News AMD to demonstrate dual-core chips

The Intel / AMD duel goes dual! this from news.com:

Aiming to deflate archrival Intel, Advanced Micro Devices this week will show off its dual-core chips, which will start to trickle out toward the middle of next year.

AMD on Tuesday will show off a Hewlett-Packard ProLiant server with four dual-core Opteron chips at a facility in Austen, Texas, bringing the functional number of chips in four-processor servers to eight.

"When you load Microsoft (Server 2003), it shows up as eight processors," said Marty Seyer, vice president and general manager of the microprocessor business unit at AMD.

The chip "taped out"--semiconductor shop talk meaning that the design was completed--in June, and AMD recently produced the samples that will be displayed in Austin, Seyer added.

More here

 

Great for servers and whatnot, but the hype over dual core procs is really just worthless... they only let you do more stuff at once, not one thing faster. That is until we make software that really supports multiple procs and it'll split the load. (Soon I hope)

 

Thats cool. Very nice. I think its a step in the right direction. Intel has been trying to do that as well for a while and the only thing they did so far was hyperthreading that only lets you use the bus more eficiently. Intel is suposed to do the same in the coming months.

 

I imagine it is exponentially harder to write software to run on mutiple threads/parallel when one thread depends on the outcome of the other? Code that can be run non-sequentially? Managing something like this in code must be a headache.

Anyone here any experience in parallel programming?

 

i had a dual system, and noticed the difference now that one has burnet out... for example i could get it to teach a neural net on one, and play whatever game on the other. It meant my system nerver slowed down for whatever whoever... It is very usefull, although you are right on getting software to start multithreading, but then it's all down to the OS to tell it which cpu to use. So it's a lot of effort on the programmers side for something that might work or might not...
What i've seen happening reacently ir games with a seperate for sound, which isn't much but doea help a bit.