theinquirer.net — DIGIT LIFE explores the next generation native quad core architecture from AMD, the K8L, based on one presentation made by Guiseppe Amato in Moscow. There are a few benchmark slides but most of the presentations seems to hover around the power to performance ratio which can turn quite dirty for Intel.
Sep 24, 2006 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountSep 25, 2006
Dual core, quad core only flannel. If you have an old dual processor SMP machine thats equal with a dualcore. Nothing new here, only marketing. And I agree with that assumption x86 doesn't have a way to scale massively.
mikecermSep 25, 2006
I think that companies like Google and every visual-effects company in Hollywood have done pretty well with clustering x86 hardware. The server sprawl problem with is getting better and better with dual-core, and now quad, and the Sun and Cray supercomputer folks really just can't compete with x86 from a price-performance standpoint. Clustering is a pain in the ass for you and me, but people that actually need clusters find ways to make it work.
mikecermSep 25, 2006
Granted, Pentium D was just 2 shoddy chips glued together, but Pentium D wasn't the mistake, Netburst was. Pentium D chips weren't any worse than the P4 chips that they were based on. AMD's design was just better, both single and dual-core.
lostmongooseSep 25, 2006
@gemini: two dies connected with a crossbar is not the same as native quad core. So, no Intel will not physically have CPUs with quad core dies first, because rather than actually work on getting native quad core, they're more worried about beating AMD to the punch, so they release a another multi-die chip and label it quad core and no one in the consumer world realizes this isn't what they're really getting and, as long as the software treats it as such, no one bothers calling shenanigans on them.
happyscrappySep 25, 2006
The power slide makes no sense.Running cores at lower frequencies only saves power (versus run and halt) if you also run them at lower voltages.Running different cores at different voltages requires CPU power supply changes, as current CPU power supplies are only designed to output one voltage at a time. This voltage can be adjusted up and down, but you can't generate two at once.If you cannot adjust voltage separately, then just running all at the same speed and then halting them when they don't have work to do uses no more power than running at the lower frequency. And if you run them at full speed and not only halt them but power them down when they are not busy, you actually save power versus running them slower due to reduced leakage currents.I can't see how AMD's power page makes any sense here. Does someone have more details that make this description make sense?As to the lower graph, it cites this URL:<a class="user" href="http://techreport.com/etc/2006q2/woodcrest/index.x?pg=2">http://techreport.com/etc/2006q2/woodcrest/index.x?pg=2</a>The URL shows the top Dempsey chip at 130W. It shows the top Woodcrest at 80W.Yet the AMD slide shows Dempsey at 260W and Woodcrest at 130W.Where does AMD get these bogus numbers from?The slide shows the top Clovertown at 160W, which is likely given that Clovertown is basically two Woodcrests.If you change these bars to what is on the referenced page, Dempsey comes in at just a hair over the Opteron DDR2 on the left. And the Woodcrest comes in a lot lower than the Opteron DDR2 on the left.I also wonder how the memory power usage of Clovertown is expected to be the same as Dempsey if the memory clock is scaled back 20% (as mentioned on the page).Finally, the 83W number is just too high for most systems. 83W probably would be correct for FB-DIMMs, but few people use FB-DIMMs.It'll also be funny to see this graph in a year when AMD has 65nm on the left and on the right, and their state TDP is estimated to rise by ~23% to 50%, while Intel falls to 45nm and their TDP is flat.
Closed AccountSep 25, 2006
Intel's naming scheme is really confusing for most people. The Core2 lineup make a little more sense than the names they used with the pentiums, but just not by much.At least with AMD you knew that the higher number meant better performance.Intel just neede a way to sneakily back out of the horendous crap that was netburst running at twice the clockrate of AMD chips that were faster.