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AMD Quad-Core Opteron (Barcelona) Tech Report
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Jul 22, 2007 04:23 PM
from the lovely-place-for-a-chip dept.
from the lovely-place-for-a-chip dept.
crazyeyes writes "AMD has been very tardy with Barcelona. Countless AMD fans have eagerly awaited a new processor. As the day draws closer, TechARP takes a look at the upcoming quad-core AMD Opteron. Is there more to it than just its four processing cores? Will it be the Intel-killer that AMD promised long ago? From the article: 'AMD is in the same boat as ATI. Delays after delays of their long-awaited Barcelona core not only ensured the dominance of their rival, Intel, in the desktop processor market, it also ensured that Intel would be the only choice for those who want a quad-core processor. Although that wait will end in August, 2007 when the Barcelona is finally launched, it remains to be seen if AMD's new processor will be able to inflict serious damage to Intel's dominance.'"
Related Stories
[+]
AMD's Barcelona to Outpace Intel by 50% 199 comments
Gr8Apes writes "AMD is upping the performance numbers for Barcelona by stating that "Barcelona will have a 50% advantage over Clovertown in floating point applications and 20% in integer performance 'over the competition's highest-performing quad-core processor at the same frequency'". AMD also claims that the new 3.0 GHz Opterons beat comparable Intel Xeon 5100 series processors in three server-specific benchmarks (SPECint_rate_2006, SPECint_rate2006, SPECompM2001) by up to 24%."
[+]
AMD Announces August Release Date for Barcelona 128 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Rumors said the release wouldn't be until late Q4 but an August ship date is now promised for AMD's quad-core chips. They're only releasing up to 2.0 GHz processors at first, with the top speed devices coming out later in the year. 'AMD's Barcelona puts four cores on a single slice of silicon, an approach AMD calls native quad-core, and the company has argued that Barcelona will outperform the Xeon 5300. The only problem: that comparison soon will become obsolete. Intel's second-generation quad-core server processors, Harpertown a server member of Intel's Penryn family, will arrive this year, too, with the promise of better performance, lower power consumption and lower manufacturing costs by virtue of a manufacturing process with 45-nanometer features. AMD is only just now moving to a 65-nanometer process.'"
[+]
AMD Finally Unveils Barcelona Chip 118 comments
Justin Oblehelm writes "AMD has finally unveiled its first set of quad-core processors, three months after its original launch date due to its "complicated" design. Barcelona comes in three categories: high-performance, standard-performance and energy-efficient server models, but only the standard (up to 2.0 GHz) and energy-efficient (up to 1.9 GHz) categories will be available at launch. The high-performance Opterons, together with higher frequencies of the standard and energy-efficient chips, are expected in the out in the fourth quarter of this year.
But it's far from clear that this is the product that will help right AMD's ship."
[+]
Intel Harpertown (Penryn) Quad CPUs Benchmarked 88 comments
unts writes "The Intel Developer Forum is currently running in San Francisco, and Intel is showing off the up-coming Harpertown processors based on the Penryn core. HEXUS got hands on with a test system and ran some performance tests: 'Harpertown is a better quad-core processor than Clovertown: it's as simple as that. More L2 cache will gobble-up larger application data-sets and a higher FSB, on select models, will ensure that per-CPU bandwidth is less of a concern.'"
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That's what you get... (Score:3, Insightful)
The reality of the situation became that the great majority of Athlon64 users were running 32 bit apps, and continue to do so.
There has yet to be a dire 'need' for 64 bit processing, much to the similar way that there isn't a dire need for more than 4 GB of ram in a desktop machine.
At work, I'm the Sysadmin for a dedicated hosting company (Linux, mostly Gentoo), and even in that market I don't know of any of my users running 64bit. any performance advantages are outweighed by incompatibilities and plain old PITA to get things working.
That said, the delay in developing these quad core procs shouldn't put that big a dent in the pocket / market share of AMD simply because it's a niche market that has yet to be widely adopted.
Re:That's what you get... (Score:5, Insightful)
1987 called, they want to use more than 64k of RAM. How can they do that without going to 32-bit?
2007 called back, just to let you know that 4gb of RAM was $150. That's right, $150. At that point, a lot of people are starting to wake up to the unpleasant smell of Intel's PAE (that's right, segmenting, but with 32-bits!). We're also living with the limitations of the 32-bit tlb and the paging methods used. I have a machine here with 4gb of RAM, and it's not unusual because of how cheap RAM is. Linux can run it as 4gb of RAM in 64-bit mode no problem, or I can run in 32-bit with 3.6gb of RAM because the PCI bus and other devices all map to that high region (just like everything above 640k was mapped to devices back in the 20-bit addressing days). Windows 32-bit does the same thing.
Now, while Linux 64-bit is stable and mature (having been something I've used for 3 years, after which most of the userspace apps have been cleaned up to work), Windows 64-bit is still not all there. Naturally, the proprietary apps will always live in the land of 32-bit. Supreme Commander, a recent DX10 game, has a lot of 32-bit troubles -- running out of RAM and crashing. One of the things you have to do to play it well is add
Now, 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago, that would not have been even on the radar screen. Now that you can buy 4gb of RAM for less than $200 (CAD or USD), and now that we have games and applications that need it (beyond the VFS cache; go look at some series SQL applications or scalable web applications), I think you're way off base, and you sound like someone talking about how 64k of RAM (the 16-bit addressing limit) is more than enough for anyone.
If all you're doing is sysadmining mom-and-pop's micro website that runs fine with 1 or 2gb of RAM, you'll never know this. If you're sysadmining a company that relies on this stuff, and has a cluster of machines that need to be up and running with gobs of RAM to buffer slower disks and backplanes, you'll know better. When normal users can get 4gb of RAM for next to nothing, the server machines better have at least 32gb of RAM.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you'd watch the market more regularly, you'd know that RAM has priced out at anything between $30 per gigabyte and $125 per gigabyte in the past 12 months. Last summer it was around $60-$75 per GB, rising to the $125/GB figure in the fourth quarter of 2006. Right now it's bouncing around in the $30-$50/GB range.
All depends on what week you buy it and what week your retailer bought their stock.
I'm hoping that inexpensive ($30 or less)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, the delay in developing these quad core procs shouldn't put that big a dent in the pocket / market share of AMD simply because it's a niche market that has yet to be widely adopted.
From what I've heard, the Intel quad cores are selling like hot cakes for running virtual machines.
And it's not only quad core, Barcelona also brings a bunch of core improvements, sorely needed to keep AMD competetive with Core2.
Re:That's what you get... (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course nobody's running 64-bit applications at home on at the office. Because the dominant player there is Microsoft — whose 64-bit support on the desktop is either lame (try to find even basic drivers for XP-64) or a nightmare (try to run Vista-64 at all!). Can't really run 64-bit apps without a 64-bit OS, can you?
On the other hand, there's a huge demand for 64-bit apps that run on high end workstations and servers. How do think AMD managed to grab so much market share so quickly? By finding a way to meet that demand ahead of Intel, that's how.
If it weren't for this demands I wouldn't have a job — documenting x64 servers for Sun. Yes, Sun. Its a big profit center for them these days.
All that tells us is that Gentoo 64-bit support sucks and that you're not supporting any high-end applications. What have you got, some low volume commerce and web presence sites? If you were doing millions of transactions a day, you'd be needing to squeeze all the performance out of your servers you could manage. Which is why the big boys run serious 64-bit OSs: RHEL, SLES, Solaris, Windows 2003.
Parent
Ahh more FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
As for your drivers comment, well let's see here: Intel has 64-bit XP and Vista drivers for their motherboards (and by extension graphics) and NICs as far back as their 865 series (anything older doesn't support 64-bit CPUs). Vista-64 has native support for older nVidia chips (GeForce 2 is the oldest I've tried) and nVidia provides downloadable drivers for their 5 (FX) series and newer. ATi likewise has support in the OS for some older chips, and downloadable drivers for the 9500 and newer for XP-64 and Vista-64. Broadcom has XP-64/Vista-64 drivers out for all their NICs (both 44XX and 57XX series). LSI has 64-bit drivers for, well, all their products that I can see for XP and Vista (and Linux and Solaris). Colorvision has 64-bit drivers and is Vista compatible. Logitech, Microsoft, and Saitek all have 64-bit drivers and support apps out for their input devices.
I could go on but basically any modern hardware seems to have no problems at all with 64-bit drivers. In fact, on all the 64-bit Windows systems I've set up, I've never encountered a component we didn't have a driver for. I'm not saying there aren't some oddballs out there, I'm saying that the vast majority of stuff DOES have a driver and thus it is a non-issue.
When you are countering some FUD, please don't spread your own. You may to like MS OSes, that's fine, but it is a lie to say that finding drivers for 64-bit Windows systems is hard. The vast majority of devices, including specialty devices (I've got 64-bit Vista drivers for my colorimeter and StudioCanvas for example) have 64-bit drivers. It is just a non-issue. Far more rare is 64-bit software, but thankfully 32-bit software runs without problems on the 64-bit OS.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Amen to that. I've run both XP 32- and 64-bit on this machine, and now I'm giving Vista x64 a go. XP 64-bit is a total joke - driver support is almost totally lacking, and now with Vista, I
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The 80386 was introduced in 1985, but the transition to 32 bits in software was really only done in 1995. Windows 3.1, released seven years after the 386, still ran on the 286. Word 6.0 for DOS, released in 1993, still could run on an original 8086.
The first 64-bit x86 processors were introduced in 2003. If they "herald in a new era of
Better quad-core how? (Score:5, Insightful)
The latest batch of ATI cards have failed to compete with the 8800GTX and instead compete against lower clocked cards, presumably again with cut margins. Right now AMD and ATI to me look like two second place companies, and if they try to integrate closer they'll drag each other down. I'm certainly not inclined to buy those two as a package...
Re:Better quad-core how? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I know, and I also don't give a shit. I got a single-socket mobo and four cores running, you don't. I don't need a special and expensive dual-socket mobo, eATX case or whatnot. That's 99% of the advantage there already. The notion that "real" quad-core makes a big difference is at best disputed, maybe if you have a lot of core-core communication but well... I don't see how that could be a very big bottleneck for normal quad-core u
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In essence, the desktop will slow and rot, perhaps giving us another boneheaded move like NetBurst.
You can take all of that with a grain of salt, but remember this... It's been hammered here many times before that a com
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Intel is not going off on a huge strategic blunder like the PIV or Itanium again, this time they're on the ball and overclocking results suggest they have a lot of headroom.
Really? I'm not so sure.
Sooner or later they're going to have to go for something similar to an Itanium processor. Once pushing clock speed runs out, pushing cores runs out, pushing micro-op improvements runs out, they're going to start looking at the instruction set.
You can bet that if they could change the instruction set at a whim they would have done a long time ago, and the processor would perform much better.
I think it's inevitable that in the next 10 years things will start to look towards It
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I look at it this way: there are only three players, AMD, Intel, and nVidia. Beyond that you're not going to find a chipset, cpu, or gpu worth anything. The only company that (now) has sufficient expertise in all three areas is AMD. Intel has done a good job with centrino, but clearly has no interests and lacks knowledge in the GPU arena (they've only done the bare minimum w
Re:Intel was never the choice for Quad Cores, sinc (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Intel was never the choice for Quad Cores, sinc (Score:4, Insightful)
Intel had the option to rest on its laurels; they don't like to work any harder than necessary to remain on top, and the Core marchitecture gave them a huge.. well I'll say it.. "Leap Ahead" of the competition. Unfortunately, Intel's more of a bunny; hop a few times then get tired and sit around, whereas AMD is more of the turtle (slow to market, but rather constant). Well all know who wins the race.
Parent
Re:Intel was never the choice for Quad Cores, sinc (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet they don't, and they just posted a $600 MILLION loss in one quarter. The difference between what AMD lost and Intel made last quarter is almost 2 billion dollars. Maybe you should take your market genius over there and help them turn it around.
Parent
Re:Intel was never the choice for Quad Cores, sinc (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, if you said that "true" quad core was going to make the chips be twice as fast as Intel's, at half the price, then that would be interesting. Of course, you could say that the chips would twice as fast at half the price, and that would be just as interesting - the technology has nothing to do with it.
Parent
Doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
In the end it doesn't matter how it is delivered, it matters who can deliver the good performance per $$$. Intel's quad core chips go a long way to doing that in the markets that can use them. The reason is it gets expensive to add physical processors to a board. A single socket board might be $100, but the same thing in a dual socket variety can be $400-600 and you don't even want to see the prices on quad sockets. Thus being able to drop 4 cores in to a standard desktop board, even if they aren't a monolithic 4 core package, is a good deal for many.
Technical arguments and contrived benchmarks mean nothing. The only things that matters is how fast it runs the things you actually, really do, and how much it costs.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Intel's sever / workstation chip sets suck (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually it makes a lot more difference than you'd think. This is most evident in caches. Intel's quadcore has two shared L2 caches (one per two cores). AMD has a full L2 cache per core AND a shared 2mb L3 cache. Intel doesn't have an L3 cache on any of their stuff. Besides that, HTT is a lot faster than Intel's dated FSB. More bandwidth and faster aggregate links means that yes, the native quadcore will be a lot better.
Aside from that, AMD also still has much better memory performance via the on-chip memory controller, and doubled-width op registers from the last gen AMD stuff.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If I could only get my favorite applications (like Logic Pro or Sonar or Wavelab or Nexus or Kontakt or Premiere or After Effects or even Flash) was available in
Re:Intel's sever / workstation chip sets suck (Score:4, Insightful)
Per core cache is faster than shared cache.
L3 is better as well because it means it can be used to transfer data between cores instead of main memory.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Shared FSB systems do not scale... even Intel knows that. However, dual-d