f13.net

Supposedly announced "today".

Do we care?

Shockeye's getting one apparently.

Yay!  I imagine that'll be quite a step up from "smoldering wreck".

The desktop dual-core Athlon 64 X2 was available for preview at the beginning of May but the official "release date" is May 31. However, supply is going to be very limited until at least the end of Q3 or Q4 so unless you are willing to buy a pre-built (and overpriced) computer from a major AMD OEM don't expect to be able to buy a bare CPU for a while.

Not until they come WAAAAAY down in price.

The 2.2GHz one is ~$600.

That's all? Get 2!

AMD is not aiming the X2 at the masses, which is too bad. Intel is aiming the Pentium-D to the desktop, but the Pentium-D sucks monkey balls with a side of yak urine.

The Athlon 64 was designed from the ground up to be a dual-core part, whereas the Pentium-D was thrown together because Intel was fearing AMD. Intel is pricing their Pentium-D's to reach the desktop, but their performance is terrible.

I'd rather buy this (http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2431&p=5).

I am interested, of course, but cannot justify a purchase until someone writes an app I want that makes [real] use of the dual cores.  More research on my part is needed.

That's pretty cool. Hopefully they'll come up with a way to make battery backup last a bit longer...

Hell, if it could be adapted to use non-volatile RAM that has WinXP preloaded on it, the OS would load/run fast a heck...

A utility that would copy everything off of the DDR disk at shutdown and copy back on startup would take care of needing the battery.

I'm thinking this would be great for swap space and maybe a game or two.

I seem to recall something from 1985....And it was a lot cheaper. And you could use the ram for other purposes when you didnt want a ramdrive.


device=ramdisk.sys

Those were the days.

There's apps (http://gcc.gnu.org/) that will already take advantage of 64-bit or dual-core CPUs, they're just not useful to the general public. I see substantial performance improvements on a 64-bit/dual-core system when using g++; takes compiling an entire system from scratch down to about 3-4 hours - less if you don't need X.

I wouldn't get too excited about that thing since its bandwidth limited by the SATA controller. In other words it is nowhere near the performance of a RAMdisk.

Edit: Fixed typo for voodoolily

I'm interested in a dual core AMD with SLI nVidia.  Looks like I need to cultivate patience, dammit!  :evil:

nVidia SLI is crap. Now ATI Crossfire looks killer. (http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2432)

Just add more main memory, dipshit.

You can never have enough main memory to make Photoshop happy, you donkeycock.

You are right.  I did say "an app that I want", and I am pretty sure I don't need anything on my PC that does, like Oracle or a compiler or what-have-you.  When I look at how my shit runs, it is hard to justify a costly upgrade.  I'll be going 64-bit eventually, just not today.  Dual core?  Depends on price,eh?

Touche.  Photoshop disrepects hardware.  What's the max for mainboard RAM these days, 3GB?

4GB.

I'm not sure I get your point.

A standard DDR part can fetch a row of memory in roughly 70ns.  So reading out any page of data (amounting to the same size as a cluster on a hard disk) would still be happening on the nanosecond scale.  Even if the SATA interface added a 100 fold decrease in bandwidth due to overhead in the controller/etc, it would still be orders of magnitude (a thousand times) faster than the random seek time on any hard disk drive (which happens on the millisecond scale).

And I don't understand the requirement of having a battery backup.  PC power supplies have had 5V 'standby power' line for quite some time (ever since the ATX standard has been in use).  If they could tap off of that (through use of a dongle connector on the regular 20 pin power connector) they would have a 5V power source that would be good so long as the PC was physically plugged in (even if the PC was 'shut down').

The PCI slot itself will still receive power on most modern motherboards, as long as it's plugged in.  It sounded to me like they take advantage of this and the only time that the battery would be in use would be when there is no power to the computer at all.

Nifty.  Promising.  But pretty early to decide on.  Definitely watching the trend.  I like the potential for Crossfire to punch up the older titles.  SLI's app profiling is a big negative to me.

I'll probably make a move when the tech is mainstream on an Alienware or Falcon.

I use my PC primarily for gaming, and I'm still not sold on dual-core processors or SLi. I hope this SLi/Crossfire thing dies a quick death, because I'd rather not have to put 2 or more overpriced cards just to get a good framerate in <Game of the Week>.

All of this new shit (PCI-E, 64-bit Processors, SLi, dual-cores), and none of it seems to be worth the money of switching unless you masturbate to compiling speed charts.

(http://www.suse.de/~aj/SPEC/CINT/sandbox-b/SPECint_big.png)

-Always here to help.

Is that graph supposed to tell me how worthless upgrading is?

It's what came up when I googled 'compiling graph'.

see, it's a joke. Ha.Ha.

Though it wasn't anywhere near that size on the page I stole it from. Jebuz.

I think I know of someone that masturbates to a MMOG chart...

I am ashamed.

The problem is the 150 megabyte per second bandwidth limit with SATA. Small blocks of random access data will be roughly equivalent to accessing data straight from regular RAM like you say (the SATA controller and the SATA->RAM interface on the RAM card will add some additional latency). However doing something like loading up all the game data onto the card will at best offer 2x to 3x the load time performance of, say, a single Raptor 10K drive, which can do 70 MB/s on the fastest portions of the drive slowing down to 50 MB/s on the slowest, and if you have two Raptors setup as RAID 0 the improvement is even less. That's what I meant when I said you aren't getting true RAMdisk performance out of this thing.

Well the simple answer is if the ATX standby power line could provide enough power to do that then you would think motherboards would use that to allow you to keep your DRAM refreshed even in a power down state in effect giving your computer "instant on" capability which would be very useful. The fact that they don't implies there's not enough current being provided to do that. Looking at the ATX power supply spec it recommends 2A be made available on the standby power line to support things like power-on-LAN. Looking at some DRAM specs something like a 512 Mb (bit not byte) DRAM chip requires about 50 mA in standby "idle" mode so that's at least 400 mA for a single DIMM with 8 chips. It seems like you could power that from the standby power line (if you ignore the different voltage DRAM requires) so I'm guessing there must be something else going on that's preventing this from being supported.

Edit: fixed typos

For straight gaming, dual-core processors make no virtually no difference at all (Quake III is one of a handful of games that are multi-threaded). However what a dual-core processor does allow you to do is to play your favorite games while something else CPU intensive is going on in the background like video encoding. Another way to think about it is for the stuff you do on a single computer, if you had two separate computers would you be able do more stuff within the same amount of time? If so then a dual-core processor in a single computer would offer similar benefits.

I'm both a performance and a graphics whore. I would want as close to 100% of my CPU cycles as possible going to my game, so unless games that aren't written by Caramack start being written with dual-core/HT in mind I don't think I'm seeing the usefulness in terms of pure gaming.

For a more... likely... scenario, it allows you to task swap MUCH quicker, like from CoH to your webbrowser, or between windows in Photoshop and Primere or whatever.  Especially with AMD chips that use seperate RAM banks for each CPU(NUMA, Non-Uniform Memory Architecture, iirc only works on certain patched versions of WinXP), you won't get the hard-disk swaping as you tab in and out of a game or other heavy memory using application.

Typically, you won't see benefits of multiple CPUs(or cores, in this case) in any single application unless it lends itself, and is written to take advantage of, parallel processing... CAD programs, encoding programs like compilers, MP3/MP4/DVD encoders, that sort of thing are somewhat common.  You are much more likely to see the difference when running multiple apps, or in a multi-user(server) environment.

As a side note, I'm probably going to go to a Athlon 64 3200+ or so here in a couple months, my 1.4 Ghz socket-A Athlon is starting to feel a bit sluggish in games, and the bus and memory speeds supported will help alot too, I'd guess.  There aren't applications that use the 64-bitness, but the 32-bit performance is still superior to what Intel is doing, and I'll be at least some future proofed, if that's where things go.

Alkiera

SMP (multiprocessor comptuing) offers no real benefit to doing any one thing at a time, including gaming.  If its solely a gaming rig, its not worth your money, no matter how little more it costs than a uniprocessor solution.  Depending on how you get your multiprocessor on, in most cases it may end up an un-noticable outside benchmarking few percent slower.

What SMP does let you do really well, is let you run more.  Given enough RAM that you aren't paging stuff to disk, multiprocessing lets you run more single or multithreaded apps, wether SMP-aware or not, without suffering the context swap overhead as badly when changing which application has the OS' focus.

Like Alkiera said, makes it much nicer and easier to swap back and forth between a game and something else, like a browser, or a chat program.  Also makes it easier, or even possible, to be usefully doing other things with the system at the same time as gaming.

Games for the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are going to be multithreaded given their processor designs so I think you'll get a "trickle down" effect with the PC versions of those console games. Whether or not more PC-only games are written to take advantage of multi-core, multi-processor systems is harder to say. It's going to depend a lot on what the adoption rate of these multi-core processors and whether or not something like Microsoft's XNA initiative will minimize the development costs of writing multi-threaded games for the PC.

If history is any guide we'll see games benefitting within a couple of years.  Nothing about adoption that wasn't hashed out when the argument was VGA versus CGA.  But yeah no point shelling out the dollars when the tech is still at a premium.

My PC does a shitload more than just play games.  Otherwise I'd own consoles.

Don't you forgetting EGA.

More on iRam (http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/06/01/HNxpwindows_1.html?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/06/01/HNxpwindows_1.html).

I'm curious as to whether you can really boot off of it.

What you need is an OS and applications that aren't built on years of bloated templates and libraries.

RAD:    Device = ramdrive.device
              Unit   = 0
              Flags  = 0
              Surfaces  = 2
              BlocksPerTrack = 11
              Reserved = 2
              Interleave = 0
              LowCyl = 0  ;  HighCyl = 79
              Buffers = 5
              BufMemType = 1

So lets just forget all this Photoshop stuff and start back at DPaint... oh look (http://www.ultimatepaint.com/).

Are you saying this doesn't take a hammer to system resources?  I suppose a test is in order but such things are bothersome.

As was guessed, it apparently DOES use the ATX standby power to keep the RAM alive.  They also discussed installing WinXP on it in order to get boot times measured in seconds, not minutes.

Alkiera

Sweet!

Huh, I wonder why motherboards don't do this then.

AnandTech review of i-Ram (http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480&p=1)

Tell me why you don't just buy a lot of RAM (6 or 8 gigs) and designate some of that as a RAM Drive?  Less cost (no extra card), faster (on the memory bus itself instead of the PCI bus) and a tried and tested solution?  Leave your computer on and with a decent UPS and some decent power saving options you have the SAME EXACT THING except better.

Summary seems to be the SATA emulator reduces throughput to where there is no real performance benefit.  Despite Anandtech's performance numbers I still think it makes for a good paging store since there is no impact on disk fragmentation.  I definitely like the idea of using it as a boot store but again we're back to the SATA throughput limit.

Good idea, not a new one, not yet time.

Cause most copies of Windows in use today have a 4 GB RAM limit?

That's a big waste of electricity assuming you don't normally leave your computer on all the time for other reasons.

Right.  If you turn off the hard drives and the montior with, you know, standard power saving options like I mentioned, the drain due to the other solid state devices is going to be fairly minimal.  Complimentary MOS design and all.

Interestingly the most power hungry device after hard drive and monitor is, wait for it, RAM.  So good luck with the daughter card full of RAM and your power conservation efforts.

Also, I would be willing to wager that 2gb as a RAM drive on the memory bus would net you better results than 4gb on the PCI bus.

Most of my power bill goes to heating and cooling.  I leave the rig on all the time.  I know from experience that they break most often when powercycled.

I run 1.5GB of RAM and am pretty sure I don't ever hit the limit, since I don't let Azureus run five torrents while playing Thief III in a window and starting up OpenOffice.  The only reason I actually have a pagefile is because I'm a pussy.  So, if I were to run 4gb, I could make 2 of those gb a ramdrive with room to spare.  However, putting a page file on that ramdrive would be stupid.  I'd just eliminate the page file.

Um, my PC boots up in about 20 seconds...is that just Too Fucking Long to deal with?

The problem is installing to the RAM drive.  It's not just cut and paste.

City of Heroes/Villains supports dual core. It helps a lot.

 http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2005/11/02/city_of_villains/6.html 
(http://www.bit-tech.net/content_images/city_of_villains/cpu-test.png)

Too bad the game sucks.


..


Ok ok sorry! I mean, too bad it's the same as CoH but with different costumes.