AMD's Dual-core Athlon 64 X2 reviewed 309
ChocolateJesus writes "Weeks after formally announcing its dual-core Athlon X2 desktop processor, reviews are finally trickling out. The Tech Report's coverage tests two flavors of the Athlon 64 X2 against a whopping 17 competitors, including AMD and Intel's fastest single- and dual-core offerings. They've even thrown in a handful of dual-processor systems (and dual-core, dual-processor systems) for good measure. Testing focuses on multi-threaded applications, and the X2s deliver remarkable performance. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that unlike Intel's dual-core Pentiums, AMD's X2s consume no more power than single-core chips." Looks like this story has come out of embargo - if you've find more reviews, post them in comments.
Cooling (Score:4, Interesting)
What's that burnt intel smell? (Score:2, Interesting)
Rollout process (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Announcement
2. Technical Preview (benchmarks Appear)
3. Launch (OEM Availability)
4. Ramp-up and Reseller Availability
They even give dates, if they can keep to those dates then we might actually have a product launch that doesn't antagonize the community with accusations of a 'paper launch'.
I'd like to see more companies be more upfront about this.
Re:market for this? (Score:1, Interesting)
Adware&Virus: hardware makers win!! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a sad case that as malware becomes more previlent, hardware vendors win. Really, you can be productive with (for example) Win2K on a 1GHz machine and 256MB, in an office. Now add the wait as every file is scanned on access for viruses (per corporate policy), and the machine somehow becomes "too slow."
OH well. I guess it's time to put all productivity applications on a Server & run them remotely. Again;-(
Does dual core == 2xProcessor or hybrid? (Score:3, Interesting)
I recall reading a
But does a vendor HAVE to make a dual core chip with two of the same processor? Perhaps gains could be made using a less powerful, commodity chip core and pairing it to a top of the line core.
Costs would be lower and they could sell more of this hybrid dual core because they would only need 1 top of the line cores.
Oh, you get what I am saying.
Re:market for this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:market for this? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Redsigning your applications. (Score:5, Interesting)
Dual CPU systems tho are useless to the home users, it's for businesses and scientists with more computing need. Real enterprise applications are multithreated.
Not so!
I was one of the lucky people buy a cheap dual Celeron setup right after that hack was first discovered and I can tell you that multiprocessors on the desktop rock. My old system was a dual Celeron 400, and while it couldn't compete with a modern system in terms of benchmark speed, it had my current 1400 MHz Celeron system beat bloody when it comes to interactivity and responsiveness -- that elusive "feel".
The price is steep now, but don't let arguments about application benchmarks dissuade you from trying out multicore when prices go down. The Anandtech review cited about has some really telling benchmarks about how well a dual system performs when loaded down with multiple tasks.
Unlike the unnoticeable 200 or 400 MHz incremental bumps you usually see with processors, dual core really brings something of value to the desktop user. Try it and you'll see.
RISC (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:market for this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone involved in matrix math (circuit design, mechanical engineering, fluid dynamics, etcetera) would love to be able to do this on their desktop instead of shared time on an HPC. Or combine the computational power of an office full of these machines at night or over weekends for the really big jobs. What's not to like?
Any scientific organization that has been holding off on capital expeditures while waiting for a clear winner to emerge ((AMD vs. Intel) vs. (PPC vs. SPARC)) will have come that much closer to making a decision.
Intel's IA64 gambit has not panned out -- their marketing hype has brought down some of their competition (PA-RISC and MIPS), but it has not proven to be the market leader Intel would have hoped. But like a wildfire in the woods, Intel's IA64 has opened up competition for diversity and some new leadership.
Re:What's that burnt intel smell? (Score:3, Interesting)
Intel is obviously relying on fat vendors like Dell, but with performance like this and power consumption like that, buyers will be asking Dell what their problem is. When Dell finally cracks, you'll know Intel have spent too long fixating on their stock price rather than their products. It's a tough thing to recover from, too, and will call for a major shake-up.
Pity is, companies which go though this usually are considerably weaker. AMD looks good, but you have no idea what may be coming out of Japan/Taiwan/China in 10 years.
Re:Redsigning your applications. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well we realize it here, because it's BROUGHT UP every single time there's a mention of more than one processor running!! Yeesh. Heh.
On a lighter note: When these processors become more popular, multi-threaded apps will come. Besides, its not like our machines aren't keeping up with apps today. Except for my 3D rendering, I don't have anything that would benefit from a faster processor, and I doubt many other people do either.
Re:Cooling (Score:3, Interesting)
It's hardly accurate to judge a CPU's performance based on a "power drawn at the wall" measurement.
Re:this is a software problem... (Score:2, Interesting)
Single threaded apps are typically written with far less care and don't leave cycles free for the GUI and OS functions.
That is why having the second processor is nice. It has free cycles when an app is hogging the other one. A multi-threaded app will use both but will probably not hog both, leaving the GUI still "snapppy".
Does anyone buy performance anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)
AMD might be turning out some pretty good products but they are not making any money [networkworld.com] selling them and it is only a matter of time before they have to fold their tent and leave the field to Intel.
Re:Redsigning your applications. (Score:3, Interesting)
Most people who post it don't realize that your CPU is context switching dozens of times per second when idle in your OS already. Simply letting two cores handle different interrupts is a benefit for system responsiveness.
How often is your CPU wanting to do more than one thing at a time? All the time in an OS like Linux or Windows.
If you're running Linux, run vmstat and check the context switches per second.
If you install a second CPU, you may not see a 2x performance increase, but you wouldn't if you doubled your CPU speed either.
You *will* however see a much more responsive machine, because of how the system handles load better.
Re:It's about the interactivity (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, it seemed the question was mostly rhetorical, as The Tech Report prompted their users to "discuss" the issue subjectively rather than getting some multitasking benchmarks going to back up the anecdote.
Re:Does anyone buy performance anymore? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Does dual core == 2xProcessor or hybrid? (Score:5, Interesting)
The only time when heterogeneous processors are really useful is when each is better than the others at a sub-set of tasks. Current PCs are usually a set of 3 different processors in a single box[1]. They have a reasonably fast general purpose CPU, and on the same die a simple vector processor (e.g. MMX, SSE, AltiVec), which has a different instruction set to the main processor and must be invoked explicitly. They also have a highly parallel large vector processor on a separate chip, which is usually used for graphics. No automatic scheduling is performed between these - it is up to the programmer to explicitly code for each one. Ideally, a heterogeneous processing environment would require code to be JIT compiled for each processor, and then moved between them depending on run-time profiling information.
[1] Yes, this is an oversimplification.
Re:Cooling (Score:3, Interesting)
So, assuming they used the same system for all measurements and just swapped out the cpus, the relative differences are accurate. But you can not draw any conclusion about the absolute power requirements of the cpus based solely on Anandtech's review.
Maybe no one cares, but it would be easy to read that article and come away with the idea that the dual core cpu consumes (and thus must dissipate) 150 watts under load. While that might be in the realm of possibility for Intel's cpus which are little micro-furnaces, the AMD chips are significantly less hot than that.
Re:It's about the interactivity (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't really share your user experience.. Being a college student at the time, I salivated over a dual system for years, and finally found the opportunity with the dual Pentium II-class celeron motherboards by Abit. That brief window in history when you could have a full dual processor system for under $250. It was dual 433's overclocked to 466. At the exact same time, I had an AMD K5-400 as my main machine. The dual ran on Red Hat 8 I believe originally, and is still running to this day as my main home-server, and I've only upgraded it to Red Hat 9.0 (main because if it ain't broke, I ain't fixen it). So as I look at uname, it's still only running kernel 2.4.20-31.9smp. I remember running this puppy side-by-side to the K5-400, and later my K6 Thunderbird 800MHZ. The Thunderbird should have blown away with dual 466, but it didn't. I had better throughput of mp3 encoding on the duelies (which I was doing a lot of at the time, farming out all my machines at home and at work 24/hours a day some weeks). One of the features I specificly played with was encoding single-threadedly with grip+lame v.s. dual threadedly. When dual threaded. Obviously single-threadedly the system was almost perfectly responsive (since lame isn't HD or even memory bound), but even when dual-threaded, the system was more responsive than my faster single-CPU K6. I quickly fell in love with the dual processor concept, and used it as my main home-station for just about anything that wasn't video games.. When my K5 literally exploded one day due to moisture damage, I was rather forced to migrate over to the new machine; but it was a welcome change from a mostly windows unresponsive environment.
I am convinced that even Linux 2.4 was more smooth operating with multiple CPUs than windows. Perhaps it is because X is single threaded, but graphical thinking occurs in the application-space and is thus inherently multi-processed. Thus you get the best mixture of non-race-conditions streamlined code with concurrent processing capability. This is purely speculative. Whatever the deal, it was great.
Unfortuntaely, I don't remember if the standard Linux benchmark of doing a parallel make of the kernel was faster on the dual 466 v.s. the single 800. I guess one of these day's I'll have to fire that 800 back up again to check; the dual's still chugging along fine as my server.
Unfortunately I haven't had the luxury of having ANY affordable dualies in the past 5 years, so I've just gone for greater single-threaded horse-power for work-stations.
As for the point of this thread. I seem to recall that the 2.6 kernel had more overhead than the 2.4 kernel. This along with my anxiety for changing a back-end special-purpose servers' OS kept me from wanting to up the now ancient machine. Most likely this overhead is compensated for by the better MT-support, and is especially unnoticeable at the 2GHZ range. But I find it hard to believe a perceptible difference in UI responsiveness could be found between the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. Perhaps measureably in application benchmarks, but surely not on the GUI.
Sadly, as I've said, I can not provide empirical data as I don't have $1,500 to spend on a simple file-server.