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The Gigahertz Race is Back On
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Apr 21, 2007 07:01 AM
from the start-yer-engines-of-commerce dept.
from the start-yer-engines-of-commerce dept.
An anonymous reader writes "When CPU manufacturers ran up against the power wall in their designs, they announced that 'the Gigahertz race is over; future products will run at slower clock speeds and gain performance through the use of multiple cores and other techniques that won't improve single-threaded application performance.' Well, it seems that the gigahertz race is back on — a CNET story talks about how AMD has boosted the speed of their new Opterons to 3GHz. Of course, the new chips also consume better than 20% more power than their last batch. 'The 2222 SE, for dual-processor systems, costs $873 in quantities of 1,000, according to the Web site, and the 8222 SE, for systems with four or eight processors costs $2,149 for quantities of 1,000. For comparison, the 2.8GHz 2220 SE and 8220 SE cost $698 and $1,514 in that quantity. AMD spokesman Phil Hughes confirmed that the company has begun shipping the new chips. The company will officially launch the products Monday, he said.'"
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More Power for What? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, this is cool, no doubt. How many users actually *use* how much power they already have? I use a lot, but it's mostly dependent on the graphics card.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're correct that people don't need this much power for their desktops but there are still plenty of uses for more speed in server
Re:More Power for What? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're correct that people don't need this much power for their desktops but there are still plenty of uses for more speed in servers and for certain other applications.
Then there is the big fact that progammers these days are sloppy and waste resources. A machine that is faster than one needs today will only be adequate in 2 or 3 years given upgrades to all the programs. (Am I being cynical? Maybe, but then again, maybe not.)
Re:More Power for What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just shut the fuck up already. Anyone with more sense than a bag of rocks will conserve scarce resources, not plentiful ones. Clock cycles are cheap. Profiling is expensive. Megabytes are cheap. Time spent coming up with clever bithacks is expensive, especially since only the cleverest and generally highest-paid developers can do it. Second cores are cheap. More time spent coming up with whole new clever bithacks for the pentium D version because it has a different relative cost for jumps and floating point ops, thus making your last batch of hacks do more harm than good, is expensive.
Furthermore, programmers don't so much *waste* resources as utilize them to provide more value. Yeah, I know the 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM, and those were some clever fellas who managed to make playable games on them. Lets see you play WoW on it. I know that your multimedia keyboard probably has more processing power than the PCjr that could once run Word. Fire up that version of Word, insert an image and a table, and hit "print preview."
Of course there are times when computing power is a precious resource. Console games that have to look awesome on 4 year old hardware. System libraries where every wasted clock will be multiplied by 2000 calls by 10000 different programs. Embedded systems where cost and size simply won't allow you to have those few extra Hz you crave. In these situations, when using extra cycles has more severe consequences than offending your sense of computational aesthetics, I believe you will find that these young whippersnappers aren't wasteful at all.
Re:More Power for What? (Score:5, Insightful)
If CPUs stayed the same power, people would write better code to improve performance.
Re:More Power for What? (Score:4, Informative)
I remember having multiple PaintShopPro files open at the same time and hearing the hard drives churning.
perhaps you need more memory? a bajillion gigawurtz won't help.
Re:More Power for What? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:More Power for What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Programmers are sloppy, because sloppy is all the industry wants to pay for. Way back in the day when CPU cycles were super expensive, programmers were paid better money and given the time to tweak the crap out of everything, because if they didn't, the app would run dog slow and people wouldn't buy it. The problem is that somehow, people now tolerate underperforming software. They see it as a reason to upgrade... good god, they actually fall for it! Gee I certainly remember surfing the web on a 486 with 8mb of Ram back in the day. Now my OS needs a good 50-60mb to itself, and that's after I ripped out all the cruft. Normally it would be 100mb just for sitting idle with a background image and a neon-colored task bar. Gee uh, where'd all my system resources go ? Does it really require 7.3 million bytes to house a TCP/IP stack when some embedded devices pull it off with oh, 6kb or so ?
The truth however, is that if we were to write code as tightly and meticulously as we did in the 80's and 90's, software would perform, on average, at least 5 to 10 times faster than today, excluding hard bottlenecks like disk access and network bandwidth. It would also take 50 times longer to write the software, and I'd say less than 1% of people who call themselves "programmers" are even able to write such finely tuned code. Everyone doing VB ? Out. Everyone doing RAD ? Out. All you Ruby on Rails weenies ? follow me to this dark alley *BLAM*
I remember spending hours on little loops, with a CPU reference manual and a calculator. Sometimes I did little time sketches to figure out the best way to stagger memory accesses so as to not starve the execution pipes. Often times that meant weaving two disparate functions together, one being memory-hungry, the other CPU hungry. Together they filled each other's latency pockets, and my routine ran nearly thrice faster as a result. No C compiler I've ever seen could do such kinky things. Heck one time I even wrote a little assembler demo whose code executed twice: forward, then backward. The opcodes and data were carefully selected to represent valid instructions when reversed. It was more than a nerdy trick, it allowed my routine to fit entirely in the CPU's on-die cache, which gave it a huge speed boost but more importantly, it enabled a lowly 486 to mix 48 sound channels in real-time. Today's Cubase can't even handle a couple dozen channels without stuttering and/or crashing, on computers over 100 times faster than a 486.
Re:More Power for What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Flash is ridiculously inefficient, and requires an extremely beefy machine to render real-time full-screen animation.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The interestin
Re:More Power for What? (Score:5, Funny)
You'd be surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
E.g., sure, we like to use the stereotypical old mom as an example of someone who only sends emails to the kids and old friends. Unfortunately it's false. It was true in the 90's, but now digital cameras are everywhere and image manipulation software is very affordable. And so are the computers which can do it. You'd be suprised the kind of heavy-duty image processing mom does on hundreds of pictures of squirrels and geese and whatever was in the park on that day.
And _video_ processing isn't too far out of reach either. It's a logical next step too: if you're taking pictures, why not short movies? Picture doing the same image processing on some thousands of frames in a movie instead of one still pictures.
E.g., software development. Try building a large project on an old 800 MHz slot-A Athlon, with all optimizations on, and then tell me I don't need a faster CPU. Plus, nowadays IDEs aren't just dumb editors with a "compile" option in the menus any more. They compile and cross-reference classes all the time as you type.
E.g., games, since you mention the graphics card. Yeah, ok, at the moment most games are just a glorified graphics engine, and mostly just use the CPU to pump the triangles to the graphics card. Well that's a pretty poor model, and the novelty of graphics alone is wearing off fast.
How about physics? They're just coming into fashion, and fast. Yeah, we make do at the moment with piss-poor approximations, like Oblivion's bump-into-a-table-and-watch-plates-fly-off-superso nic engine. There's no reason we couldn't do better.
How about AI? Already in X2 and X3 (the space sim games) it doesn't only simulate the enemies around you, but also what happens in the sectors where your automated trade or patrol ships are. I want to see that in more games.
Or how about giving good AI to city/empire building games? Tropico already simulated up to 1000 little people in your city, going around their daily lives, making friends, satisfying their needs, etc. Not just doing a dumb loop, like in Pharaoh or Caesar 3, but genuinely trying to solve the problem of satisfying their biggest need at the moment: e.g., if they're hungry, they go buy food (trekking across the whole island if needed), if they're sick, they go to a doctor, etc. I'd like to see more of that, and more complex at that.
Or let's have that in RPGs, for that matter. Oblivion for example made a big fuss about how smart and realistic their AI is... and it wasn't. But the hype it generated does show that people care about that kind of thing. So how about having games with _big_ cities, not just 4-5 houses, but cities with 1000-2000 inhabitants, which are actually smart. Let's have not just a "fame" and "infamy" rating, let's have people who actually have a graph of aquaintances and friends, and actually gradually spread the rumours. (I.e., you're not just the guy with 2 points infamy, but it's a question of which of your bad deeds did this particular NPC hear about.) Let's not have omniscient guards that teleport, but actually have witnesses calculate a path and run to inform the guards, and lead them to the crime. Etc.
Or how about procedurally generated content? The idea of creating whole cities, quests and whatnot procedurally isn't a new one, but unfortunately it tends to create boring repetition at the moment. (See Daggerfall or Morrowind.) How about an AI complex enough to generate reasonably interesting stuff. E.g., not just recombine blocks, but come up with a genuinely original fortress from the ground up, based on some constraints. E.g., how about generating whole story arcs? It's not impossible, it's just very hard.
And if you need to ask "why?", let's just say: non-linear stories. Currently if you want, for example, to play a light side and a dark side, someone has to code two different arcs, although most players will only see one or the other. If you add more points and ways you can branch the story (e.g.
Re:You'd be surprised (Score:4, Funny)
Re:You'd be surprised (Score:5, Funny)
Re:More Power for What? (Score:5, Informative)
If Fedora users who are KDE fans are lucky and I remember Fedora's release cycle right, Fedora 8 should be out around late October or November...
Oh come on (Score:4, Insightful)
I muchly prefer a fanless processor.
Re:Oh come on (Score:4, Insightful)
To understand how this is not a sign of slacking off by the chip designers, you have to understand that the P4 was able to run at high clock speeds only because it was designed to use a very long pipeline of small functional units. This design has proven to be inefficient because it causes too many pipeline stalls and because it requires a higher clock speed and higher power consumption to achieve the same performance. The more complicated functional units of chips with shorter pipelines cannot be clocked as fast, but they perform better at the achievable clock rates than the P4 did at higher clock rates. The last Gigahertz race was ended by a shift of architecture, not by "hitting a wall". Then came multicore designs, which further reduced the need and opportunity for higher clock rates (heat dissipation is somewhat of a "wall"). All this caused clock rates to grow much slower. Now that chip designers have found ways to control power consumption, increasing the clock rate is viable again, so the race is back on.
Gigahertz a bad thing? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gigahertz a bad thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
You're missing the whole point. CPU performances are increasing all the time, which allows Microsoft to continue making everything slower. However, the GHz race had little to do with performance; Intel pushed their Pentium 4 closer to 4 GHz, even if it performed slower than many competing CPUs between 2 and 3 GHz. They probably did it because most consumers would only look at raw GHz instead of performance.
Re:NO NO NO NO NO (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:NO NO NO NO NO (Score:5, Informative)
For desktops, most of Intel's newer Core 2 Duo processors have an average thermal dissipation of 65 watts. The fastest Core 2 Duo, the 2.93 GHz X6800, has a 75-watt average TDP. The quad-core chips range from 105 watts for the 2.40 GHz Q6600 to the 130-watt QX6700. These chips have a very reduced version of the SpeedStep that Intel puts in its laptop chips. The lowest core speed of the 800 MHz FSB chips is 1.20 GHz and 1.6 GHz for the 1066 MHz FSB chips. AMD's current new desktop processors start from a maximum thermal dissipation of 35 watts for the single-core Sempron EE and go up to 45 watts for the Athlon 64 single-cores (Lima), 65 watts for the Athlon 64 X2 models from the 3600+ to the 5200+, 89 watts for the 5400+ and 5600+, and 125 watts for the X2 6000+ and FX-70 series. The AMD chips all clock down to 1 GHz at idle. AMD also rates the chips on their absolute maximum thermal dissipation rather than an average thermal dissipation like Intel does, so a 65 watt AMD chip will usually end up drawing less power than an Intel 65-watt chip. The AMD chips also draw significantly less power at idle due to their lower clock speed.
The scenario is much the same for servers. AMD has their High Efficieny line of dual-core chips that draw 68 watts, the normal line that draws 95 watts, and the SE line that draws 125 watts. Intel has a few low-voltage Xeons, but those are very uncommon and pretty much limited to blade server vendors. AMD sells its Opteron HEs through a wide range of vendors.
Re:Rev up, don't shift (Score:5, Informative)
AMD64 has 16 registers
AMD seems to be working on putting a GPU in ther CPU
Memory used to be managed by a dedicated chip -- the northbridge. But AMD moved it into the CPU because it was faster that way.
The APIC? But anyway, the slow part of interrupt handling is done in the OS kernel, which runs on the CPU. So I'm not sure how much a chip would help there.
I'm not an expert, but my guess is that because computers are all-purpose devices. Specialized hardware can accelerate something like encryption or audio mixing, but there doesn't seem to be all that much of that sort of thing that's still worth accelerating. Most people don't need to encrypt the huge amounts of data that would make a dedicated accelerator make much of a difference. Notice also how now almost nobody buys sound cards anymore, because you can just mix sound in hardware.
Re:AMD is desperate (Score:5, Interesting)
Not so. AMD never said that they wouldn't increase clock speed on their CPUs. In fact, that's pretty much standard practice to get higher performance. So now their manufacturing process is capable of producing 3 GHz CPUs in sufficient volumes to sell, and they're selling them. As the process is refined there may be faster CPUs.
Intel does the same thing. As the manufacturing process is refined they are able to produce more and more CPUs at higher clock speeds. It's not a sign of anything other than business as usual.
Funny, Intel was chumped by AMD just like this a couple of years ago, why did AMD let themselves get tagged back? Intel woke up in a major way. Can AMD? Doesn't look too good...
AMD has more than just clock speed coming, Barcelona (aka K10) is supposed to be shipping in the next month or two. That's generally expected to take back the performance crown from Intel, and even if it doesn't it should at least eliminate the performance gap. For purposes of historical reference, AMD pretty much bitchslapped Intel when they released the Athlon 64. It took Intel 4 years to finally catch up to AMD and pass them with the Core 2 architecture, and even today the Opterons are still higher performers on 4 and 8 processor systems. If Barcelona turns out to be as fast as or faster than Core 2 (and by all rights, it should be) then it will have taken them only 1 year to catch up. Conroe was "previewed" at Spring IDF in 2006, but didn't ship until several months later.
As for why it's taken AMD a year to catch up, it takes quite a long time to design, layout, test, and debug a new CPU. Once all that is done the manufacturing process has to be designed and tested too. Then the CPUs have to actually be produced, and once production has started it takes almost 2 months to go from silicon wafers to functioning CPUs. However, something to keep in mind is that Intel is a much, much larger company than AMD and that Intel runs severals CPU design teams concurrently, while AMD doesn't. Intel has several times the number of designers, engineers, and fabs that AMD does. Because of their resources, Intel is able to completely scrap a CPU project and switch to something else if they need to. AMD can't, or at least not without seriously hurting the company. The fact that AMD is even competitive with Intel says quite a lot about the talent they have in-house.
The thing that I find most interesting was that last year when Intel was on the ropes, they offered the IDF preview to select web sites in order to generate buzz and FUD regarding Intel vs. AMD. And it worked too, because for 3 months everybody was talking about how Intel was king again even though they still hadn't shipped any Conroe CPUs. This year they're doing the same thing with their new Penryn architecture, and they don't appear to be on the ropes. Why would you tip your hand early if you don't have to? That indicates to me that Intel is concerned about something, and I suspect that something is Barcelona.
Even more interesting is that none of the previews compare Conroe with Penryn at the same clock speed. Most of the benchmarks that I have seen show a roughly 20% performance advantage for Penryn. But the Penryn CPU was running at about 14% higher clock speed, a 25% higher FSB, and with 50% more L2 cache onboard. Now who's playing the Gigahertz Game? I suspect that if you overclocked a Conroe and it's FSB to reach the same speeds, you probably would see little to no difference with Penryn. Which means that Intel's response to the all-new Barcelona is going to be...you guessed it...run up the clock speed and slap on some cache, because we're in for a bumpy ride.
Re:AMD is desperate (Score:4, Insightful)
Moving to 45nm gives you extra headroom for clock speed, extra transistor budget, etc. So they might just be demoing systems with similar power envelopes/cost/whatever.
Throw some SSE4 enabled apps in the mix and the Penryn would outperform an equalized Conroe by a fair margin.