AMD QuadFX Platform and FX-70 Series Launched 130
MojoKid writes, "AMD officially launched their QuadFX platform and FX-70 series processors today, previously known as 4x4. FX-70 series processors will be sold in matched pairs at speeds of 2.6, 2.8, and 3GHz. These chips are currently supported by NVIDIA nForce 680a chipset-based, dual-socket motherboards, namely the Asus L1N64-SLI WS, which is currently the only model available. HotHardware took a fully configured AMD QuadFX system out for a spin and though performance was impressive, the fastest 3GHz quad-core FX-74 configuration couldn't catch Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX6700 quad-core chip in any of the benchmarks. The platform does show promise for the future, however, especially with AMD's Torenzza open socket initiative." And mikemuch writes that the QuadFX "not only fails to take the performance crown from Intel's quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6700, but in the process burns almost twice as much electricity and runs significantly hotter in the process. ExtremeTech has a plethora of application and synthetic benchmarks on QuadFX, including gaming and media-encoding tests."
Also in the AMD vendor section (Score:1, Informative)
Depends on what you call a "power user" (Score:5, Funny)
Boy, intel really made things difficult. (Score:1)
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Not long now (Score:1)
Having the home server also doing all water heating for the house might be a good idea.
You need to run some intensive process to heat up enough for a bath or shower.
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required... (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:Not long now (Score:5, Funny)
Nahh, just boot Vista.
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Good name from a marketing perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
While performance may be disappointing, it's pretty clear that AMD is just releasing this as a stopgap solution to "stay in the game" for the performance sector until their new developments are ready next year. The name is a good choice and reflects that intention - they combine their performance branding, FX, with "Quad", the term Intel is using, to indicate that it fills the same niche as a quad-core processor. I think it does what it is meant to do - give the impression of a comparable offering until AMD
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I'd rather an Opteron for HPC than an Intel box anyday.
For "gaming" and other 1337 chores, I guess the Intel box is the winner. But really until Intel figures out this "not use the FSB" approach they can kiss my HPC using ass good bye.
[and this is coming from a dude who loves his Core 2 Duo workstation...]
Tom
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1) Only one memory module per channel supported, and no ECC. Not what you want for high reliability or in memory-intensive tasks. This disqualifies the QuadFX as server processor.
2) Much cheaper than the (closest in performance) Opteron 2220 SE but castrated as described above. I guess AMD did that intentionally to avoid cannibalizing the server market.
So I'd consider the Intel, with a high quality board, for "affordable
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Piss off gamers with a problematic part and you might lose some "street cred".
Piss off IT managers with a problematic part and you will lose significant revenue for many quarters to come.
If I were going to test out a new product, a bunch of rich kid early adopters would be the market segment to target. They are always willing to try something new and their decisions do not significantly impact your bottom line.
Once the process kinks are worked out, incorporate the other features for your main
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Correct. It appears to be a higher clocked but otherwise severely limited version of the Opteron 22XX series, relabeled and fitted with a controller for non-registered, non-ECC RAM.
The QuadFX may be interesting for gamers, but I doubt anyone else would want it.
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Fanboys... it just doesn't get more entertaining then that.
Re:Good name from a marketing perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel spent years in that boat with no indication that they had an intention to 1) aim for low power consumption (they were happily gloating about the forthcoming Pentium 4 5GHz) or 2) do what it took to gain the performance crown. It was not clear (in recent history) that they had an eye on the super-performance desktop market until the announcement of the Extreme Edition and little indication of concern about power usage on the desktop until they announced that their new desktop processors would be based on the Pentium M.
On the other hand, we already know AMD's plans for next year, and we have statements of what they hope to achieve. I'm not saying just to wait and that it will be awesome. I'm posting on a Core 2 Duo system built using the remnants of my last Athlon XP system. My previous post indicated my expectations for what AMD is doing from a business perspective, not my feelings about the company or their product.
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I'm actually surprised the review was so positive. It's somewhat neutral, but really the conclusion is simple - 4x4 is a piece of crap. It uses ridiculou power and still loses the majority of benchmarks. In fact, in most applications, an E6600 would match or exceed it in performance, especially when both are overclocked.
Espensive, high power requirements, average performance, questionable future. Seriously, pretty
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AMD's new Power HOG (Score:1)
But, this is a first release, and what's important is the strengths shown. Notably, that 2 AMD 64 processors (granted, the 1207 pin versions) scale up to Intel's brand new Core 2 QX series best (itself 2 CPUs slapped together). It will be interesting when AMD releases their true quad core CPUs on 65nm in 2007. It looks like they'll be on par with Intel at worst.
This is only good news for us consumers!
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Re:AMD's new Power HOG (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel wins on extra Cache- and the benchmarks that keep getting ran don't reveal performance snags with the SMP operation.
Intel's got a shared L2 that's 2-4 times the size of the AMD equivalents' pool.
AMD's got a coherent, but NON-shared L2 split across multiple CPUs- each core has it's own L2. You'll have less L2 thrash with that design.
Under an SMP load, the AMD design will have an edge if all four cores are busy in different parts of system memory.
If you pop out of cache, the memory bus design and overall architecture of the AMD parts will have an edge.
Intel has an edge only due to process shrink and the things they can do as a result thereof. As soon as AMD goes to the
smaller process size, they'll pick up the lower TDP advantage Intel has right at the moment and then the whole deal will
flip-flop on who's got the "best" CPU unless Intel comes up with a few new tricks along the way, which may/may not happen
for them.
But can AMD gain on process? (Score:1)
Only problem then is that as it currently stands, Intel is, allegedly, ahead in the process game: " Intel to hit 65nm-45nm cross-over in 2008 [techreport.com]"
I like AMD for Hypertranspart, and Intel need to go there too sooner or later, but elegance isn't going to get AMD the win in the mass market; only performance can do that (and performance per dollar at that).
Sadly (for reasons of competition), I'm afraid that Intel may remain on top unless they run into problems with 45nm and AMD can sneak up on them by
Re:AMD's new Power HOG (Score:5, Insightful)
In CPU architecture circles, the shared L2 is considered a more ideal design than split L2 for multi-core processors. There are plenty of talks around the 'net as to why.
As far as cache size, that's a design tradeoff just like any other. Because of the slowness of main memory, you want to have as large a cache system as possible. However, cache system latency increases with the size of the cache so that is a tradeoff as well. Intel chose to use some chip realestate for cache. "Faulting" them for this is just being an apologist for your puppy.
There are many types of "SMP loads". Multi-threaded loads where all threads work on the same data will be similar on both as there is only one pipe to the memory on both the NUMA and the FSB model, for example. But yet, on SMP loads that are more 'lose', you can get good benefits from NUMA. By the way, Intel also has the IMC with their equivalent to HT on the roadmaps, so this discussion (NUMA vs FSB) won't be relevant for much longer.
Additionally, it isn't until AMD's 'next thing' where their NUMA architecture will be able to scale much better (it doesn't do that well with lots of sockets because it falls back to being limited by the number of HT connections so some communication has to be multi-jump with current multi-socket solutions - the new core adds an HT link so that 4+ sockets can have a more direct path around the system).
There are a number of examples of "popping out of cache" in the tests on various sites. AMD does show that it helps in those when it can use the bandwidth of both NUMA branches but it isn't convincingly better than Intel's FSB on many/any of the tests that are shown (you'd hope to see idealistically 2x performance improvement on many of those, but even with all the extra bandwidth, AMD doesn't seem to 'blow the doors' off of the Intel parts... in fact, AMD doesn't even beat them even with the added bandwidth... this just shows that there may be more to the picture than an IMC + more bandwidth). Even AMD's latency isn't that much better than Intel's FSB design anymore (the nice advantage that had against NetBurst is pretty much gone).
I'm eagerly awaiting AMD's next 'real' move, myself, but given that Intel is already sampling 45nm parts and even on 65nm Core is able to clock to 3.5GHz ranges (meaning Intel has a lot of headroom even on 65nm), the short amount of time that Intel and AMD will overlap on 65nm will probably just show equality (at best) between the two. I haven't really seen what performance advantages AMD's new features give, other than the obvious benefits of wider paths and the FPU issue increase (to bring it equal to Intel's issue rate, although AMD has typically had a stronger FPU). AMD claims a lot, but that could simply be marketing at this point.
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Re:L1 vs L2 vs RAM? (Score:3, Informative)
~19700 MB/s for L1
~4700 MB/s for L2
~3000 MB/s for main memory
This is on a Athlon64 X2 4600+ w/ low-speed DDR2 RAM (4 sticks of 1GB).
I'm guessing that L2 gains are because it can respond to a memory request faster (fewer clock cycles) then because of the bandwidth? Because the L2 bandwidth of 4.7GB/s doesn't seem to be that exciting anymore once main RAM can feed the CPU at 3GB/s.
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AMD's FPU (Score:2)
Fusion may only be a CPU and a graphic card in the same package, targeted at the entry market, as some have speculated.
But it can also turn out to be something more similar to the Cell processor a CPU with several general purpose Vector units that could be used for higher level computation (Physics, Geometry, or even scientific calculation @Home) while leaving the
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Personally,
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How does this explain that when clock speed and L2 cache sizes are equal, Core2Duo o
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2Gb of L2 versus 1Gb of L2 per Core (1Gb twice over...) isn't the same thing. On non SMP benchmarks the 2Gb will win. Same goes with Four Cores and so forth. They don't do better on a "matched playing field" because it's not. Most of the 'benchmarks' don't really DO SMP operations- they're Uniproc applications, even the games... And on Uniproc, the DUO technically has double the cache because it's got 2Gb share
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Again... what is this mythical "true SMP operations" that people keep mentioning? Are you talking about MIMD code?
I don't understand the "places" you mention. L2 cache has been multiported for a long time. Additionally, the c
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"true" again... spoken like a "true" fanboi. Anyway... Core has a lot of headroom for frequency increases. In the ExtremeTech article, they overclocked the QX part from 2.66GHz to 3.55GHz even. Not only that, but Intel is already sampling 45nm parts and will likely have 45
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My bad... I read that wrong. The Core2Duo was overclocked to 3.55GHz, not the quad core part. However, this still shows the amount of headroom the core has on 65nm.
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2) The increases seen from dropping mask scale haven't been that great over the past few drops. Certainly not in the frequency bump arena. Since 65 can do 3.6 or more, I wouldn't be shocked if they can eek 4GHz out of 45nm, finally, only about 4 years late.
3) Intel's architecture has already shown problems with the FSB limitations with Woodcrest in Apple benchmarks.
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What is "true SMP type multi-threading"? I've worked on parallel (multi-process and multi-threaded) code for almost 20 years now. There is no "one true" SMP processing type. The differentiators are data partitioning and how much serial vs. parallelism are inherent in your problem/algorithms. All are "true" in every sense of the word. Some are more efficient than others and some scale better... that's it.
As far as L2 cache sizes, they *are* going to grow with t
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This is more related to how a task is run within the system than ho
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_only_memory_arc [wikipedia.org]
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OTOH, this is typical AMD. Copy Intel, but hotter and a power hog, then try to refine. About the time AMD is actually a real competitot to the Intel version, Intel cmoes out with a better chip and AMD follows. Rinse repeat.
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Pentium D
Pentium M
You're right - crap is not good for consumers!
nforce chipset? (Score:1, Interesting)
Hotter? (Score:4, Informative)
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I think the community of folks who follow processor awesomeness generally equate high TDP with system heat (and therefore ability to function as a space heater, cook eggs, burn the fingers of curious children, etc.) It's sort of sensationalist, in both senses of the term - "Man I bet you can feel the heat from that thing on the other side of the house!" Making fun of power draw just doesn't have as much good material.
Re:Hotter? (Score:4, Informative)
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I think it's also worth noting that the QuadFX platform apparently doubles some parts of NVIDIA's power-hungry chipset [hothardware.com] (12 SATA ports??). Back when the single-CPU AM2 platform was launched, the NVIDIA chipset consumed a lot more power than the ATI chipset: somewhere between 20 watts [techreport.com] and 40 watts [hothardware.com].
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They might not run hotter (operating temp) but they produce twice the heat (power draw), so you're really pushing the semantics here. More heat = more cooling = more noise = higher power bill = lower battery life. These are what matters to end-users, I couldn't care less if it spends it all in one place or two.
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Which brings up another "con" for the QuadFX platform: so far, it's only available in the eATX (extended ATX) form factor. The motherboard is too big to fit in almost all popular gaming cases (which max out at "standard" ATX). In contrast, a Core 2 Quad can be used in standard ATX and even microATX SFF cases like the Falcon NW Fragbox [falcon-nw.com].
I
The race is on! (Score:5, Funny)
processors with 10 cores
or
razors with 10 blades
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Sparc is up to eight cores [edn.com].
Razors have better hurry.
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8 SPU's plus a dual core PPC = 10 cores
I for one... (Score:2)
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The more up-to-date version would be:
You don't do virtualization, do you?
Start cramming multiple virtual servers onto a single box and all of a sudden dual-core solutions start to seem limiting. And you find yourself wondering just how much a 4-way quad-core machine would cost...
(That 4-CPU quad-core machine is still going to be cheaper then maintaining 4 separate quad-core servers.)
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i'm barely maxxing out my intel 66mhz with the turbo activated.
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Corporate Stupidity (Score:2, Insightful)
I think most here knew that this was always going to be a stupid vanity platform, almost as stupid as water-cooled memory modules [ocztechnology.com]. Now, the only thing more sad and stupid than a vanity platform, is one where the vanity isn't even there.
This should have ended as abandoned concept art in a drawer.
(PS. My current gaming rig is AMD X2-based, but if they don't have the performance/$ then they won't get in on the next upgrade)
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Yeah, it's a real winner.
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No - this will be the difference between having an 8 way system that takes up 5U in a rack and an 8 way system that takes up 1U since it only needs two sockets. You don't need a huge board that only goes into oversized cases - that said the huge board does have 16 memory slots.
I'm wrong above (Score:2)
Any games out there on linux that would really show off an 8 way system to "test" it over the weekend? Whatever happened to the cluster
Windows XP NUMA support (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Windows XP NUMA support (Score:5, Insightful)
In short, once you factor NUMA out of these benchmarks, the difference between AMD quad and Intel quad is approximately the same as the difference between AMD's K8 arch and Intel's Core arch for single cores. Umm... duh?
Re:Windows XP NUMA support (can blow me) (Score:2, Interesting)
Anybody running a 2.4.2 version of the Linux kernel should be shot. Nobody runs 2.4.2 these days and anybody suggesting that is far out of touch with what Linux is doing. Compare it against 2.6.19 with all of the NUMA options turned on (CPU local memory allocators, RCUed algorithms) and you'll see an expected an expected trumping of XP for kernel load hands down because of all of the MP work on it over the 4 years.
HardOCP's take (link) (Score:2)
I'd go with the QuadFX platform just so I could swap in two quadcore AMD chips mid-2007, or one quadcore and one Torrenza platform coprocessor... if I had a few $thousand lying around and could make proper use of all that firepower. I suspect that quadcore + coprocessor combination is going to be really, really interesting within a year.
AMD couldn't last forever on top (Score:1)
Nobody wants to be seen as the Dollar General of processors...Cyrix anyone?
Tom's Hardware... (Score:2, Informative)
Quad cores - great for servers... but. (Score:1)
I'm sure quad cores are great for my servers, especially a couple of my mail servers that process a boatload of mail... but honestly, it's completely useless for the desktop. I would go so
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I also like to play games and listen to mp3s. Game music has a tendency to get boring.
I also like to play games while downloading large files.
Many times I ahve been watching a DVD while burning a disk, or cimpiling and buring disks for distribution.
OTOH, I found that a SCSI 320 with 3 ms seek time takes care of this problem just fine.
Re:Quad cores - great for servers... but. (Score:5, Insightful)
Stating the blindingly obvious: some people aren't going to notice much (if any) difference; others are going to see a huge difference. Parent falls into the former camp; I fall into the latter. I also have been using 62x2 for a year, and no way would I go back to single core. It would be worth having dual core if only for the fact that I can start a job and it will consume a core while all my interactive work runs on the second core, and hence I don't even notice that a huge job is running in the background. Everything else one gets with dual-core is an added bonus. I'm not totally certain that going to 4 cores on the desktop will be as useful, but I can believe that it might be, and will certainly be worth trying. For me, anyway (and I can't believe that I'm particularly untypical of slashdot users).
Given my experience, I'm even fairly convinced that the rest of my family (who are much more like ordinary users) would benefit from dual core too. Everything is simply so much more responsive.
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Given the number of PCs that were selling with faaaar too little memory arond when XP Home was released, I think most are oblivious. If they can't notice that their machine is swapping like crazy, what are they going to notice? Personally I think my biggest issue seems to be locking IO calls - the worst thing I can do to my Windows box is put in a semi-scratched CD/DVD. It'l
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preface: I-am-not-a-windows-programmer...
My guess is that windows isn't actually locking, but instead that the file-system directory is locking... But since virtually any OS call is accessing some kind of file object, those OS calls will likely lock too.
Same is true in UNIX, except UNIX isn't retarded enough to have unrelated virtual paths block one another. Gnome, on the other hand... Well it does still dream about becoming win
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What? What is more responsive? Someone show me some tangible proof that day-to-day activities are "more responsive" or "smoother." I have yet to see it. Maybe I just set my shit up properly from the get-go, so my computing experience is already hyper responsive, so I don't notice the difference. Maybe dual and qu
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I spent 4 years on a 600mhz G3 iBook, and just upgraded to a Quad Mac Pro 2.66. I've also regularly used a P4 2.4 and a Celeron 1.7 laptop at work.
To start with, actually, I ran a 6-proc 200mhz PPro at an old job I had, and while the thing was never lightning fast, it ran like a train.. NOTHING slowed it down, ever.
I was continually surprised at how slow the P4 2.4 running XP felt, given my slow iBook at home... so part of it may be the
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These are still 90nm chips... (Score:1)
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I still think that AMD's move to 65nm
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Check out the Tom's Article (Score:1)
print url (Score:2, Informative)
Same Price for Intel and AMD? (Score:1)
What is the reason for this much power? (Score:1)
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They're in the process of reading it now.