Dell Set to Introduce AMD's Triple-core Phenom CPU 286
An anonymous reader writes "AMD is set to launch what is considered its most important product against Intel's Core 2 Duo processors next week. TG Daily reports that the triple-core Phenoms — quad-core CPUs with one disabled core — will be launching on February 19. Oddly enough, the first company expected to announce systems with triple-core Phenoms will be Dell. Yes, that is the same company that was rumored to be dropping AMD just a few weeks ago. Now we are waiting for the hardware review sites to tell us whether three cores are actually better than two in real world applications and not just in marketing."
You know what would be even better? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:You know what would be even better? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You know what would be even better? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You know what would be even better? (Score:5, Informative)
Happens all the time in graphics cards. The main difference between different model numbers in the same line is the number of pipelines on the GPU. Top end cards have them all enabled, lower models progressively less. Often the lower end cards will have working pipelines disabled.
Re:You know what would be even better? (Score:5, Interesting)
The distinguishing feature is often the number of tests done to certify the hardware and in some cases it is not a failure in a certain test but that the test required for the higher spec was not done at all. The rumor with the Celeron mentioned above was that they were rebadged after passing all the tests required for the Pentium II 450 spec but there were a lot of them in storage and more Celeron 300's were required - so they got the "A and circle" symbol to distinguish them from the other Celeron 300's.
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If the cores aren't actually defective, then yes, AMD will make it relatively easy to unlock because that's what they were once famous for, with the Athlon XP.
If the cores are crap, then most likely they will lock them down securely to avoid bad PR. Enthusiasts like you and I understand that there are no guarantees once you start tweaking, but we're not the problem. The problem is shady vendors that unlock/overclock to defraud the client.
Example: I just finished building a cheap machine for my
Re:You know what would be even better? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, if the price difference is enough to make buying one of these "tricores" worth it, and more importantly, if these Dells allow me to throw in a "real" Phenom aftermarket (or even ship with the option to buy a true quad-core Phenom...) well, more power to them.
Not only that, AMD seriously wins in this -- they sell these (likely Dell Precision Workstations and/or Dell XPSes) with their "tri" core CPUs, as well as -- I would wager -- their Quad Core CPUs as an upgrade, and they'll start to finally make some inroads with them. So far the impression I've gotten is that both Intel and AMD's quad core offerings have been kinda DOA with consumers (as opposed to the enterprise). But then again, I typically work with office workstations (Optiplex, PWS, etc).
Ob-Full Disclosure: I work for Dell as a Prosupport Tech Support Agent.
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Of course a few chips might fail in other ways and you'd catch them after pa
Re:You know what would be even better? (Score:5, Interesting)
#1: you do test these chips before the saw step (chopping the wafer up into individual die)
#2: its hard to predict speeds/vcc/temp sensitive yields at that stage, but you do test all the die and usually check for full functionality (as much as the test coverage allows)
#3: once packaged, the chips are "binned" to functional fails, speed grades. etc, and are tested at temp, vcc limits for speed sorting. so you could have 1 core that fails at 30C with a high vcc, but the others are ok (this is should be rare since they all sit together on the wafer in close proximity, and thus shouldn't vary much from each other)
#4: nanoscopic defects occur and could take out one or two of the die. It would be advantageous to bin this out as a tri/dual core.
#5: I am 100% sure that if these become popular, there will be some chips that pass all tests fully, but have one core disabled. happens all the time.
JP
What's "defective" about them? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which part of that is "defective", misleading, or unfit for purpose?
How many dual core chips are really four core chips with two failed cores? Do you know? Face it, it's just the number three which bugs you, and that's pretty childish...
Give him a break (Score:5, Funny)
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486es with a working co-processor (Floating Point Unit) were sold as "DX" models, the ones where it was broken were sold as "SX".
Even better, it allowed a market for FPU co-pro upgrades where one would install a co-processor upgrade alongside their 486SX later on.
Once production yields improved, this practice was continued for a while maintaining a market for both "SX" and "DX" models, where the "SX" models would have their FPU deliberately disabled. What on
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It's all about economics and "perceived value", not technology.
Graphics cards too... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You know what would be even better? (Score:4, Informative)
Or perhaps you're just not comprehending the semantics here. It was purposeful disabling, to avoid problems with a problem core (or maybe they're just having thermal problems, for all we know.) The cores don't disable themselves. Thus it was disabled to deal with the problem of a defect.
It's not any more misleading than telling you that one Cell SPE is disabled on every PS3.
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Re:Un No. Well, Not even close... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:You know what would be even better? (Score:5, Informative)
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Then again, I haven't been following CPU product lines in the past few months, so I could be mistaken.
In the end, this CPU will enable AMD to yield more CPU's and actually turn profit, but it won't be on market too long once AMD perfects the process and yields working q
Re:You know what would be even better? (Score:5, Informative)
With a quad core system, each core cant directly talk to the core diagonal to it which slows things down.
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Arrange 3 cores in a triangle. Place the fourth core inside the triangle. Join this core to the other three cores. This has two issues: 1.) The paths are different lengths. 2.) A 3-dimensional link is required for the centre core to talk to anything other than the other 3 cores.
With a three dimensional arrangement, it is possible to have a single hop between any number of cores.
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Re:You know what would be even better? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:You know what would be even better? (Score:5, Funny)
Like modeling the behavior of triple-core computers, for instance...
Re:You know what would be even better? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You know what would be even better? (Score:4, Informative)
His claim thay threads are useful in powers of two is of course complete junk since threads are usually used one at a time for specific tasks (data aquisition thread, rendering thread, etc), or in groups (maybe of run-time configurable size) to provide thread pools for specific tasks - e.g. server threads.
Let's not forget also that the OS itself will be competing with whatever application(s) you are running for the CPU, so even a single single-threaded program will benefit from a multi-core CPU by way of not having to compete with the OS as much for the CPU cores.
Re:You know what would be even better? (Score:5, Funny)
Particularly, and gloriously so, when the quad-core system is not powered on.
Re:You know what would be even better? (Score:5, Informative)
Moreover, even if a certain program, running on a 4-core system, generates 4 processes or threads, you still cannot claim that that particular program "handles 4 cores". It is up to the operating system to manage the system's resources, including where and how a process is ran. It might even run all the 4 processes or threads in the same core.
Another silly thing that you imply which is clearly wrong is that a user can only take advantage of the multiple cores in a system if that user happens to run applications which spawn as many processes or threads as the number of cores. That is just plain wrong. The operating system manages the execution of all the system's processes and threads, which means that it distributes the execution of those processes and threads through all the available processing cores. So, if you run 4 separate applications (single-process/threaded) on a decent operating system running on a 4 processing core system then the operating system may end up executing those 4 separate applications in the 4 separate processing cores. As any desktop computer is running at any given time more than 20 different processes (single or multi-threaded) then the advantage of having more processing cores on your system is rather obvious.
But hey, don't let logic and concrete knowledge on the issue get in the way of your judgement.
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Yield, effectiveness (Score:5, Informative)
I am sure some units will make it through the process with a functional-enough fourth core to be useful to "overclockers", but I think the majority will have actual problems. That is, unless there is no 4-working-core version of this processor for the known-working ones to be sold as?
One concern... How do they keep thermal load even if 1/4 of the die is not running?
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If running Windows, the OS will cycle through the cores so 3 are always running, and one is cooling. This will usually not cause a problem before the system crashes due to something else.
For other OSes, I would think that the conductive layers over the non-functional core would still be working, and capable of distributing the heat evenly. Same problem as when 1 core is running full tilt and (1, 2, 3 for dual, triple,
Re:Yield, effectiveness (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yield, effectiveness (Score:5, Interesting)
If one is disabled, it would cycle 1,2,4,1,2,4 (assuming #3 is the bad one).
Moreover, if one of the cores isn't running, and you have a cooling system designed for four cores, it really doesn't matter. If it can handle four full-tilt cores, it can handle three. The zero heat production is a bigger benefit than a slightly uneven distribution. If it's truly a suitable medium, the heat generated will be spread throughout pretty well, even if the heat-production is only on one edge of the medium. Think of an electric stove burner--it only has heat applied at one end, but the opposite end heats up pretty well. Obviously it's not perfect, but it doesn't need to be.
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I haven't really looked at Phenom's design, but I highly doubt that it'll rotate between the cores while running. You can't really transfer the contents of registers and whats in the pipeline between cores in any sort of efficient manner (unless there is something about the Phenom I don't know about).
Why would the ther
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(It was a great comment tho')
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Ultimately, that's what the heat spreader is for. Right?
I don't imagine they'll allow it (Score:3, Informative)
1) Reduces complaints. You'd get people who would enable a defective core and then bitch that their system didn't work, especially since it could be somewhat random when failures happened.
2) Allow them to have a ch
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Licensing? (Score:5, Funny)
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No (Score:5, Informative)
At work we have purchased a dual processor system with a quad core CPU in each that runs Vista. All 8 cores show up and are usable by software.
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You have an 8 processor mac
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They are completely alone in that since many other systems properly support the pentium pro and later processors - including other 32 bit systems sold by Microsoft. Their hobby line (including their latest 32 bit operating system) unfortunately does not.
Shick (Score:4, Funny)
Obligatory Onion Article (Score:5, Informative)
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There's no need to wait for any reviews (Score:5, Informative)
For most things, no 3 cores isn't really going to be much benefit at this point. While there are now multithreaded games out there that make use of 2 cores pretty well, they don't really scale past that at this point. I imagine that'll change as time goes on since quad core processors are getting more common, but it hasn't yet. As for desktop apps, well they don't tend to use much power so it won't help much. I suppose it might help responsiveness in some cases a tiny bit, but I doubt it.
However for some professional apps it can help. Cakewalk's Sonar makes use of multiple processors quite handily. Every effect plugin, every instrument, all run as a separate thread so it can easily use a large number of cores. I've seen it run on a quad core system and it distributes load quite well across them. I don't imagine anything would be different with 3 cores, it'd just have one less to use.
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For most things, no 3 cores isn't really going to be much benefit at this point. While there are now multithreaded games out there that make use of 2 cores pretty well, they don't really scale past that at this point.
But now you can play games and encode a dvd at the same time. It's still useful. And at some point or another there will be games that support use of multiple processors, just like there are games now that support physics processors (though few) even though most people don't have one.
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I agree (Score:2)
1) Only uses a single core.
2) Uses 2 cores, but no more (games mostly).
3) Can scale to an
The advantage of dual-core... (Score:5, Interesting)
Dual-core means that for most cases, I can run a video encode, a backup/compression process, a long-ish compilation (of the sort that doesn't like 'make -j2'), etc -- not so much all at once, as I can fire off any background process and not worry about it, as I have a whole other core to use. It's shameful -- Amarok will occasionally use 100% of one core, and I won't notice for hours.
Having more than two cores wouldn't benefit me a lot right now. I wouldn't mind it, certainly -- I've been playing a bit with things like Erlang, which should be able to scale arbitrarily -- but I think the real applications are only just catching on to the idea that threading is a good thing. I imagine it's still going to be a lot longer till a quad-core machine is useful for anything other than, say, running virtual machines, as most programming languages do not make threading easy. (Locks and semaphores are almost as bad as manual memory management.)
While I'm playing crystal ball, I'll predict that the first application of multicore will be things which were already running on multiple machines in the first place -- video rendering, for instance. Not encoding, rendering.
The second application for it will be gaming. This will take longer, and will only be the larger, higher-quality engines, who will simply throw manpower at the problem of squeezing the most out of whatever hardware is available.
I suspect that the old pattern will be very much in effect, though -- wherein gamers will buy a three-core system and unlock the fourth one (if possible), then use maybe one core, probably half of one, with the video card still being the most important purchase. If there's a perceptible improvement, it'll be because their spyware, IM, torrents, leftover Firefox with 20 MySpace pages and flash ads, etc, won't be able to quite fill the other three cores.
I'd like to add that for most people, including me, one core is plenty if you know how to manage your processes properly -- set priorities, kill Amarok when it gets stuck in that infinite loop, and get off my lawn!
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A broken Makefile, that is. I have them too.
I bet you would be mostly fine with one core, too. Nothing really b
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Re:The advantage of dual-core... (Score:5, Informative)
In general I'd agree with you, but I've found that a quad-core (which is actually pretty cheap these days) is much better than a dual-core if you watch HD video. h264 at 1080p is pretty taxing on the processor, and on a C2D you generally can't have anything in the background or you'll drop frames. A quad-core means you can run one or two other processor-intensive tasks (usually as you said, video encoding/backup/compilation type stuff) and don't have to pause them when you want to watch video. Also, it's very helpful if you use Mathematica a lot for large computations.
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Dual cores are easy to keep busy. Do anything somewhat demanding, and use the othe
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Core AVC is wicked fast, I just downloaded the Iron Man trailer from quicktime.com and here's some rough figures for the h.264 decoders that I tried on my Athlon X2 running at ~2.5Ghz:
Quicktime - ~80% load
Nero - ~60% load
Core AVC - ~25% load
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I've had it with my video screwing up when running an IO or CPU sensitive task. The problem is that prioritizing tasks - for both CPU and IO - on current O/S does not really work, and it is starting to hurt.
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Say what you will about all the eye candy, if you have a decent video card Vista performs far better with the Aero enabled then disabled for the simple reason that Aero is actually using
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And yes, even when apps don't use it themselves, SMP's nice; I was doing it 9 years ago when I got my first BP6 [wikipedia.org] and it was great, despite relatively little other than the OS actually making us
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Seagate's 7200.11 750GB are a great example, in my informal testing (called "actual use") they do far better then the 36.7GB 10,000 rpm Raptors drives I was using previously, and at a fraction of the $/GB cost.
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Multicore cpus and threaded games and applications (Score:2, Informative)
Many of the newest Operating Systems, applications, and games are multi-threaded. Multiple cpu cores just allow modern systems to take advantage of them, when available.
I have a dual quad-core computer, that dual boots Windows Vista Ultimate, 64-bit, and Fedora 8 Linux, 64-bit. Many programs do take advantage of this system, including modern PC games, such as Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3. UT3 does use all 8 cpu cores during parts of the game.
So, even though multiple cores are not n
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Depends (Score:3, Informative)
In general most modern OSes do a pretty good job moving things around. It isn't necessarily an app per core situation since many apps don't use much power and thus can all ru
The AMD Triple Track (Score:5, Funny)
[For those too young, the reference is the 1975 SNL parody about the Remco Triple Track Razor - done just after twin-bladed razors first appeared.]
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We're doing five cores (Score:4, Informative)
For reference, see The Onion [theonion.com] reference, "... We're doing five blades [theonion.com]". (Rough language. If you're at a school maybe NSFW). From February, 2004. For the record, the Gillette Fusion with five blades and two lubricating strips was introduced in early 2006 [cnn.com].
Hilarious though:
I'm a big AMD fan but three cores are barely better than two. Buy it anyway - AMD needs to live if the computer market is to be bearable at all in ten years. Via makes some interesting stuff too - and they're not afraid to cut the watts and make them small. You can do some very neat stuff [viaarena.com] with a low watt CPU on a small board.
It doesn't take a great deal of insight to see we're going to 8 cores per processor on the desktop sometime in the next few years. Dual 16 core processors will happen within ten if competition keeps the pressure up. Personally I don't care if every core is on a separate slab of silicon as long as they integrate in the package well. Yields are better that way I imagine. Somebody tell them to get the watts down. Electricity [intelligen...rprise.com] is mostly made from CO2 emissions [doe.gov]:
software compatability? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm guessing there is a lot of code out there that's looking for power of 2 number of cores. A program might run fine with 1,2,4,8, or 16 cores, but if you do some kind of odd number I wouldn't be surprised if several applications just refused to run. It will be interesting to see what kind of compatibility testing AMD has done with this new processor.
In the end though, this just seems like another last ditch attempt by AMD to marginally compete on the lower end market with Intel. Intel says they have no need for 3 core chips since their yields are so much higher.
Re:software compatability? (Score:5, Interesting)
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k8temp [hur.st] is a good example; if you have one really o
There is a known problem with current Phenom... (Score:5, Interesting)
The first (and less relevant) problem is the TLB errata. The second (and more relevant to this discussion), is a problem in which core #2 (out of [0,1,2,3]) is lower yielding than the first three. For example, on the same CPU die, cores [0,1,3] may work fine at 2.6Ghz, but core [2] yields only at 2.0GHz. This is a widespread problem, mostly found out through failed overclocking attempts.
Google it yourself and find out..
God, Dell is NOT dropping AMD (Score:4, Informative)
My personal opinion is that they still need to be fleshed out though. I am not sure why, but all the AMD systems we have only accept DDR2 unbuffered as well has having issues with very large amounts of ram ( More than 64gigs). I will admit however, they use ALLOT less power and much quieter.
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People have reported that sparking and loud screams have been reported all over the US. It has been thought that a posting on Slashdot caused the sparking when thousands of nerds drooled over their laptop computers. In other unrelated news, the amount of rugged laptop sales has skyrocketed.
Dell is dropping 25% of AMD (Score:3, Funny)
My next Christmas wish... (Score:2)
Main question: Will it run Linux? (Score:2)
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Re:I've been away from IT for very long (Score:5, Informative)
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Anyone care to wager a bet on what my mod will be? I'd say flamebait/troll is a bit over the edge... Overrated perhaps?
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Or maybe you don't understand manufacturing.
Not a shyster; no suckers.
(It would be interesting to pit an AMD Triple-core against Intel's Quad-core.)
Computer chips have billions of transistors, capacitors, resistors, and interconnects. All of them have to work to make the chip work.
Even in the says of tubes (valves), the manufacturers tested their product, then set aside the best to sell at a premium.
Intel used this technique on their 486SX processors. When the FPU on a 486
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(I can't be the *only* nerd (in the late 90's) who thought the "Play.com co-founder and evangelist Kiki Stockhammer" was one HOT redhead! -I wonder whatever happened to her?)
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At least try to go to a url before making bizarre assertions.
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