News AMD's dual-core performance boost

Faster, processor - More! More! AMD has spilt the beans on the performance increases the upcoming dual core CPU's will offer. This from news.com:

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday detailed performance results for its forthcoming dual-core Opteron processor, showing a speed boost of 30 percent to 55 percent, compared with today's single-core models.

In addition, AMD said the dual-core Opteron chips will be about the same size and produce the same amount of waste heat as current single-core Opterons, Kevin McGrath, manager of the Opteron architecture, said in a speech at the Fall Processor Forum here. That means the new chips will fit into the existing server designs.

Dual-core chips put two processing engines on the same slice of silicon, a way of letting chips do more work. The change is made possible by moves to more advanced manufacturing processes with smaller features that permit more circuitry to be squeezed into a given area.

More dual core action can be found here

 

That good news to hear as other mp system only gain about that much with the addtion of the the second proceesor. Now they just need to put them in prodution at decent price and release the desktop version

 

Trouble I can't see multi-core having any impact on desktop performance immediately. It is essentially the same idea as SMP, but with the cores on the same die. Thing is with SMP you won't see any peformance improvement unless the application has been specifically written to utilise multi processors, which virtually no desktop aps have.

Even more interesting is Windows licensing as Windows is very keyed into the number of processors you have. Does a dual core appear as two processors to Windows? If so you'll need to buy WinXP Pro to make use of it.

NB: With a 1GHz clock drop you are NOT going to want these for desktop applications. Sheesh.

 

I agree with you for the most part. Except I find the HT technology of the intel p4 I have quite nice. For example, running ad-aware or a virus scan, while burning a cd, and playing a game. It is a LOT nicer to have enabled than disabled.
I also thougt they'd have to put a cap on the cpu speeds somewhere down the line. guess this is it.
and I'm glad to see AMD doing this, cuz intel would be a tad overpriced most likely (or just more expensive than AMD)

 

And if it's 600MHz-1GHz slower than current chips, doesn't that put it sub-1GHz? Haven't looked at opteron speeds lately, but last time I looked they were around 1.8-2GHz I thought?

 

they range from 1.4 - 2.4GHz.
x40 - 1.4GHz
x42 - 1.6GHz
x44 - 1.8GHz
x46 - 2.0GHz
x48 - 2.2GHz
x50 - 2.4GHz

I have dual 246's

 

can you imagine one of those 4 cpu boards with four of those dual core chips in there You could almost host the internet (except not at all)