AMD's new chips

[tha]

Article on the new AMD silicon

[cheesehead]

From that article:

Originally Posted by InfoWorld

Each of Barcelona’s four cores incorporates a new vector math unit referred to as SSE128 (128-bit streaming single-instruction-multiple-data extensions). I am aware that you only do quantum physics on weekends, but the potential for hardcore IT tasks such as encryption, compression, real-time analysis of high volumes of streaming business transactions, and

.. Lucas-Lehmer testing :-)

Barcelona gives floating point operations their own schedulers (checkout lanes) and runs them twice as fast as 64-bit SSE did. AMD claims that Barcelona’s per-core floating point performance is more than 80 percent faster than the present Opteron.

Barcelona blacks out power to individual portions of the chip that are idled, from in-core execution units to on-die bus controllers. This hasn’t made it into PCs before because it’s very difficult to manage light switches for several “rooms” individually and to make sure that, like a refrigerator light, whenever a door is opened, the light is on as if it’s been burning the whole time.

Cool!

Barcelona gives each core dedicated L2 cache, and ... adds Level 3 cache, a newcomer to the x86

[jasong]

Scrappy little company, aren't they?

[moo]

does the happy dance...


P.S.
you just lost 3 cycles by watching the dancing banana

[E_tron]

ah! dancing bananas are killing my LL tests! Oh, if only i had one of those fancy K8L chips to replace this banana eating K7 of mine...

[vaio]

Dedicate one core to bananas eh?

[dsouza123]

There are web pages (not mersenneforum.org),
that will cause the web browser to use up almost all the CPU time,
found out the hard way after finding no progress after many hours,
tracked down the offending page among the many open pages,
that was eating the CPU cycles.

I don't remember which site but it wasn't even an issue flash
or shockwave, might have been javascript with some sort of
simulated animation or a scrolling message.


Back on topic a fairly informative page on the K10 aka Barcelona aka K8L.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2027633,00.asp

[Cruelty]

http://anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3091

[Dresdenboy]

More reviews:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...oc.aspx?i=3092

http://techreport.com/articles.x/13176 (contains a deep analysis of cache/mem latencies - Barcelona has higher mem latency due to the added L3 cache)

Some Linpack results:
http://www.techwarelabs.com/reviews/.../index_3.shtml

Heise did some more SPEC benchmarking (2nd table in the article)
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/95680

So far, nobody run Prime95 on these CPUs.

[ewmayer]

Barcelona blacks out power to individual portions of the chip that are idled, from in-core execution units to on-die bus controllers. This hasn’t made it into PCs before because it’s very difficult to manage light switches for several “rooms” individually and to make sure that, like a refrigerator light, whenever a door is opened, the light is on as if it’s been burning the whole time.

Hasn't made it into *AMD* chips before, but AFAIK all the Intel Core series chips have this feature. Ah yes, from this Intel white paper dated 2006:

Intel Intelligent Power Capability is a set of capabilities designed
to reduce power consumption and design requirements. This feature
manages the runtime power consumption of all the processor’s
execution cores. It includes an advanced power gating capability
that allows for an ultra fine-grained logic control that turns on
individual processor logic subsystems only if and when they are
needed. Additionally, many buses and arrays are split so that data
required in some modes of operation can be put in a low power
state when not needed.

Sound familiar?

Not to disrespect what AMD is doing - I think Barcelona is gonna be a great chip - but don't say it's "never before seen in PC!" if it's not.

[Dresdenboy]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Not to disrespect what AMD is doing - I think Barcelona is gonna be a great chip - but don't say it's "never before seen in PC!" if it's not.

Unfortunately (because of the extra work required to check facts) reading Tom Yager's articles needs to be done with a grain of salt.