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#1
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When will the Intel "real" quad-core processor come out?
I've read threads here about both AMD and Intel bringing out new "real"
quad-core processors for 4+ socket servers in a few months. I am looking at a machine with 2 real quad Xeon processor. Does anyone know approx. how long am I looking at - am I looking at March? June? Fall? December? of 2007? Apart from this forum, where can I find more information on this timeframe issue? Thanks for any reply. |
#2
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When will the Intel "real" quad-core processor come out?
phuile wrote: I've read threads here about both AMD and Intel bringing out new "real" quad-core processors for 4+ socket servers in a few months. AMD won't have quad cores till the second half of this year AFAIK. Intel already offers quad Xeon DP systems. I am looking at a machine with 2 real quad Xeon processor. Does anyone know approx. how long am I looking at - am I looking at March? June? Fall? December? of 2007? How about they have been available since November? DK |
#3
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When will the Intel "real" quad-core processor come out?
* David Kanter:
phuile wrote: I've read threads here about both AMD and Intel bringing out new "real" quad-core processors for 4+ socket servers in a few months. AMD won't have quad cores till the second half of this year AFAIK. Intel already offers quad Xeon DP systems. I am looking at a machine with 2 real quad Xeon processor. Does anyone know approx. how long am I looking at - am I looking at March? June? Fall? December? of 2007? How about they have been available since November? DK OP If you mean single die - i.e. not two dual-cores put together - the answer seems to be not until next year. Though as DK indicates, just because the current ones are not single die, doesn't mean that they're inferior. -- Derek |
#4
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When will the Intel "real" quad-core processor come out?
Yes, I am talking about the "real" quad, not 2 dual core put together.
I am asking because I was in a discussion on another thread in this forum and happened to read that some people are prepared to wait for the "real" quad from Intel. The reason being that AMD will have them coming "soon" and Intel shouldn't be far off if they want to compete. I am just consdering whether I should wait or just go ahead with the currently quad Xeon. That's why I am wondering whether anybody knows about the time frame. |
#5
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When will the Intel "real" quad-core processor come out?
phuile wrote:
Yes, I am talking about the "real" quad, not 2 dual core put together. I am asking because I was in a discussion on another thread in this forum and happened to read that some people are prepared to wait for the "real" quad from Intel. The reason being that AMD will have them coming "soon" and Intel shouldn't be far off if they want to compete. I am just consdering whether I should wait or just go ahead with the currently quad Xeon. That's why I am wondering whether anybody knows about the time frame. Well, the answer seems to have been updated recently: not till sometime in 2008, _after_ Intel has converted to 45nm! http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/01/27/in...enryn_details/ For Intel with a shared L2 cache, it may not be as easy to redesign it to accommodate 4 cores rather than just 2. AMD will only have a shared L3 cache, which is not as performance critical as an L2 cache, so some design flexibility might be available there. As for the advantages of a real quad-core vs. dual-dual-cores, we really won't know the answer to that until AMD launches its real quad-core. So far people think it won't make a difference, but AMD is claiming that Barcelona will be upto 40% faster than Cloverton. Pretty much what Intel claimed Conroe would be over Athlon 64 before it got launched; back then people were skeptical, but it turned out to be true. AMD might hold similar aces up its sleeve. We can assume that AMD will implement all of the same architectural improvements to its cores that Intel did to make Core 2 so good, so at the very least it will equal Core 2. Then AMD will have a shared L3 cache between the 4 cores, which should pool common data among all 4 cores rather than 2; the shared L2 cache worked wonders for Core 2 over Athlon 64, it was probably worth over 50% of the overall improvement by itself. Also although Core 2 is a superb computational engine, it's definitely not state-of-the-art at I/O throughput (i.e. Hypertransport vs. front-side-bus). It's masking its I/O deficiencies with big caches at the moment. The I/O throughput equation also includes communications between processors in a multiprocessor system. When they scale up over two processors, the FSB is a bottleneck. Yousuf Khan -- There is no failure, only delayed success |
#6
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When will the Intel "real" quad-core processor come out?
On Jan 22, 6:50 pm, "phuile" wrote: Yes, I am talking about the "real" quad, not 2 dual core put together.] Can you explain to me exactly what the difference is? It sure seems like most software doesn't know the difference. I am asking because I was in a discussion on another thread in this forum and happened to read that some people are prepared to wait for the "real" quad from Intel. Yes, well, some people also stored up tons of canned food for Y2K. That just made them crazy... The reason being that AMD will have them coming "soon" and Intel shouldn't be far off if they want to compete. What makes you think that Intel "needs" an integrated solution? The only questions that a user should care about a 1. What is the performance for the applications I care about, or performance generally? 2. What is the power dissipation? 3. How much does it cost? Having four cores on a single die is a way to improve performance. However, it has drawbacks. You cannot bin the parts to match on frequency and power dissipation. It is inherently more expensive to produce, because larger dice have lower yields. Using a multichip package has some advantages and disadvantages as well. It is lower performance for multithreaded applications, but can be higher performance for some single threaded applications, since the frequencies will be higher. The reason that frequency will be higher is that you can choose the two dice that go into the MCP, and pick so that they are both really fast, or both slow. It's also probably 10x cheaper to developer a new CPU with a multichip package than with a new project. Only zealots really want to portray it as a black and white issue. AMD doesn't have the technology to do a multichip package so they have been spending a lot of effort to get people to believe that "only integrated quad cores are real quad cores", which is bunk. AMD's performance will scale better because of the choices they made, but it is balanced out by being somewhat more expensive in other ways. If your workload isn't multithreaded, then it won't even matter anyway. I am just consdering whether I should wait or just go ahead with the currently quad Xeon. That's why I am wondering whether anybody knows about the time frame. Intel won't do four cores on a die for another 1.5-2 years. It really depends on what your application is, most applications simply don't have 4 threads, so you're better off buying the fastest dual core you can get. DK |
#7
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When will the Intel "real" quad-core processor come out?
On Jan 27, 10:06 pm, Yousuf Khan wrote: phuile wrote: Yes, I am talking about the "real" quad, not 2 dual core put together. I am asking because I was in a discussion on another thread in this forum and happened to read that some people are prepared to wait for the "real" quad from Intel. The reason being that AMD will have them coming "soon" and Intel shouldn't be far off if they want to compete. I am just consdering whether I should wait or just go ahead with the currently quad Xeon. That's why I am wondering whether anybody knows about the time frame.Well, the answer seems to have been updated recently: not till sometime in 2008, _after_ Intel has converted to 45nm! http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/01/27/in...enryn_details/ For Intel with a shared L2 cache, it may not be as easy to redesign it to accommodate 4 cores rather than just 2. Absolutely. AMD will only have a shared L3 cache, which is not as performance critical as an L2 cache, so some design flexibility might be available there. This sentence really doesn't make much sense. How is there design flexibility from having a shared L3 versus a shared L2 cache? It's really all the same. As for the advantages of a real quad-core vs. dual-dual-cores, we really won't know the answer to that until AMD launches its real quad-core. So far people think it won't make a difference, but AMD is claiming that Barcelona will be upto 40% faster than Cloverton. AMD is claiming that it will be 40% faster in SPECfp_rate than EXISTING clovertown processors. Between now and then clovertown could increase in clockspeed...imagine that. I bet on average the two products will be about even, with AMD winning on FP and numerical workloads, and Intel winning on more integer stuff. Pretty much what Intel claimed Conroe would be over Athlon 64 before it got launched; back then people were skeptical, but it turned out to be true. AMD might hold similar aces up its sleeve. We can assume that AMD will implement all of the same architectural improvements to its cores that Intel did to make Core 2 so good, so at the very least it will equal Core 2. You could assume that, and you'd be wrong. AMD already stated that they are not doing full LD/ST reordering, and they are only reordering loads around other loads. That's much easier to do, and provides less of a performance benefit. Besides, any changes that AMD made to Barcelona were set in stone around 1-2 years ago. Then AMD will have a shared L3 cache between the 4 cores, which should pool common data among all 4 cores rather than 2; That's really easy to model though. The problem with Intel's quad core is that there is duplication between the different L2 caches, but it probably isn't that bad. the shared L2 cache worked wonders for Core 2 over Athlon 64, it was probably worth over 50% of the overall improvement by itself. Can you back that statement up by data? Those numbers seem ridiculously high. DK |
#8
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When will the Intel "real" quad-core processor come out?
On Jan 27, 11:51 pm, The Kat wrote: On 27 Jan 2007 22:59:14 -0800, "David Kanter" wrote: On Jan 22, 6:50 pm, "phuile" wrote: Yes, I am talking about the "real" quad, not 2 dual core put together.] Can you explain to me exactly what the difference is? It sure seems like most software doesn't know the difference. I could see, in any case when the same data was being processed by multiple cores, that there would be a benefit to a shared cache. But that's NOT what most quad-core chips will be doing, I think. Yup. It becomes an issue when you have one CPU in the package trying to write, while the other CPU is trying to read or write. It's not ideal, but it is a lot cheaper and easier to do, and I think both Intel and AMD make the appropriate choices for their respective situations. DK |
#9
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When will the Intel "real" quad-core processor come out?
David Kanter wrote:
AMD will only have a shared L3 cache, which is not as performance critical as an L2 cache, so some design flexibility might be available there. This sentence really doesn't make much sense. How is there design flexibility from having a shared L3 versus a shared L2 cache? It's really all the same. But L3 can be: a) slower (latency wise) b) concurrency is less (L1/L2 handles much more traffic that just L1) IOW -- it's easier to share slower L3 than faster L2. Pretty much what Intel claimed Conroe would be over Athlon 64 before it got launched; back then people were skeptical, but it turned out to be true. AMD might hold similar aces up its sleeve. We can assume that AMD will implement all of the same architectural improvements to its cores that Intel did to make Core 2 so good, so at the very least it will equal Core 2. You could assume that, and you'd be wrong. AMD already stated that they are not doing full LD/ST reordering, and they are only reordering loads around other loads. That's much easier to do, and provides less of a performance benefit. But up to now AMD does virtually none of that while Intel did that stuff (LD/LD) since P6. So finally AMD picks that long hanging fruit with performance improvement associated with that. This sole thing should bring performance up by 2 speedgrades. Besides, any changes that AMD made to Barcelona were set in stone around 1-2 years ago. Then AMD will have a shared L3 cache between the 4 cores, which should pool common data among all 4 cores rather than 2; That's really easy to model though. The problem with Intel's quad core is that there is duplication between the different L2 caches, but it probably isn't that bad. The problem is bus load. Coherency traffic is exposed on CPU's FSB and occurs at FSB speed. rgds -- Sebastian Kaliszewski |
#10
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When will the Intel "real" quad-core processor come out?
David Kanter wrote:
For Intel with a shared L2 cache, it may not be as easy to redesign it to accommodate 4 cores rather than just 2. Absolutely. AMD will only have a shared L3 cache, which is not as performance critical as an L2 cache, so some design flexibility might be available there. This sentence really doesn't make much sense. How is there design flexibility from having a shared L3 versus a shared L2 cache? It's really all the same. L3 doesn't need to have as low latency as lower-level caches. It's also probably not as heavily accessed as the lower-level caches. Since 4 cores accessing the same memory would require more traffic management, which adds latency, the fact that the cores are relying much less on the L3 than L2 will result in less weighted-average latency increase. In fact, L3 might be ideal for the experimental caches like AMD's ZRAM, or Intel's FB-RAM. Neither of those have the low-latency of SRAM, but SRAM's latency increases the larger and larger it gets, so at sufficiently large enough sizes, the two technologies' latencies might equal out. Intel is talking about a 16MB SRAM L3 cache in some future quad-core processor (assume Nehalem), at 45nm. If ZRAM comes online for AMD soon enough, then a 16MB ZRAM L3 can be substituted for a 2MB SRAM L3, without much increase in real-estate. Yousuf Khan |
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