AMD, K10

[Fil2eFly]

http://img243.imageshack.us/img243/8927/amdvsintel2is4.jpg

well as euan knows i love AMD's and hate intel (silly thing not rly based ony any reasoning)

and i for one has been very sad :( for a while becuase of the evil intel core 2 duo

BUT now im happy :) as iv been reading the interweb and found some shit regarding AMD's new processors, due this summer ( i belive)
Here are some words to look at!! (http://dailytech.com/AMD+45nm+DDR3+and+Socket+AM3+in+2008/article7132.htm)

Looks prity shit hot, for those who dont know , aparently there will be a few ranges :
Phenom x2 (twin cores)
Phenom x4 (the first true quad core processor not like intel who taped 2 twin cores together :P)
Phenom FX (quadcore)

[Uuurrahh]

rofl@the entirely unecessary MSPaint photochop job: if it had unecessary phallic objects and other shock material it just may be one of mine. Now come here whilst my 6600 analshafts you.

[Hex]

Phenom x4 (the first true quad core processor not like intel who taped 2 twin cores together :P)


Dude it makes very little difference, 4 cores is 4 cores. Dual Core processors don't have anything over 2 single core processors of the same speed in terms of performance - in fact 2 single core processors probably have a larger combined cache as they're on separate chips. More to the point, quad core is currently a huge waste of money as bugger all supports it....

[Fil2eFly]

rofl@the entirely unecessary MSPaint photochop job: if it had unecessary phallic objects and other shock material it just may be one of mine. Now come here whilst my 6600 analshafts you.

well i was going to draw a penis on the intels head, but i deemed it unnessary

Dude it makes very little difference, 4 cores is 4 cores. Dual Core processors don't have anything over 2 single core processors of the same speed in terms of performance - in fact 2 single core processors probably have a larger combined cache as they're on separate chips. More to the point, quad core is currently a huge waste of money as bugger all supports it....
maybe so but it makes ur e-peen this much bigger : |----------------------------------|

[Uuurrahh]

well i was going to draw a penis on the intels head, but i deemed it unnessary

Hrmmm ... *begins to work*

[Uuurrahh]

Et Voila:

Naturally, NSFW. (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v245/Schmeisser/amdvintel.jpg)

[Hex]

That link leads to:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /files/83/830e79eac7e4b277b84a3443568124bff1f6c3d0.jpg on this server.

Not that thats probably such a bad thing.....

[Uuurrahh]

Waffle seems to be acting up a bit :(

Fixed and fully compensated for.

[Hex]

Dude, you absolutely cannot post a picture featuring goatse on this forum, thinks like that HAVE to be linked with a NSFW tag! Use your common sense man!

[YegaDoyai]

ROFL!

twin dual core compared with true quad core does actually have somedifferences. I posted about this a while back but essentially the true quad core nature of the K10 + its inbuilt memory manager measn that they can use less on board cache more effectively. Read the article it is quite interesting to see the different paths chosen by AMD and Intel. Hopefully AMD have chosen the cheaper more effecient route again thus giving them some market share.

[Fil2eFly]

well i for one am looking farwards to their relise, see how the benchmark compred to the intel, hopefully they will be on a par if not better than the intels, but wait and see i guess,

By the time they come out (later part of 07) il be thinking about a new machine so i may be able to build a shithot AMD powerd machine :)

[Uuurrahh]

Dude, you absolutely cannot post a picture featuring goatse on this forum, thinks like that HAVE to be linked with a NSFW tag! Use your common sense man!

Personally I find the lederhosen more offensive.

[LastChanceHotel]

Dude it makes very little difference, 4 cores is 4 cores. Dual Core processors don't have anything over 2 single core processors of the same speed in terms of performance - in fact 2 single core processors probably have a larger combined cache as they're on separate chips. More to the point, quad core is currently a huge waste of money as bugger all supports it....

No, No, No. Have you heard of cache localisation? If you have a single-threaded app, then the binary (or portions of it) will be stored in the L2 cache, as it's about five to six times the speed of RAM in modern processors. All's fine and well, until you get multi-threaded apps, which spread their execution across multiple discrete cores (eg, finely-threaded apps which spread instructions rather than entire subsets of operations across multiple cores. (subsets of operations = physics.exe, graphics.exe, etc)... And then you get what can only be described as cache ping-pong: the program is loaded into one core, then oh shit it needs to run an operation on another core, so the entire program gets moved along the slow front-side bus to the other core (because they don't share caches), to go do some work, then ponged back and so forth... Which is why having a unified cache architecture is so important. It's even more important in servers - Oracle databases for example are finely threaded, which makes a good cache infrastructure very important, otherwise you waste more time shoving bits than you do processing!

AMD's opterons got it right the first time around, which is why Opty's are still being used and specified for database and cache servers (single, finely-threaded executables). the new quad-core single-die processors by Intel are coming into the marketplace in a big way so that's beginning to change, but quite often for database applications the change is quite insignificant.

You're talking exclusively about today's single-threaded games; with no reference to Valve's new game engine or any other upcomings (crysis anyone?). Quad core gives you more, if you can use it. But, other than the high end (Which I'm sorry, is not gaming) stuff like database servers, large memcached clusters or extremely powerful filesystems like MogileFS and XFS, there's very little application for quad (or indeed dual) core currently.

This will change, though.

[YegaDoyai]

Jan, the native quad core design for the K10 actually has 3 levels, it is kinda awesome. But also the twin dual core solution "on a chip" just tacs on a crossbar switch and shared pool for cache. Nothing like as elegant as the K10 design.

[Fyndir]

Should we expect Intel to throw in a price-drop of some sort on the C2D's round about the AMD release to try and ensure less people go for the AMD?

[YegaDoyai]

yes

[Fyndir]

yes

How very yummy, I expect you'll tell us which one is best value for money once the new AMDs have been out for a few months? =D

[Fil2eFly]

No, No, No. Have you heard of cache localisation? etc etc etc etc

well ya do learn something new everyday... thanks.

so y is it atm that games etc dont use the full 2 or 4 cores of the processors properly? is that down to how the games are built or what?

[Hex]

well ya do learn something new everyday... thanks.

so y is it atm that games etc dont use the full 2 or 4 cores of the processors properly? is that down to how the games are built or what?

Simply put, yes, it is down to how the games are built. For quite some time, applications (and especially games) have been built to take advantage of what's called "hyper-threading". This involves having many small operations being swapped in and out of the CPU so rapidly that they appear to the user to be happening at the same time. This is how your OS allows you to have more than one process running at the same time. However, it is not actually the case that more than one thing is running at the same time.

Multi-core or Multi-CPU systems however are different - they actually allow more than one process to be run simultaneously, as you effectively have 2 (or more) CPUs to use - hence one process can run on each CPU. Because multi-core architectures have only recently become standard in home machines, games have not been fully optimised for "parallelism" - using both cores in parallel. In order for games to take full advantage of two cores, they have to be designed so that both CPUs are used to maximum efficiency.

The problem of course is that the game designers still have to support users with Single core processors, meaning that they either have to ignore the extra benefits of dual-core, or come up with some kind of compromise. Sooner or later I anticipate that games will start being released which actually require dual-core machines as they are optimized for them.

Hope that gives ya some idea of whats going on!

[Fil2eFly]

yeah that helps, explained very well,.. now i would have thought it would be posible to have the O/S tell a process to run across multiple cores, or its it the way the programs are designed that it is imposible for them to be running across multiple cores?

[Hex]

yeah that helps, explained very well,.. now i would have thought it would be posible to have the O/S tell a process to run across multiple cores, or its it the way the programs are designed that it is imposible for them to be running across multiple cores?

The way OSs currently work, a single process can only run on one CPU/core at a time. The knack to optimizing a game for multi-core architectures would be rather than having one mammoth process for the whole game, to split the game into multiple processes that could be run on multiple cores simultaneously. To some extent this is already happenning - after all, graphics work is run on the graphics chip on your graphics card, and those people who own physics cards also have a dedicated chip for that part of the work.

Essentially the OS is reasonably dumb - applications hand it processes and it just adds them to the queue and runs them on the CPU - the applications have to be very specific about what needs doing when/where in order to really juice the CPU for all it's worth. Don't worry, it will come :)

[Fil2eFly]

ah ic, well thanks very much another enlightening post sur