First 16-Core Opteron Chips Arrive From AMD 189
angry tapir writes "After a brief delay and more than a year of chatter, Advanced Micro Devices has announced the availability of its first 16-core Opteron server chips, which pack the largest number of cores available on x86 chips today. The new Opteron 6200 chips, code-named Interlagos, are 25 per cent to 30 per cent faster than their predecessors, the 12-core Opteron 6100 chips, according to AMD."
Bulldozer Cores are not that Great (Score:5, Interesting)
The "cores" in Bulldozer are not your typical first-class x86 core. Bulldozer "cores" are worth 2/3 of a modern x86 core. The 6200 is more like a 10 core. Add to that the crappy IPC and I'm not impressed.
I was excited about Bulldozer before it was released. It's not often that CPU makers take chances on radical new architectures. Too bad this one turned out to be a huge pile of fail.
Re:Compared to Intel? (Score:5, Interesting)
This would compete with the Xeon-E chips that aren't out yet. But in terms of performance about 75%, so this is the equivalent of a 12-core intel chip.
Re:Only 16? (Score:5, Interesting)
Pfft, how much harder can it be to design one with 32 :)
Design? Easy.
Manufacture? Tricky.
Make work? Trickier.
To read about? Interesting.
Re:really 16 core? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe...
It'll be interesting. Most server applications are integer-only and never touch the floating point units. That should mean that Bulldozer designs work close to the full core count in contrast to the poor benchmarking results it puts out in Photoshop filters and video encode.
Re:Compared to Intel? (Score:5, Interesting)
Put simply, the AMD ones are slower than the intel ones by about 2 fold per core. This isn't because AMD sucked at design, so much as their marketing department sucked at telling the truth. In reality, we're looking at 8 core AMD CPUs with 2 integer units per core - i.e. no more 16 core than intel's are 16 core chips because of hyperthreading.
Once that's ironed out, the AMD chips turn out to have rather good performance if you want lots of integer work done, and the Intel chips to have rather good performance if you want anything else done.
Re:Compared to Intel? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's the Xeon E5-2650L, 2650, 2660, 2665, 2670, 2680, 2690 and 2687W then?
Hint: they're all 8 core SNB-E chips. Second hint - AMD's 16 "core" CPUs don't have 16 cores – they have 16 integer units. They only have 8 instruction fetch units, 8 decode units, 8 L2 caches, etc. That is, they're 8 core CPUs with strong integer support. SNB-E's particular strength is floating point, but it tends to beat the opterons at pretty much anything that isn't heavily integer biased.
Re:Intel vs AMD's philosophy as of late (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel: I know, let's try to see just how many features/cores/cache we can fuse off in our dies and different socket combinations to try to make *puts pinky finger to mouth* one MILLION SKUs! Oh, and while we're at it, let's add a FOURTH memory channel, because more is better! Sure, we could get all the bandwidth we need with two DDR3-1866 or -2133 channels and that you really only get about three channels' worth of bandwidth because we have to clock the IMC down to DDR3-1333 with two modules per channel- but we still have FOUR channels! Oh, and we forgot, it's the start of a new quarter so we need to release a new socket. Can't let those socket suppliers get lazy making last quarter's socket design. What, you guys want us to release Sandy Bridge-based Xeon MPs because MP platforms actually need that much bandwidth and core count? We just released the Westmere-based ones a few months ago! Don'tcha know that Xeon MPs run two years behind everything else? Geez, what did you do, wake up yesterday? Next you'll want us to stop crippling our chips, stop using a new socket every other month or something ridiculous like that. Where do you guys get those ideas?
AMD: Based on market analysis, most server applications use primarily integer code and require a lot of bandwidth, memory capacity, and a high core count. We don't have over a hundred billion dollars in market cap to fund several parallel R&D teams to design a specific CPU for every edge use case, so we will design a CPU that is highly modular, has good integer performance (because that's what our research indicated most server apps are), and has a lot of cores. Experience with Intel's HyperThreading is less than stellar with regards to predictable performance, so we will use our CMT approach that leads to better integer performance than HyperThreading but doesn't increase the die size by a huge amount, since we can't afford to make 400-600 mm^2 dies like Intel does to have a lot of physical cores. Oh, and we'll continue to use the existing server platforms out there so our customers can drop-in upgrade and we'll also not change any feature sets in the SKU stack other than the clock speed and number of enabled modules and their associated caches. We do apologize for being "late" with these parts since we usually release server and client at about the same time...
When are multiple cores going to help me? (Score:5, Interesting)
I just got a fancy 8 core T7500 Dell workstation and only one of my compilers actually takes advantage of the multiple cores when it is compiling. As a result this expensive desktop is only 15% faster in terms of time to compile than the 4 year old PC it replaced (the new PC has twice the ram as the old though which may account for some of that speed increase). I am seriously unimpressed with all these cores. Maybe they are useful for something, but I've not found anything that I do that shows significant improvement. Putting my development projects on a SSD did much more for my work flow performance than this fancy new computer, that is for certain.
Re:Only 16? (Score:5, Interesting)
The basic point is that it has a total of 8 instruction fetch units, it has a total of 8 instruction decode units that they feed, and it has a total of 8 chunks of L2 cache. The fact that each of these 8 cores has 2 integer units on it is neither here nor there –hell, for years cores have had several floating point units on them, it didn't make them more than one core. Not only that, but this CPU behaves badly when the scheduler treats it as 16 cores instead of 8. The bottom line is that this chip in every single way behaves like an 8 core CPU, more so, it's slower than intel's 8 core CPUs at a similar clock even with hyper threading disabled.
Re:Compared to Intel? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Compared to Intel? (Score:2, Interesting)
While I do agree that AMD is *well* behind Intel's latest and greatest in the 1P / desktop world, I fail to see how you could make such bold statement, unless you have had the chance to compare and AMD 4S machine to Intel 4S machine (say, Opteron 62xx based HP DL585G7 vs. Xeon 75xx/E7 based HP DL580G7).
In my experience (and I venture and guess that is just as good as yours, if not better) the picture is far from being black-and-white and greatly (!!!) depends on the application that is being tested. The pictures becomes even more complex, once you factor in the Xeon E7 excessive price. ... So I ask again, have you had any experience in benchmarking the Opteron 6200 or are you simply making things up as you go along?
- Gilboa