You thought
six cores were nifty? This week, AMD and Intel have begun the multithreaded battle in earnest -- if only on the IT front -- with chips that have up to double that core density. First up, AMD has officially brought us that Opteron 6000 series
leaked last week, a set of 8- and 12-core processors aimed at dual- and quad-CPU servers that it claims have both higher performance and lower cost than Intel's recent hex-core offerings. Not to be outdone, Intel has just introduced a 8-core processor series of its own, the Xeon 7500, that it envisions deployed in mammoth 256-processor configurations. In bulk orders of 1,000, a single 12-core Opteron costs nearly $1,200, while the cheapest single 8-core Xeon will set you back a cool $2,461 in the same quantity. We don't doubt they're powerful, and we'd kill for a pair of either in our gaming rig. At those prices though, we'll stick to building our supercomputer
out of PS3s --
oh, wait.
posted March 30th 2010 11:03PM
Pfhthth, that's nothing compared to my Dodecahedron Core from MeglosTel. Thanks be to Ty.
@Blackstar
Spend 2 grand to claim yourself as the owner of the fastest uber CPU,only to be reminded your uber CPU is no longer the fastest and greatest in a month or two.
ahhhh technology, gotta love it you can never have sate of the art for too long.
Stop Intel's domination. Go AMD!
Gotta love engadget for the humorous references to previous posts. That's skill right derr.
@drumwiz86
+1 Agreed, especially when the precious post is from over a year ago.
@drumwiz86
yeah did you see the sandisk reference from 4-5 years ago earlier tonight? there is a reason engadget is the best.
@drumwiz86 I find it more humorous that this is "Filed Under Desktops".
12 for 1200, 8 for 2500... intel needs to seriously rethink their pricings.
@CJisohsocool Quantity =/= Performance
@CJisohsocool
You have to take into account that Intel has the more powerful and energy efficient chips.
But yeah, the Xeon's probably don't outperform the Opteron's by 100%.
@CJisohsocool
...or 24 for 2400 vs 8 for 2500.
@CJisohsocool
Hmmm, more cores... more parallel processes, is a usually good thing in supercomputing tasks.
@OTHER PEOPLE WHO THINK IM DUMB
Well ofcourse intel's stuff performs better. but your getting 80% of the performance for less than half price by choosing AMD processors rather than Intel
@Sunweb
I haven't seen the specs on these latest chips but since when did Xeon's have a more power efficient design than the Opteron's? I was of the belief that the AMD chips were much more efficient than the Intel chips but were lower performing. But on the plus side they were also backwards compatible to older server motherboards making them a far better value for companies wanting to increase the performance their servers without a total upgrade of components and loss of investment in the large amounts of memory etc.
@CJisohsocool "Well ofcourse intel's stuff performs better"
since when? you clearly never touched server technology in past 10 years
@Jimbojones Take a look at the benchmarks. Intel's 6 core outperformed AMD's 12 core in about half the benchmarks. And this one has 1/3rd more cores again, double the memory bandwidth and more cache. This will handily outperform AMD's 12 core.
@dennisheadley Intel has been more power efficient than AMD for most users since the Core Duo came out, the Core i7/8xx series is quite the performer for the power.
@Jimbojones
He's right, to some extent. The cores themselves tend to be faster in Xeons than Opterons. The important thing that differentiated them until a few months ago was the fact that the Opterons were plugged into HyperTransport, which was vastly faster than the Front-Side Bus in the Xeon, and meant that large workloads and large multi-processor systems tended to be faster with Opterons.
@Kira HyperTransport and Front Side Bus are not directly comparable. HyperTransport only carries I/O and cache sync control signals, memory accesses (as FSB carries) don't go over HyperTransport.
Also, Intel abandoned FSB a year ago on Xeon (March 3rd, 2009) with the Nehelem (Core i7) Xeons. It wasn't a few months ago.
@CJisohsocool A lot of people are missing the point of pricing and why Intel can charge 100% premium for 25% performance differential. For the market these chips are tackling the value proposition offered y 25% performance improvement translate to economic rewards which make the price of those parts almost irrelevant for the corporate customer (to a point of course). For example, for large orders there may be a differential of $1 million between purchasing an intel vs amd fleet solution. But the return for the 25% performance for whatever reason translates to to tens of millions of increased profitability or revenue or productivity, maybe enable faster time to market for development or more transactions processed in the same amount of time. Whatever the case, investing an extra million to get tens or so millions back seems like a no brainer.
The problem for AMD is that they have to be within less than an order of magnitude in the performance metrics from intel if they want to be considered by the market. But they have to do so with an organization almost two order's of magnitude smaller than Intel. I don't think people understand the differences in scale within both companies. I have a lot of respect for AMD's staff. They have been for decades in one of the toughest positions to be: in the exact same market as one of intel's bread and butter.
OOOO diss on ps3
@IcerC
I hope sony gets sued
Apple: There's a patent for that
@JeremyBenthem
Not likely, you don't have to update your PS3. If you want to play online you have to accept their ToS. I'm sure somewhere in that great wall of text, there are statements that cover Sony's ass.
@daytripper
playing online and being able to use linux are two things people bought a PS3 thinking it would do
Wow, now I'll be able to check an e-mail, edit a digital photo, run my virus protection program AND watch teh youtubez all at the same time!
http://i.imgur.com/D6kzJ.jpg
@Physicsguy89 Well technically that is correct as a single core can actually only run ONE actual process at any given moment in time. Since those are only 3 processes on a quadcore, they actually technically run all at the same time :P
that is an over simplified note.
@Physicsguy89
the SAME TIME!!!
That's rediculouse where have i bein up my ass when did this happen -_-"
@cocopuffs
I'm having a hard time understanding what exactly was up your ass...when this happened...actually, forget it, don't wanna know...=/
haha "we'll stick to building our supercomputer out of PS3s -- Oh, wait"
Too bad linux is going byebye... -,-
Anandtech sums it up nicely -
Applications based on transactional databases (OLTP and ERP) are also better off with new Xeon. The SAP and our own Oracle Calling Circle benchmark all point in the same direction. Intel has a tangible performance advantage in both benchmarks.
Data mining applications clearly benefit from having “real” instead of “logical” cores. For datamining, we believe the 12-core Opteron is the clear winner. It offers 20% better performance at 20% lower prices, a good deal if you ask us. Intel’s relatively high prices for its six-core are challenged. The increased competition turns this into a buyers market again.
And then there is the most important segment: the virtualization market. We estimate that the new Opteron 6174 is about 20% slower than the Xeon 5670 in virtualized servers with very high VM counts. The difference is a lot smaller in the opposite scenario: a virtualized server with a few very heavy VMs. Here the choice is less clear. At this point, we believe both server CPUs consume about the same power, so that does not help either to make up our minds. It will depend on how the OEMs price their servers. The Opteron 6100 series offers up to 24 DIMMs slots, the Xeon is “limited” to 18. In many cases this allows the server buyer to achieve higher amount of memory with lower costs. You can go for 96 GB of memory with affordable 4 GB DIMMs, while the Intel server is limited to 72 GB there. That is a small bonus for the AMD server.
The HPC market seems to favor AMD once again. AMD holds only a small performance advantage, and this market is very cost sensitive. The lower price will probably convince the HPC people to go for the AMD based servers.
@Nitesh That was a review that compared the AMD 12 core against the Intel 6-core 5670. That was two days ago, this is a new Intel 8 core chip with more cores, more cache and more memory bandwidth than the 6-core in that review.
@spin cycle Yes, but the memory controller in the new Xeons still has the same limitations, so technically the AMD has that slight advantage still going for applications sensitive to large memories.
Also AMD still has an edge in the HPC market because multi socket (for n>2) solutions using hypertransport have had a good half decade head start over Intel's QPI. So Intel seems to be topping off as the clear winner in market segments of two sockets or less (which obviously is not that small at all).
The problem is that the HPC market is not that large, so it puts AMD in a bit of a pickle if they can only dominate that relatively small market.
How many cores does the PS3 have? 8? Took long enough.
@Aurailious
And people STILL don't understand that core counts are not directly comparable between the Cell and these. The Cell's SPE's are not full cores. Just look at the transistor count between that and this, these are far more complex.
12 core...
8 core...
but how many Ghz?! Better be 4+ AMD and Intel or gtfo
@Plazmic Flame
If both AMD and Intel GTFO, then who GTFI?
@TomTom2010
IBM, who is perfectly capable of making an 8-core 4GHz chip.
@TomTom2010 VIA? I'm pretty sure they have dual core chips now, so just get like 4 or 6 of them. Plus I hear they are pretty cheap.
Now we know what's going to be in a new MacPro's. Up to 16 cores, 32 threads... It will render my FCP footage quicker, I hope.
@Agmois
I kind of doubt Apple would make a $8,000+ model.
Plus two 6 core processors are $500 cheaper than one 8 core processor.
@reallynotnick
i think the idea of apple has gone over your head
This is big for enterprises who run large VMware installtions, as it is licensed per socket, not per core (last I checked).
If you can get 50% more load onto a core based purely on number of cores that could represent a huge cost saving.
Still waiting for our coming overlord, thyne AMD Bulldozer, cometh 2011.
When will software be able to fully take advantage of this stuff?
@Openwave
Depends on the software. Most general consumer software couldn't even begin to use a fraction of its full power now or in 2 years time, but some enterprise servers and applications could make good use of 12 cores now.
@Openwave
It does. These 12 core chips are mostly for server, supercomputer, and data mining applications, which can all use many more cores than consumer software.
@PBB Yeah I was wondering about the general consumer aspect of having 12 cores of fury. Thanks for the reply.
This is why the top 3 supercomputers run on Operton processors.
its about time it seems AMD has learned stop announcing wtf your gonna release cause Intel will try to beat it they announced 6 core Intel announced 6 cores bait and switch go past that and aim higer awsome you have finally learned to play the game right amd bravo