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
@Atlantian Our of curiosity, are you on a line of work even remotely related to chip design or production?
Have you noticed some changes. AMD used to be a serious rival of Intel only in the segment of cheap processors several years before. But now it is forcing Intel even in the niche of high performance processors. Better performance+lower price. AMD is doing awesome game.
@Zigicollins, may I remind you that "several years before" it was AMD's Opterons which brought the AMD64 architecture - the 64 bit awesomeness for everybody. In the times, AMD was owning server market - whatever smallish part of it it could own: compared to Intel, AMD's production volumes are much smaller and they simply can't supply enough chips to dominate any market.
this is really what nvidia were targeting with their fermi architecture. instead of a supercomputer with processors, build one with gpgpu's instead.
Put these kinds of CPU in a gaming rig? Clueless article writer is clueless.
The Octium IV is much better.
http://octiumchip.com/
Too bad Intel has a secret weapon that they could easily implement and make AMD look like a young grasshopper again. Hyper-Threading. Yes, I know they're merely virtual threads that tag along each real thread but they still yield a 10~40% performance boost in comparison of only using real threads.
It's a fact that the performance does dip in certain benchmarks with it turned on but that's mainly for consumer level programs that weren't coded to even benefit from multiple real cores. As for servers, HT should be consider a major threat to AMD if they ever want to outdo Intel like a decade ago.
Another thing is that everyone seems to be talking about the core counts and how more cores have a direct association to how much throughput power there is but that's idiocy. Intel's 4-Core Xeons have proven to outperform AMD's 8-Cores Opteron by even 200% and that was still back in the days when FSB was kicking.
@FermentedDischarge
Good thing AMD has Simultaneous multithreading coming down the pipeline, eh?
Look at IBM, their chips offer four threads per core. I hope AMD pulls of something like that for this segment.
@FermentedDischarge: "As for servers, HT should be consider a major threat to AMD if they ever want to outdo Intel like a decade ago."
Our IT runs bunch of Xeons, all have HT and all universally have HT disabled. We failed to find any real workload which benefits from HT. And some workloads it made actually slower. (Same story with multi-threading on SPARCs.)
I read up that Java applications benefit from HT, but those rarely are performance critical.
i was going through the article http://microelectronics.cbronline.com/news/amd_introduces_new_opteron_series_platform_290310, and tried to find mor info on your website.
thanks dude
Interesting to note that if you had invested in AMD a bit over a year ago, you could be selling your initial investment for four times its initial value today. Are the AMD-doomsayers gone at last?
AMD kicking ASS.
Go AMD!!!