CPU Competition Heating Up In 2012? 100
jd writes "2012 promises to be a fun year for hardware geeks, with three new 'Aptiv-class' MIPS64 cores being circulated in soft form, a quad-core ARM A15, a Samsung ARM A9 variant, a seriously beefed-up 8-core Intel Itanium and AMD's mobile processors. There's a mix here of chips actually out, ready to be put on silicon, and in last stages of development. Obviously these are for different users (mobile CPUs don't generally fight for marketshare with Itanium dragsters) but it is still fascinating to see the differences in approach and the different visions of what is important in a modern CPU. Combine this with the news reported earlier on DDR4, and this promises to be a fun year with many new machines likely to appear that are radically different from the last generation. Which leaves just one question — which Linux architecture will be fully updated first?"
Locked down (Score:5, Interesting)
64 bit ARMv8 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Evolutionary! (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do people keep saying AMD can't keep up? because they don't compete in a market you care about?
My wife's laptop has an AMD E-350.. its got an ATI video card built onto the cpu.. it sucks down a whopping 9 watts, making her super light 10.6" laptop last about 7 hours.. 4GB of ram, 500GB hard drive, can stream HD video without a hiccup, and it was $350.. about what you would pay for a nice video card.. I would say AMD is competing rather well..
In the server space, were ditching Intel as fast as we can.. because for our loads, a 16 core Opteron runs oracle at the same speed as a 12 core Intel (CPU usage is not our limiting factor, disk IO is for our databases) and the difference in price last time we looked was about $7k for a Dell R815 spec'd the same as a Dell R810 with dual CPU's.. That difference is a Fusion IO card, or almost another tray of drives.. which would really help IO.
Re:Evolutionary! (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately most tests aren't covering anything business related like calculating join tables and processing large volumes of relational data. Instead, they report on things business could care less about, like the time it takes to transcode a video file or it's ability to render videogame graphics.
The simple truth is that there are very few CPUs currently on the market which aren't perfectly capable of handling business application processing like document editing in a very acceptable fashion. In fact, the issue with even the "slow" CPUs is the time it takes to load and initialize an application, not in it's responsiveness once the application is loaded. That would seem to be more of a question of storage bandwidth than it would be of processor horsepower, but reviewers still blame the CPU for the performance.
For that matter, even the video playback reviews are kind of pointless. Once you have enough snort to render video without dropping frames or tearing, any extra power is pretty much pointless for video processing. While you can start turning on options in the video pipeline, the truth is the effects of those options are virtually unnoticeable unless you use a super-high resolution screen to display expanded video.
I think Windows RT is going to wake up a significant portion of the population to the benefits of low-power ARM processors in the real world.
The business market requirements are not the same as the general gaming/video market's requirements.
Re:64 bit ARMv8 (Score:2, Interesting)
No, it's not.
ARM cpus are actually pretty lousy when it comes to computations/watt. That crown goes to low-end celeron CPUs, by a massive margin. It's just that ARM can operate in the very low-end power sipping envelope that a smartphone/tablet demands.
You have to remember that these new arm SOCs are actually not very fast when compared to desktop CPUs. The lowest-end single core celeron murders the highest-end quad core arm SOC in terms of computational power. This is the real reason you don't see ARM based desktops.
Now, it's interesting that you can cram hundreds of arm cores in to a small rack mount chassis.. But how useful that is has yet to be proven.
Re:Evolutionary! (Score:4, Interesting)
My wife's laptop has an AMD E-350.. its got an ATI video card built onto the cpu.. it sucks down a whopping 9 watts, making her super light 10.6" laptop last about 7 hours.. 4GB of ram, 500GB hard drive, can stream HD video without a hiccup, and it was $350.. about what you would pay for a nice video card.. I would say AMD is competing rather well..
Which laptop is it? There seem to be a distinct lack of super light laptops of late. My eee 900 at 935g is currently lighter than any netbook on the market and the Asus UX-21 seems (at 1.1Kg) to be the joint lightest non netbook.
What is it? It sounds pretty good and I want one...
In the server space, were ditching Intel as fast as we can.. because for our loads, a 16 core Opteron runs oracle at the same speed as a 12 core Intel
That's what I found a while back, when everyone said Intel was faster: the 12 core 6100s could cram more FLOPS into 1U than the best Intel 4 socket boxes, and at a considerably lower price. Intel have substantially improved their offerings since then (AMD has not by quite so much), but the price of RAM crashed, making the CPUs and system boards a much larger fraction of the cost, increasing the advantage of AMD further.
I actually did the calculation, since I had to budget the 5 year cost, including electricity and cooling and rack space. The AMD systems chew more power, though not as much as the raw CPU differences, since with RAM maxed out, that is a significant fraction of the power draw.
End result was that the AMD systems were substantially cheaper in compute peak performance per $ and in 5 year compute power per $.
Actually, the performance is very application dependent. Some codes suck on AMD, others (rarer) had the PhenomII macthing an i7 for speed.
Intel still have the single thread performance crown, which is really useful on the desktop and laptop. If you're buying a 4 socket machine, it's a fir bet that your task is parallelizable, which reduces the advantage of intel in the 4 socket market.
For single socket stuff that isn't too performance sensitive, AMD has the additional advantage that cheap consumer level boards support the otherwise expensive enterprisey features of ECC memory. If you care about that sort of thing, then getting a Phenom II is much cheaper than a 1 socket Xeon.