will dual core be a step backwards short-term wise

[raretech]

Yeah, games are going to be an issue. A lot of gamers are going to say this sucks. Oh well. Even an AMD spokesman said in an interview of ExtremeTech that this isn't going to be for gamers at first. For the non-gamers, this is largely going to be good tech. Especially in servers/workstations.

I'm still disapointed in the clock speeds, and I share the skepticism of the synthetic benchmarks, but if they are able to produce dual core chips that run at lower clock speeds, yet just as fast as the latest unicore dual processor systems, this is going to be a winner. Depending on the price that is.

I just keep thinking about being able to upgrade my system to a 4 way, without having to plunk down the money on a 4 way motherboard, and Opteron 8 series processors. Though I suspect the price of these things are going to push my upgrade plans a year down the road. I'm not spending more than 800 bucks a chip. That'd be worth it for my needs. But I want faster clock speeds.

I want my cake and I want to eat it too. :lol:

<i>Cigarettes - No cholesterol, high in fiber, low in fat, how could they not be good for you?</i>

 

[trooper11]

i really wonder what you were expecting fomr the first dual cores anyway? you expected a instant doubling of performance? i dont know where you got those rose colored glasses lol, but really 30-50% is in line with what i expected. at least with this number, we can tell amd is at least trying to be real here. id rather them admit this up front then try to hype something that doesnt materialize.

and we have no idea about pricing yet, since the first dual cores will be opterons, we may see it simply take the spot of the high priced single cores now, while the single cores drop in price. thats very possible in that area.

now for dothans, where is the evidence these things do well in server /workstation situations? i havent seen any such benchmarks to confirm this. you say they would rule there, but there is no such evidence. dothans are excellent chips in the mobile area, but utnil i see some new tests done, its nto much more. it has alot of potential and if intel is smart it will be planning more wiht the architecture. but making them out to be the second coming for intel is a bit much at this point.

so now about the underclcoked ahtlons, 3-5 times is what was said. so that means that at intro there could be 2ghz per core opterons, while there were 2.6ghz opterons. tahts possible i would say. really, if thats true, then 2ghz per core isnt so bad is it? this is all relative to waht amd has single core wise for opteron by that time. so we will see.

 

[Stimpy]

We really need to look what dual core is aimed at.
We are talking opteron and not Athlon64 at the moment, hence the server space.
Frequency is generally not the driver from business apps, however parallel processing is. I.e. servers will have a high concurrent user base.
Doubling the number of cores will (in user terms) generally double the number of users, assuming we are not running at 100% CPU usage.
Maximum number of users will be less than a dual CPU setup, clocked higher.


Look at traditional servers (i.e. SUN/HP/IBM), in the past the CPUs were not clocked very fast, but had a large number of CPUs to support a large user base, but were still able to support more concurrent users than a system with half the CPUs and double the frequency.

For a customer running at 80% CPU utilisation with a fully loaded 2 or 4 way system, just changing the CPUs to dual core even if the frequency is 20% less will give them a 100% uplift in the number of users supported.
If it were running at 100% CPU they would obviously only get an 80% uplift.

 

[p1ng]

Well i think it will be a great revolution on the market. I do not know the architecture of the dual core procs, but see it this way: it should imitate dual processors in any way... maybe memory management or other stuph will not be duplicated. anyway supposing it imitates dual proc systems, in most cases of 'regular' cpu usage it should somewhat almost double the performance, since if u are runnin several apps, they can be running on separated cores because they are dependant. If u run a server like apache, or IIS, this is extremly usefull since there are always lots of service runnin and requiring processor. When double core applications enter the market, this will also run at somewhat the double of speed, depending on the apps. Now for the commom gamer, it all depends on what the programmer can do. When there was no GPU, most of graphics calculation was handled within the proc; the proc also handled physics engine and AI. now graphics calcs are runnin in GPU. did it improve the quality of games? yes. did it improve quality of apps. no. It all depends on how programmers can (re)design their apps to make thins run faster. in these days the bottleneck of graphics is the graphics card speed. So i think for gamers it is much more interesting SLi than dual cores, for the coming year. I think the real revolution will occur in the end of 2005 when serious dual core apps will begin to enter the market

 

[dobster99]

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1666805,00.asp
This is from the same article

"However, Kevin Krewell, editor of The Microprocessor Report and an analyst for In-Stat/MDR, said that most games will still favor single-core chips for the time being.
"Everybody's going multicore, but the best single-threaded performance will still be on a single-core processor," Krewell said. "Don't expect a [dual-core chip] inside gaming PCs; most gaming apps are still single-threaded, and those things will come later," he said of multithreaded games. Intel's hyperthreaded Pentium 4 architecture was designed for multithreaded applications."



I use Maya 6.0 alot and it would probably take advantage of a dualcore system. However, I could tolerate lower performance in Maya alot more than I could in any new game, especially considering A64 dualcores will be in a FX price range. Consider if a AMD dualcore was released on the Oct18. Would you rather have a FX55 or a dualcore 4000+.

I picked a dualcore 4000+ instead of FX55 dualcore as an examples because the price of a dualcore FX55 would probably be priced just about out of anyone hands. A 4000+ since its performance gains are related to more cache, higher Hypertransport speed and/or different chipset then the other 2.4GHz chips.

Now here is where it gets hairy. Now if these things follow the opteron and are 3 to 5 speed clocks slower. A speed clock looking at AMD's recent clock increases means 200mhz. That means a chip that operates from anywhere from 1.8Ghz to 1.4Ghz with 1MB cache and 1GHz HT. Doesn't look to appealing against a FX55 using a singlethreaded app does it.

Now purchasing a dualcore in about 3 years, after a majority of games have being released optimized for dual core and dualcores themselves operated at speeds closer to their single core cousins, will be more appealing.

 

[Clob]

Wow... Great debate here. ( if it is that)

Only time will tell, we can only forcast devolopers and how the economy will adapt. I'm realy excited to see how these turn out!


PS. Not one troll or flame in here. WOW!!!!

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