News AMD announces ARM-based Opterons

i`ll say it now - TOLD YOU SO ; said this a few months back AMD are moving into ARM....

 

Well done AMD, Intel are still strong in the PC Gaming market, but most day to day user tasks can already be handled quite well by ARM, and its not gonna be too long until ARM delivers the performance of x86-64 yet still has that infamous ARM efficiency!. Can't wait to try OC'in a future ARM based desktop chip with watercooling!

 

Total codswhallop...

 

Total? Codswallop?

Are Intel strong in the PC gaming market? Yes.

Can ARM handle many day to day tasks? RasPi does browsing and word processing to an adequate degree and can playback at HD quality and it uses an old cortex... so again yes.

How long until ARM delivers x86-64 performance? Well this one's a stumper, particularly as "x86-64" is a pretty wide open goal a quick google points out that the first was the AMD Opteron... I couldn't quantify it, but I'm pretty sure that if someone did some testing comparing a top of the range ARM chip with an old K8 then ARM would come out on top. Conversely compare the same ARM chip to a high end Intel or AMD product and I'm sure we'd see it brought to it's knees. It's a bad first statement, not what I'd term codswallop, but he hadn't properly defined his terms.

ARM, efficient? Again, yes, again.

ARM, over-clocking? Yet again, yes; jumping back to the RasPi, it's ridiculously easy in Rasparian, open up a txt editor, enter the clock speed you want, and if it's possible then it's there on your next boot.

Water cooling an Arm chip? Well, it's a bit silly due to the aforementioned efficiency. But whatever floats your boat.

 

The Cortex A15 supports the ARMv7a instruction set which is 32-bit with a PAE-like extension to support 40-bit memory addressing at the OS level, but not at the application level.

 

ARM implementation will always do certain things well, it will always lack behind as well. There is no magic solution that will give you perfect 64 and 32bit execution whilst doing it at normal ARM power usage levels. If it could be done, it would be being done. However, what ARM are doing, with the software to support it, is making people ask the question as to whether the cost and power usage differences are worth it. For peeps needing raw power, the answer is yes. For those that want a tablet in future, the answer is no, ARM will provide what the platform and user needs.

As is said above, AMDs saving grace is that they recognise the need to deliver a good product at the low end. Both with this licensing agreement and their APUs. What Intel give is is useless Atoms. They were no good when they came out and still suck &#/¤ IMO. Will they be better in 12 to 18 months once they get an inegrated GPU, erm, no. It will be woefully underpowered and will provide so little GPU muscle the machines with them in will struggle with showing the Metro start screen.

 

Many users are finding significant gains using heatsinks and quiet fans on our RPis. I would certainly consider a integrated peltier and water cooler! Oh hang on, that kills the power efficiency a bit doesn't it!?

 

The reason I mentioned the idea of water cooling was because I would like to see how well a more power efficient/cooler cpu architecure would OC, although I'm not really a big fan of running my system in an OC'd state unless I'm doing a little gaming for the next few hours... which admittedly is rare these days...

I've tried OC'ing my SGS2 before to see how well that would run with higher clock speeds and that did cause it to get very hot, hence I suggested water cooling, and the reason I'd want to try it on a desktop chip is because I believe that it would be easier to get a good water cooling kit for a desktop setup lol...

but power efficiency is still more important to me than higher clock speeds, OC'in is just a hobby when I've got a few hours to spare, and when I'm done I restore most settings back to their defaults...