AMD + INTEL Competition Heats Up

[Jerry Jones]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nf/20030811/bs_nf/22051

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Elie]

I'd take 64 bit processing over increased clock rates and memory any day.

[Flying dutchman]

I am not sure if 64-bit processing would give any advantages at all - most data types used (characters in word processing, RGB/YUV color values in video applications) are 8/16/32 bits in size. If you could do two 32-bit operations with one 64-bit command, yes that would make a difference. But that's already implemented in MMX and SSE/SSE2.

I think Intel's "hyperthreading" (limited multi-processing on-a-chip) is a more elegant solution that today's applications can use with only minor re-writing of core routines.

The Pentium-M (and also AMD's Athlon) need on average fewer clock cycles per command than a Pentium-4. There's much room for improvement here- make the core more efficient. I have recently acquired a new notebook with a 1.3 GHz Pentium-M and its speed is easily comparable to a 2 GHz P4.

[davpen]

""hyperthreading" (limited multi-processing on-a-chip)"

Very limited unfortunately. Its a very nice idea but it has been done so that there is just about the maximum amount of shared resources between the two cores (no doubt to keep the cost to an absolute minimum). The resulting contention more often than not slows things down compared to a non-hyperthreading processor.

I am not a big fan of the P4. I tend to think its specs were more designed by the marketing department rather than the engineering department. It looks good on paper (and in marketing brochures and ads) but doesn't really perform as it should. Although admittedly the upgrades made during its life time (bigger cache, faster bus speeds) have improved it a lot.


Cheers,

David.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

I will go for 64bit over clockspeed also. So far IMO opteron speed sounds promising even in 32bit, their FPU is great. Hopefully developers will start implementing AMD64 tho...

Oh yea... is porting to AMD64 hard? I don't really know about the technology. Anyone care to explain what the procedures are?

Oh yea... http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030811/index.html toms has a Xeon 3.06GHz 1MB L3 cache review... speed...

Opteron 2xx series looks promising... its quite cheap and is pretty fast. So far it looks like Opteron will excel in scientific calculations... (Seti@home bench for 4X Opteron looks great)

Any idea what price Athlon 64 will start at?

[Marshmallowman]

codecs and compression algorythims use some interesting maths to do their work, you CAN trade #of iterations for increased precision in the working numbers...

So a 64bit float system may converge to accurate values twice as fast as a system based on on 32bit floats..

Its all in the tranforms...also the possiblity that using a 64bit integer transform may give accuracy (quality) that will exceed 32bit floats! and be considerably faster (64bit sse?)..

I think codecs is one area where 64bits WILL pay off...But I can see ZERO performance increase in word or excel

Just a guess but the price of a athlon will be a (good)bit cheaper than a single CPU opteron (142,144,146...etc)

[Chrono_Wanderer]

LOL, but how much are the 14x CPUs?

[Marshmallowman]

good question

I have not seen a price

But the slowest dual(240) is 266 (1.6G)

Going by the diff between normal XP's and MP's you could could expect the slowest single to be something like half that? hpow about $130 ?....as wildly inacurate estimate

[Flying dutchman]

I would rather like to see a 3.0 GHz desktop version of the Pentium-M instead. Should be comparable to a 5 GHz Pentium-4...

[Frank Marshall]

Is the Pentium-M based on the Pentium III? If so, is that with a larger on-chip cache like the Pentium III-S (512k)?

[Nowhere]

No, Pentium-M is completely different chip (from Intel design team in Israel I think...they were working some time ago on "computer on a chip" that was scrapped, but P-M emerged.
I think I remember something like that at least...).
When it comes to architectural similarities it is somewhere between P3 and P4, and has it's own special (geared towads notebook usage, to which it was designed, not redesigned)...erm, properties.
All I remember from one read on some site. And dammit, I can't find it (with lots of stuff about various architectures, processors, etc.)

[mmp121]

For a good review of what the Centrio (Pentium M) chip is made of go here.

http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.html?i=1800

I found it as very useful.