Can AMD salvage QFX with an in-house chipset?

[croc]

Hey Turpit... Watch it. We down here sort of like the endangered Tasmanian Devils... Maybe you could pick on your own endangered species?

 

[turpit]

Sorry, cant do that. The Tasmanian Devel population is far greater than the AMD Deluded Fanboy population. We have to conserve the few we have left for future generations to study.

Besides, every time I see a Tasmanian Devil, one name winks into my mind without fail: Agrajag

 

[evilr00t]

To top it off, USB devices don't get allocated memory. Everything has to go through a driver.

 

[pausert20]

To top it off, USB devices don't get allocated memory. Everything has to go through a driver.

You know above I noted to Baron his question was answered and I went back and re-read my posts to his query, I did not see the tone as such.... nonetheless, he still clings to a chipset will fix it or a flash thumb drive will fix it.

After answering the question, then explaining it to him, then again he persists at some point you have to stop and say --- this guy is unteachable, he will not learn, comprehend or understand.

I have always advocated, there is no shame in ignorance -- if you don't know you don't know -- but there is undeniable shame in remaining ignorant and Baron apparently wishes to remain ignorant.

A true shame.

Jack

Remember some quotes:

Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity. - Frank Leahy

Or

The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity. - Harlan Ellison (1934)

Or

Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it. - Stephen Vizinczey

Or

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. - Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 - 1968

Or may favorit:

Ignorance can be cured but stupidity goes on forever.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

I particularly like this one: The thing about common sense is that it aint so common

 

[mesarectifier]

The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity. - Harlan Ellison (1934)

Of course Frank Zappa also ventured the theory that stupidity was the building block of the universe, as it was more plentiful than Hydrogen.

And he only had Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Swaggart to go on - noone had even heard of BM when Frank was around.

 

[cyborg_ninja-117]

baron, just wondering, but what do you use a pc for?

Surfing the web.

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Buying a QFX system just to surf the internet? Either your rich or your stupid. You don't seem rich, so that kinda narrows it down.

 

[Insane_Maniac]

I havent been keenly following this topic, but in my personal opinion. Whether AMD uses an inhouse chipset, a different motherboard manufacturer or makes some tweaked arrangements on the CPU they will not get any farther than they have. Maybe a little more, but quite honestly there is no magic bullet solution to fix the mess the Quad FX has become. Intel has purely beaten down AMD with the Conroe and the Q6700. Until the K8L comes out and until AMD really gets in gear with 65nm their going to have to sit tight. (Not to say that I hate AMD, just Intel really did their homework this time.)

Even if AMD went with their own in house chipset, changed the motherboard manufacturer and somehow tweaked the system, it comes down to one basic component, the CPU. All the tweaking in the world wont amount to crap unless you can get the vital part of the Quad FX to become better.

Fortunately though, I think the idea that AMD has done with the Quad FX is a step in the right direction and if they keep it up, the Quad FX could become something great. If the quad platform system keeps up with Intel and AMD then we might see bigger and better Quad systems that could one day be brought to the mainstream segment. For now the Quad FX is just a pipe dream and AMD will have to sit tight until they can release the K8L in 07.

 

[gOJDO]

I just saw a Voyager 16GB USB drive and I thought to myself SuperFetch, perhaps the cure for your NUMA woes on Vista x64.

A 16GB drive would hold the RAM for ANY game 2 or 3 times over, so obviously swapping is a factor without NUMA. If NUMA works well with it (hmmm, don't I know some of the kernel developers?), then a single threaded app will never need to cross socket boundaries.

WOW! 8O You are a genius! :trophy:
When I am thinking that you might be the most stupid jackass that have ever used a computer, you come back with some more idiotic BS, that has no competition! 😛
Congratulations BaronBS, you must be proud of your unique insane stupidity! :lol:

 

[BaronMatrix]

I just saw a Voyager 16GB USB drive and I thought to myself SuperFetch, perhaps the cure for your NUMA woes on Vista x64.

A 16GB drive would hold the RAM for ANY game 2 or 3 times over, so obviously swapping is a factor without NUMA. If NUMA works well with it (hmmm, don't I know some of the kernel developers?), then a single threaded app will never need to cross socket boundaries.

WOW! 8O You are a genius! :trophy:
When I am thinking that you might be the most stupid jackass that have ever used a computer, you come back with some more idiotic BS, that has no competition! 😛
Congratulations BaronBS, you must be proud of your unique insane stupidity! :lol:

Well, thanks for your support.

 

[BaronMatrix]

I havent been keenly following this topic, but in my personal opinion. Whether AMD uses an inhouse chipset, a different motherboard manufacturer or makes some tweaked arrangements on the CPU they will not get any farther than they have. Maybe a little more, but quite honestly there is no magic bullet solution to fix the mess the Quad FX has become. Intel has purely beaten down AMD with the Conroe and the Q6700. Until the K8L comes out and until AMD really gets in gear with 65nm their going to have to sit tight. (Not to say that I hate AMD, just Intel really did their homework this time.)

Even if AMD went with their own in house chipset, changed the motherboard manufacturer and somehow tweaked the system, it comes down to one basic component, the CPU. All the tweaking in the world wont amount to crap unless you can get the vital part of the Quad FX to become better.

Fortunately though, I think the idea that AMD has done with the Quad FX is a step in the right direction and if they keep it up, the Quad FX could become something great. If the quad platform system keeps up with Intel and AMD then we might see bigger and better Quad systems that could one day be brought to the mainstream segment. For now the Quad FX is just a pipe dream and AMD will have to sit tight until they can release the K8L in 07.

I guess the only question is, Would you buy a dual socket system that wasn't QFX and why.

 

[atp777]

Very good article Jack. So my next question is, would a Dual Socket system benefit from a the memory controller being on the chipset rather than on die? I'm here to learn.

 

[atp777]

Thank you Jack, very much appreciated. Now, with that said why can't some people accept this as fact? :lol:

 

[TechnologyCoordinator]

I guess the only question is, Would you buy a dual socket system that wasn't QFX and why.

At work for my datacenter, no.

However, the REAL question is, Would you buy a quad-core system that wasn't Core 2 Quad?

 

[BaronMatrix]

As the article points out, in NUMA if a processor looks for data in memory on a node remotely located, the data must be sent through the interconnect network (and not the chipset as some on this thread will lead you to believe ). Any transmission of data across multiple links will incure latency. Thus, not all memory will have the same access time.

The chipset controls accesses as every request goes through the chipset for IO. Do you think a PCIe tunnel is used to take the GPU IO off of the chipset and retain all disk/SouthBridge IO?

If you start a program does the IMC talk to the HDD controller directly or does it talk to the chipset ?

 

[evilr00t]

And you call yourself a DEV? You wouldn't pass the A+ certification with your level of hardware understanding.

 

[BaronMatrix]

And you call yourself a DEV? You wouldn't pass the A+ certification with your level of hardware understanding.

So you mean the IMC does talk to the HDD controller and the USB controller and the sound card?

 

[BaronMatrix]

I guess the only question is, Would you buy a dual socket system that wasn't QFX and why.

At work for my datacenter, no.

However, the REAL question is, Would you buy a quad-core system that wasn't Core 2 Quad?

Well, I think that answer should be pretty obvious. Of course I would. FX70 is up to $900 less and I believe will clock to 3.0GHz (not that I will).

 

[evilr00t]

Assume what you want. I never said anything of that sort.

 

[evilr00t]

Market price != MSRP. Basic economics. If FX70 has high demand or low supply, expect the price to rise dramatically. Perhaps that's FX7_'s strength: no price gouging, since it's not popular.

 

[BaronMatrix]

Assume what you want. I never said anything of that sort.

So you mean the chipset is in charge of all SouthBridge IO including disk?
Then that means that the chipset CAN be a bottleneck as evidenced by the OCability of certain chipsets vs. others. Or the presence of a faster HD ctrlr. Or the use of higher speed RAM.

All of these are case where the chipset does matter, but QFX is the orphan child that doesn't need a good chipset (or one with no driver issues).

HMMMMM!

 

[RB9269]

This has proberly been remarked upon earlyer in the topic, i just cba to read it all. Wasnt all the AMD fanboys going on about the crappyness of a dual/quad core cpu that wasnt a "true" dual/quad core cpu, just two single/dual cores superglued together?

Doesnt this smack of "superglued" crappyness? To unhijack this topic, QFX cannot be salvaged with a chipset. It needs faster and cooler CPU's to be of any use to anyone

 

[WR]

When you start a program on a modern computer, the keystrokes/mouse click signals go through the motherboard I/O chipset ("Southbridge") into the CPU. Assuming the program is not already buffered, the CPU starts to send commands to the "Southbridge," which handles the disk controllers and transfers data from the IDE/SATA ports directly to the memory controller for placement in RAM (this mode is called DMA, or Direct Memory Access). The CPU is both aware of where the program data resides on the hard disk map as well as in control of where it goes into RAM (the OS generally decides the RAM allocation specifics).

As soon as enough program data has entered RAM, an A64 CPU starts to read that data directly using the IMC. In a multisocket Opteron/4x4 system, if the data unfortunately resides on a different bank of memory from that managed by the IMC, the CPU will instead send a read request through a CPU interconnect to a neighboring CPU, whose IMC queues the request, processes it, and then sends back the data along the interconnect. For a benchmarking application designed not to factor hard drive performance, the actual benchmarking commences only after all of the relevant program data has been transferred to RAM (and hopefully before it gets swapped back out).

For an Intel-based system, the first paragraph remains true, but the second paragraph changes greatly because memory is handled via a "Northbridge" memory hub separate from the CPU sockets, and in multisocket nodes, there remains one memory hub dealing with all the memory banks as well as all of the memory read requests.

I hope it is now evident that in AMD's 4x4 implementation, none of the motherboard chips have any say in where hard disk data ends up in RAM, and none of them even see the transfer of data from one memory bank to a local or neighboring CPU. One can draw a similar conclusion for Intel systems. As long as the Northbridge is held constant, changing the other chips around will not resolve memory performance problems.

 

[TechnologyCoordinator]

I guess the only question is, Would you buy a dual socket system that wasn't QFX and why.

At work for my datacenter, no.

However, the REAL question is, Would you buy a quad-core system that wasn't Core 2 Quad?

Well, I think that answer should be pretty obvious. Of course I would. FX70 is up to $900 less and I believe will clock to 3.0GHz (not that I will).

FX-70 MSRP = 599 per pair

This recovers the extra $150 to $200 caused by a more expensive motherboard.

This also recovers the extra $50 to $100 for a more expensive power supply.

So a FX-70 would cost $100-200 less than a Core 2 Quad system when you factor the motherboard and power supply issues in. However, the performance hit you take from going 3.0 to 2.6 is tremendous (13%).

So even the cheaper FX-70 is still going to have price\performance issues when battling the Core 2 Quad. You can't just factor in processor prices when the "platformance" of Quad FX requires you to have a very expensive motherboard and a beefier more expensive powersupply.

 

[BaronMatrix]

I hope it is now evident that in AMD's 4x4 implementation, none of the motherboard chips have any say in where hard disk data ends up in RAM, and none of them even see the transfer of data from one memory bank to a local or neighboring CPU. One can draw a similar conclusion for Intel systems. As long as the Northbridge is held constant, changing the other chips around will not resolve memory performance problems.

That's where you're wrong. Legitreviews showed that the chipset driver for QFX WAS putting memory into the wrong sockets. In XP NUMA is handled by the chipset, not the OS. In Vista, the OS overrides the chipset driver. I haven't seen any Vista Home Premium numbers yet but I bet they will be better for single threaded apps.

As a person who worked on components (test and automation) for 5 versions of Windows, I think I know how the kernel works. RC2 (the last Vista reviews ) is reserved for code freeze and optimization. XP RC2 was a lot slower and less polished than XP RTM.

The same thing will happen. But even if QFX STILL LOSES 10% off of FX62 scores that's still (including the 8800GTS) at least 70% faster than my 4400+/7800GT at Doom3. That means I can finally buy FEAR.