Quad Core Battle, Intel Yorkfield vs AMD Altair 172
Joe writes "Yorkfield Extreme Edition based on the 45nm Penry core architecture will meet
heads-on with AMD Altair based on the 65nm K8L core in Q3 2007 as
reported by VR-Zone. Due to its
advanced 45nm process technology, Yorkfield XE is able to pack a total of 12MB
L2 cache (2 x 6MB L2) and still achieving a much smaller die size and higher
clock speed of 3.43-3.73Ghz. Yorkfield will feature Penryn
New Instructions (PNI) or more officially known as SSE4 with 50 more new
instructions. Yorkfield XE will pair up nicely with the
Bearlake-X chipset supporting DDR3
1333, PCI Express 2.0 and ICH9x coming in the Q3 '07 timeframe as well."
I for one... (Score:5, Funny)
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Rolling upgrades for 10 years or so. Never more than half the computer has been replaced at any one time.
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the first died because it had a disagreement with the PSU, and they both lost. Antec + Tyan = bad.
The second... Well, you buy cheap crap, you get what you pay for...
Re:I for one... (Score:5, Interesting)
In my higher than average experience, Antec = bad. I couldn't believe how many of their P/S's (all above 400w) I've had to send back compared to the cheap-oh CoolerMaster 350w supplies we were using. Got to a point where Antec tech support number was being answered by a voicemail (we couldn't get a live person any longer).
When it got to a point where it was taking them *weeks* to get back to me (if they ever did at all), I got fed up and sent an email to the complaint email link they have on their support page (Yes! A complaint link! Only company I've ever seen that *needed* one due to such poor tech support!). In the email I stated my position, that I had a handfull of supplies I was going to dumpster because I could not get anyone to respond to me, and that I'd be reccomending *against* anyone using anything Antec again.
Long story short, someone actually replied fairly quickly, dragged me along for a couple weeks telling me how he'd get me help (he had me fill out an RMA form several times because he claimed there were errors, then refused to take the supplies back because I didn't have a recepit available (it got filed away and sent to storage) even though they were *well* within the manufacturer 3 year from the date of manufactuer instead of date of sale!)..
I've since switched to Enermax or Thermaltake and never looked back. Never had anywhere NEAR the quantity of P/S's to send back and of the FEW I have, it was taken care of right away.
In short, Antec can kiss my ass.
Re:I for one... (Score:4, Interesting)
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With your message (and it's positive moderation), and the moderation on my message, I'm glad to know I wasn't alone. I was half expecting a bunch of Antec "fanbois" to come in and mod me into the ground.
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Pretty cases and crappy power supplies. No, no Antec fanbois here.
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My experience with their customer service (my children busted the front USB ports on the case) was positive and reasonably responsive.
Of course, I wasn't dealing with them in volume, and I have only had the one incident, so I may have gotten the one good guy, but I don't know.
Just my experience.
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Both OSes are insecure, so you put them behind a firewall and install a virus scanner. Most of the vulnerabilities that count when protected in this way are IE related, so don't run IE and keep firefox up to date (at least its patched somewhat regularly).
Given that Windows 2000 uses less resources, does less behind your back, will install to SATA devices with no issue (XP will not even install on my current
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I can see your point, but I'll respectfully differ. I bought a motherboard with the "new!" AGP slot and a top-of-the-line AGP card. I eventually wound up replacing the motherboard (+CPU +memory) with one with a "legacy" AGP slot. I was able to re-use all my other components (except for the too-lame-to-die ISA Ethernet card, but the new MB had Ethernet built-in). Had to do a little device driver tweaking, but everything worked without too much has
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Major rebuild (Score:2)
I did a 100% rebuild. Now I've got a AMD 64 X2 3800+, Lian-Li case, UPS, 19" L
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Errrr..... no, not likely. Creating the mask for the photolithography is not a simple task. Such a custom chip would require scores of photomasks, one for each possible combination. Then the finished chip would requir
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If you buy something good with lots of room for expansion, and take good care of your computer, you shouldn't have to replace it every 2 years.
Let's not deceive ourselves with that "have to". Need has nothing to do with this.Re: (Score:2)
What exactly does that mean? Feed it right and take it on regular walks?
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Maybe he means using good airflow, cleaning out the dust every so often, installing updates and using software utilities (anti virus, spyware, etc) to keep the OS running smooth.
I personally turn off my system at night to save power but i'm sure it does help somewhat to prolong the life of the system?
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Altair? (Score:3, Funny)
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Competition rocks (Score:4, Funny)
Moore's law is nothing about this (Score:2)
Like many laws, people mention Moore's without actually knowing what it says.
One sided (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:One sided (Score:5, Funny)
Ooh, but dont' count out AMD yet! According to the nifty diagram from TFA, the Windsor has a "HT1.0", and the Altair a "HT3.0", and I can't see anything like that for the Intel processors. I don't know what a HT1.0 is, but I'm TERRIBLY excited about it, let me tell you.
More bullet points or higher numbers in a press release indicates a superior system much more clearly than any real life performance tests.
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Re:One sided (Score:5, Informative)
This is where I think AMD gets themselves a big win. Intel's FSB, even clocked at 1333MHz (actually it's 333MHz QDR, but we'll not quibble) pushes only 10.6GB/s. And that's not accounting for the off-die memory controller. Even with dual buses (like the 5000 series chipsets tout) they only just barely have enough aggregate throughput to handle memory transfers.
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TFA was about AMD's and Intel's future single-processor desktop platforms, so it didn't mention updates to Intel's current server platform that you
Ah Numbers... (Score:2, Funny)
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int i,j,l;
fork();
fork();
for(i = 0; i<9000;i++)
for(j = 0; j<9000;j++)
for(l = 0; l<9000;l++)
printf("More Cores");
I've mocked intel before... (Score:2)
Interesting. (Score:3, Interesting)
The AMD with it's Hyper-transport could have an advantage over the Intel chip but right now it is all pie in the sky.
I wish that AMD had access to the Intel Fab tech. Just how fast and low power would their chips be if they where 65nm right now like Intel's?
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That is where I was going with my post so I'll just add this. If Intel can retool to
As far as the cache expectations go, I don't think Intel will go that high. Your right. They will need it to keep inst
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You may want to visit Intel's site... several of the Core 2 Duo based processors have 4 MiB shared L2 caches (X6800, E6700, E6600, Xeon 51xx).
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I stand corrected.
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Aie... Can you imagine Intel/AMD merge? When we have that we'll all yell and holla about the monopoly.
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until then it is all guess work.
I will make one prediction. Both of them will be bloody fast.
what new instructions? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:what new instructions? (Score:5, Informative)
Here [intel.com] are details about the new instructions.
RISC is dead. I miss it too.
OK, but... (Score:2)
Sort out those names! (Score:2)
Prescott new instructions = PNI = SSE3
Therefore SSE3 = SSE4...?
Strikes me that Intel is running out of buzzwords! Was the marketing dept. severely depleted in the last round of purges?
THe next 12 months or so are going to be a very interesting time for the CPU world. All Intel needs to do it get their chips' idling power down into the same ballpark as AMD, and AMD need that 65nm process in volume *now*! I've actually been finding myself forcing myself not to look at compu
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I guess there's not alot to complain about. At least it's not more-valuable-than-platinum-per-ounce Rambus.
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I'm just really tempted by the "fake" Kentsfield quad cores since H264 encoding takes an age, even with both cores flat out, but I'm still not sold on Core2 wholsesale since it's only energy efficient when it's running full tilt. Maybe I'll get a Kentsfield for my workstation and keep my servers (idle 95%
Does anyone really care? (Score:2)
So my first system was a 486-25.
Second system was a P-90.
Third was a 300MHz AMD.
Fourth was 1.2 GHz AMD.
Current system is a P4 2.7 GHz and it's at least 3 years old. And I don't feel any urgency to upgrade my basic system, perhaps a video card and some more RAM instead.
I simply don't see that CPU horsepower increasing in the steps like it used to. Yes, I understand multicore, more-cache, hyperthreaded CPUs are going to o
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I might celebrate my computer's third birthday by replacing it. Then again, I can't imagine what I would need to do three times faster.
Depends (Score:2)
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The original P4 @ 2.7 is rather crap. But then again maybe the apps you use dont need more than a PII really.
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On the other hand, the new computers at my office are 3.0Ghz P4's with 512MB of ram, and are less powerful than my aging Socket A system. Even 3 year old technology is still considered "new" by many people - certainly different from the old days. Back
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If you upgrade when performance triples, the Core 2 Duos with 4MB L2 are at least 3-4X faster for any tasks that will multithread in raw CPU than your current CPU. They're almost 2X faster in single threaded tasks as well.
Penhryn New Instructions (PNI) (Score:2)
I hope they come up with a new acronym. PNI is already used for Prescott New Instructions.
I like the Irony. (Score:2)
Let's hope AMD's altair is more useful.
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one thing to consider (Score:2)
Intel took two dual cores and packaged them in one unit (but inside that unit they are actually just two separate dual core CPUs) whereas AMD has made an actual quad core single die CPU.
I'm not saying Intel's method is wrong or even disadvantaged, just that it's quite different. Intel will therefore get to market much quicker than AMD, I beleive, but once bother are on the shelves (sa
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No, I didn't RTFA.
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-Rick
Re:Isn't that going a bit far? (Score:5, Informative)
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The K8L looks likely to have 512 MiB of cache (L2) per core with 2 MiB of cache (L3) shared among all four cores while Yorkfield will have two independent 6 MiB cache (L2) blocks shared between two cores and on die glue between the independent dual core blocks and the FSB.
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The K8L design has been pretty concrete for a while now. AMD makes a point of talking up the benefits of having seperate cores with regards to contention. Of course nothing is really universal. It seems a w
Yorkfield has 8 cores: 2 4-core dies on 1 package (Score:2)
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However, there is a reason to care about how quad core is being achieved. In both the first generation design (where they have two disctint does on an MCM) and the second generation design (the Yorkfield, with two dual core blocks on one die) - the cache. Not only is there likely to be data duplicated in the two L2 cache sets (thus reducing the "effective" amount of cache), any cache traffic h
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In the case of Intel's quad core solution, they seem to be achieving higher overall performance, as expected, but at the expense of pushing their thermal envelope back up to 130W even after the die shrink. AMD, on the othe
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Whether it makes sense... depends. Some applications really do benefit from big boxes - OLTP, ERP, datamining, application servers, directory servers. Commodity virtualization has made consolidation a buzzword again.
The other thing to keep in mind is that when you move into a large environment the initial purchase price is not necessarily the primary cost - rack space costs m
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L2 is what helps a CPU compensate the disparity of the FSB to the main system memory's speed.
The larger it is, the faster the CPU will run- so long as the data and executables remain there.
If you halve the L2 on the Core CPUs (Matching the AMD's Cache size...), you will see a 20% or
more drop in overall performance.
If you drop about 15-20% of the performance, you see that the Core Duo is actually SLOWER than
the comparable AMD and that the only real edge is the overal TDP which goe
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Anyway making statement about well if you cut this, change or run this specific task that then you see this makes little sense when trying to truthfully compare real devices. Compare the devices as they are running the work load YOU need to run and see which is best for what YOU want to do with the
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Something that I might be concerned about at Intel is that some of their optimizations aren't necessarily coupled to their design decision, such as the intelligent pre-fetch in their memory controller. It was more necessary in
Re:Isn't that going a bit far? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you kidding me? With a 4-way superscalar processor running at 3GHz, any cache miss can result in the processor being completely idle for 50-100ns. At an aggressive 50ns memory latency, this is up to 600 wasted opportunities to retire instructions.
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Re: No more instructions!! (Score:2, Funny)
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There are half height DVI cards so your statement isn't true. You can get a small chassis that takes either size card anyway. It's not that big a deal.
Enjoy your mini and it's slow hard drive if that's your solution. I think you have more options than that.