad can beat up your dad!" (Score:2)
Re:"well.. my dad can beat up your dad!" (Score:2)
Oh, is that what we're calling the dot com crash now? Clever. Explains the lower salaries since the dot com crash and gets your mom off your back.
Now, do we call the computers "grandkids"?
Re:"well.. my dad can beat up your dad!" (Score:3, Insightful)
excuse me? WTF are you smoking. The people I think of buying the hottest newest CPUs with multicores and multiple CPUs in the enthusiast (read: gamers) market is people who buy more hardware for ePenis only.
These people don't have wives!
Re:"well.. my dad can beat up your dad!" (Score:4, Funny)
Judging from most of the posts I read here, I think "mommy" is more likely.
Re:"well.. my dad can beat up your dad!" (Score:2)
I for one... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I for one... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the two most demanding uses for a computer.
The rest is futile.
Re:I for one... (Score:2)
It can, in fact, run Linux.
Re:I for one... (Score:2)
Re:I for one... (Score:2)
Re:I for one... (Score:2, Insightful)
Until I meet anything it can't do that I really want to do, I don't see the need to replace
Forget the small details... (Score:5, Insightful)
What matters is that AMD has captured sufficient marketshare over the last years to become a real competitor to Intel. Opterons have become the CPU of choice for large servers, the niche that Itanium was meant to capture.
Now Intel's comeback means we're seeing the start of a new growth of CPU power, this time into multi-core land, a nice solid metric on which to compete. You can fudge the Ghz but you can't really fudge the number of cores. This means we have the perfect conditions for an explosion of growth, until the numbers get into meaningless territory. Within 3-4 years, common desktops will have 8 to 16 cores, and high-end workstations will have 128 or more.
I'm just very glad my company made the move to writing multithreaded code so we can get the best from this new landscape.
Ah, but you can fudge the number of cores... (Score:3, Interesting)
If the two giants start to compete on core count, y
Re:Ah, but you can fudge the number of cores... (Score:4, Informative)
The Core 2 series now has shared L2.
Re:Forget the small details... (Score:3, Funny)
Look, we have hyper-threading/SMT/whatever, so our 2 cores are as good as 4 of your cores. Besides each of our cores are faster than your cores. And nobody needs more than 4 cores anyway. With our supercallifragilisticexpiallidotious memory bandwidth, even our dual core processors will beat your 16-core processor, because memory bandwidth is what really ma
Re:Forget the small details... (Score:2)
On top of that, last time I checked the cache wasn't shared, which means we won't get anything really usefull with more cores unless they start doing crossbar switching in the cache (expensive, but damn its nice).
And in other news (Score:5, Funny)
Intel leading with heat and watts (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been a few benchmarks (I believe one was on Anandtech's site) that have shown Intel Xeons running in 64bit mode performed slower than the same processor running in 32bit mode. Now, I know, we're talking about copying larger data segments around, because the address space is larger, so a bit of a slowdown in some areas are expected. But when they're talking 5% slower, thats a bit.
We replaced 3 Dual Intel Xeon servers (2.8GHz Xeons) with 4G of RAM each, with a single AMD Dual Opteron server, running in 64bit mode for MySQL. This system is immensely faster than the old Xeon systems. MySQL shows upto 23% performance increases in SELECT commands on 64bit vs 32bit on the AMD. On the Intel, it was a performance loss.
As far as heat output, the air coming out the back of this server feels cooler, not to mention that it replaced 3 servers with one.
People need to focus on the server market, and not the desktop market to see the real king in the (x86) CPU wars. Lets not forget hypertransport, and seperate data paths for memory and IO, whereas the Xeon has a shared 800MHz FSB (now 1066 with the newer rendition).
Re:Intel leading with heat and watts (Score:4, Interesting)
We had (2) IBM servers (Dual AMD 64-bit Opteron) with 12GB ram each running 32-bit RHEL3 and Oracle 10g. Because it was 32-bit RH it was only using 4GB in each server. We upgraded the RHEL3-64 and Oracle 10g 64-bit (using all 12GB of memory in each box) and we got about 140% improvement on the same hardware.
What was the difference? 8 more GB of ram each. The fact that a single server has 12GB of ram and all queries happen on a single server makes a HUGE difference than have (3) servers with only 4GB of ram as the database can cache more data in memory.
While I don't know your *true* setup, I can say that a single server with a TON of ram will kill many servers with only a little bit of ram on simple select statements. CPU doesn't do a whole lot on select statements compared to what it will do on say stored procs or all kinds of subselects/joins/aggregate functions in your select statements.
Re:Intel leading with heat and watts (Score:3, Informative)
The boxes we were using were Dual Xeon 2.8GHz servers, 4G of DDR RAM, and 4 x 73G 15K SCSI disks in a 0+1 RAID array. We had 3 of those servers running like that.
The new Dual Opteron server is 2 x model 252s, with 8G of DDR RAM (4G per proc), using node-interleaving memory configuration, with 6 x 73G 15K SCSI disks in a RAID 0+1 array, with 2 x 73G 10K SCSI disks mirrored for binlogs.
Our application for MySQL is an ASP app, with each cu
Re:Intel leading with heat and watts (Score:3, Insightful)
Woodcrest changes your equation completely.
Re:Intel leading with heat and watts (Score:2)
Re:Intel leading with heat and watts (Score:2)
AMD has not made a friend of this customer. They would have to beg me to stick with them now. They will truely have to beat Intel on price/performance AND overclockability. A C2D 2.4 can overclock well above 3.0 for around $320. At 3.0 the C2D beats the best Opertons for 90% of desktop workloads. I'm interested in video encoding, gaming, compiling and a
This is just dual dual-core (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is just dual dual-core (Score:2)
i'm not an intel fan
Re:This is just dual dual-core (Score:2)
like games, and sending private information over the internet.
But who want to do those things with a computer?
Re:This is just dual dual-core (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is just dual dual-core (Score:2, Informative)
FINALLY! (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD CEO to Marketing: "Attention marketing team: Full Steam Ahead with the scrambling and spinning in place!"
I'm going to take a few moments to enjoy AMD's panic. Because: a) its been a long time, and b) it probably won't last long.
Re:FINALLY! (Score:3, Insightful)
This was news.... A month and a half ago (Score:2)
Let me be the first to say to AMD (Score:3)
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
*ducks*
Misleading title... (Score:5, Insightful)
The 4x4 motherboard excellent for servers? (Score:2)
Re:The 4x4 motherboard excellent for servers? (Score:2)
Re:The 4x4 motherboard excellent for servers? (Score:2)
Re:The 4x4 motherboard excellent for servers? (Score:2)
Title (Score:2, Funny)
65nm (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:65nm (Score:2)
Re:65nm (Score:3, Interesting)
Consumer Dual Processor (Score:2)
Healthy Competition (Score:2, Insightful)
Age old fight: Intel vs. AMD... you want to know who wins? Us.
Not really that great (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure you can (Score:2, Funny)
Only one comment... (Score:2)
Counterstrike (Score:2)
AMD Launches Counterstrike Against Core 2 Duo (Score:3, Funny)
AMD launches Core 2 Duo Killer
Memory Bandwidth (Score:2)
A single (single or dual core) super-duper fast processor may be good at some benchmarks but consider this.
Plugging in two Athlon 64s/Opterons doubles the memory bandwidth due to the NUMA (Hypertransport) architecture. That intel processor is choking on an old-fashioned 1980's-vintage front side bus. If you have two, they're both fighting over that bus.
This is why Pentium multiprocessor systems don't scale well. You get a bit of a benefit with a second processor, with very small and diminishing gains wit
Everyone not getting it (Score:5, Interesting)
There are already Xilinx cards available because this has been used in Cray supercomputers for a while (the Opteron ones anyways). This means AMD can counter ANYTHING Intel puts out because you can just slap a $20 speciality DSP on the mobo which could easily be 100x faster than that Intel chip at whatever small set of functions it needs. Video cards are already in the works for this along with all kinds of audio and video stuff. I seem to remember one manufacturer has a RAID processor. The possibilities are endless.
Re:Part of the vicious cycle in Tech (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Part of the vicious cycle in Tech (Score:5, Interesting)
At home, I keep a $640 check I wrote back in 1990 for a 486 CPU.
It's framed and visible on top of a bookcase to serve as a reminder.
At the time, I thought it was a great deal; screaming processors were
never going to get much cheaper than that!
These days, last years tech (or even two years ago tech) is usually
MORE than sufficient. Except for games, which always seem to
need NEXT years processor in order to be playable...
Re:Part of the vicious cycle in Tech (Score:2)
I just bought one of those amazing cute HP slimlines for like $550. It's probably the first PC I owned that does well with "Liberty City", and does everything else amazing well. If you don't need a PC for games, you can get by with some very old hardware indeed. (And yes, I do recognize how much
Re:Actually (Score:2)
There is no reason why Intel hasn't chosen to do their own HT "like" network. Other than they would have to aboutface on yet another Intel "truth". That the FSB [with their uber overclocked goodness] is the way to go.
Tom