Hardware AMD Phenom and Quad Core Opteron

In all honesty I've been a AMD fan boy since I built my first computer. Even though the Intel core duo's do a wonderful job, AMD is still better for the money IMHO. Its just like when I use to work at circuit city, people would buy a 7800 over a x1600 just because it had a bigger number. Oh how I wish all the ignorant people in the world would be informed!

How true! Does anyone else remember when a 500mb hard drive was HUGE?! Now we have 1TB drives, my how the years fly by.


(I move to the UK soon woot! **** bush haha ok im done)

 

intell's current quad cores have already been shown to give negligible performance inprovment in all but a few benchmarks so if these can actually do quad core well they should rock...

 

so your going from bush to blair ? talk about failing downwards but seriously, i cant see how blair is better in any way then bush

I'm very interested to see how this chip does, amd definitely needs to get back in the game, will this chip do that ? i hope so - for amds sake, but even if it doesn't help in the desktop - the server market is where amd really needs to keep its grip

 

dude you do know its as bad as America here, just people are less vocal?

the foods not as cheap/nice aswell.

 

I'm sure I read somewhere that AMD ditched K9 to go straight to K10 (Ideally to try and beat Intel).

 

im sorry but blair is no where near even half as bad as bush as a leader of a country. hes done alot of good since the conservatives were in, people just forget to remeber back that far with some not so good aswell (eg IRAQ etc) dont know one large major thing bush has done well in office

 

^^(a little off topic don't you think)

 

Waiting is a pain. But so is no play.

 

Haha, I'm just glad to get out of this country and explore the world. Besides isn't blair's last day in office June 27th?

Sorry off topic, haha, love AMD


Sidenote: Ill take over parliament with R-E-S-P-E-C-T....E. (anyone get that? haha)

 

huh? ur opinion is wrong. and no, im not an intel fanboy. bought amd before c2d...and almost got tired of waiting to buy my current rig and went amd again. but im glad i didnt. i still say the only reason to do a full upgrade on amd is if your goal is quad core. otherwise, c2d is the way to go.

 

I think AMD have taken so long to come out with a new chip is because Intel have obviously patented there C2D Architecture like crazy, so AMD had to start bottom up while doing that they reliased the fault with the Intel chip and built the quad-core. AMD will succed if this quad-core Phenom chip is cheap, if it can match the Core 2 Duo in price then we will see AMD on top.

 

i wouldn't really say so, amd's main architecture hasn't really changed much

the difference is, AMD's architecture scales very way, intel's really doesnt, in fact intel's suffers badly

 

well realistically it will be bush to brown - some men consider this an aim

 

Well....I think this is putting a life expectancy on my main rig now...

Looks good, we might finally have an intel killer...

 

Intel will eventually pwn AMD, then AMD will do it again. Its a natural cycle and hopefully there will never be a winner - no good without competition.

Great article btw, can't wait to see benchmarks and pricing, it could be the next system upgrade for me perhaps on launch... cost dependant!

 

The benefits of an AM2+ platform over an AM2 platform will no doubt be very small in single socket systems. HT2.0 doesn't struggle all that much for bandwidth on the current processors. I reckon we will see maybe a 5% improvement on AM2+ over AM2.

AMD haven't been slow because Intel has patented stuff... its just not like that. They have been slow because it takes a damn long time to design a new chip and they killed the original K8 successor project off. Something about designing a massively parallel chip or something. Unless i am thinking of the wrong thing.

As for a redesign not incremental improvements... this thing is a HUGE leap. Native quad core, split power planes, l3 cache, improved HT, aditiional and wider SSE units, OoOE etc. etc. There are probably as many architectural improvements here as with Core to Core2.

 

I believe this is incorrect. Isn't it 2 power planes, one for the cores and one for the northbridge rather than one for each core?

 

You're confusing core enhancements with voltage planes:

AM2 CPUs have per-core clock frequency adjustments but only a global voltage value with a single plane voltage. If one core is clocked down but the other is running full pelt, both will still be full voltage not saving much power.

AM2+ allows for split plane voltage between cores and northbridge, however the new architecture has been optimised for completely independent P-state adjustments on a per-core basis: if only one core is 100% load it'll be full MHz/full voltage, while the other cores will sit in a lower mhz/voltage state.

Their new mobile CPUs (info coming friday ) have gone even further to include a triple plane voltage instead allowing for even more independent sleep states.

 

It's not just about a speed bump, it's about a technological improvement allowing further native instructions for power states and I/O between chipset-CPU and CPU-CPU as well. It's also about building for the future: if your whole CPU architecture team (from mobile to server) is working with the same technology then you're more people available to optimise it.

 

Regarding AMD's implementation of Quad-core... we can see from the facts that it should be a more efficient system, but isn't it just going to fall down in the same way as Intel's Quads in real-world performance, simply because Quad isn't all that useful yet?

What I mean is that, yes, AMD's solution is more efficient than Intel's but realistically-speaking, how many Quad-core users ever see all 4 cores being used, or how much of a realistic benefit have Quad-owners seen over Dual?

Correct me if I'm wrong, because I'd hate to be talking out my arse here, but from what I've seen, Quad core is still of little benefit over dual-core in all but the highest-end of applications designed for it, and very few games actually make use of a multi-core setup.
The only game I can think of off the top of my head which properly supports multi-core is Supreme Commander, and from what I've read in the SupCom forums and seen in benchmarks, the 2nd, 3rd & 4th cores are still barely utilised in a game supposedly optimised to take advantage of it.
I don't know the ins and outs of load-balancing and can't claim to have understood everything in this article, but is an improved quad-core system going to overcome that problem?
I don't think so...

I'm currently running a single-core A64, while waiting to build my C2D dual-core rig, and I'm curious to see how much of a performance benefit I can attribute to having a 2nd core, as opposed to having a faster chip overall (though how I'll determine that is anyone's guess).

I'm no Intel Fanboy, I'm a hardware mercenary, I'll use whatever performs best for my budget, but I can't help but feel that AMD's claims to superiority in Quad-core architecture are no more than a marketing gimmick with no real-world benefit to the average high-end gamer or enthusiast for the foreseeable future.
Sure, Quad-core may help in folding, 3d rendering and video production, but I see a lot of 'hardcore gamers' out there convinced that having 4 cores will give them Bazillion-squared frames per second, when that doesn't seem to be the case, exaggerations aside.
Obviously, if nobody made the move to quad-core then neither would the developers, so I'm not saying that nobody should go Quad, I just can't see the quad-hype being justified.

I can't claim to know the topic in-depth, so someone with more knowledge on the matter: please correct me if I'm wrong.

(Sorry for the lengthy post )