AMD Dual Core

[Pococurante]

Supposedly announced "today".

Do we care?

[schild]

Shockeye's getting one apparently.

[Samwise]

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

[Trippy]

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.

[Shockeye]

Shockeye's getting one apparently.

Not until they come WAAAAAY down in price.

The 2.2GHz one is ~$600.

[Viin]

That's all? Get 2!

[Shockeye]

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.

[Shockeye]

I'd rather buy this.

[Yegolev]

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.

[Viin]

I'd rather buy this.

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...

[Shockeye]

I'd rather buy this.

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.

[Furiously]

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

[Shockeye]

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.

[Yoru]

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.

There's apps 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.

[Trippy]

I'd rather buy this.

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...

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

[Pococurante]

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

[Shockeye]

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

nVidia SLI is crap. Now ATI Crossfire looks killer.

[Yegolev]

I'm thinking this would be great for swap space

Just add more main memory, dipshit.

[Shockeye]

I'm thinking this would be great for swap space

Just add more main memory, dipshit.

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

[Yegolev]

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.

There's apps 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.

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?

[Yegolev]

I'm thinking this would be great for swap space

Just add more main memory, dipshit.

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

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

[Shockeye]

I'm thinking this would be great for swap space

Just add more main memory, dipshit.

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

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

4GB.

[Miguel]

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

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').

[Dodger_]

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.

[Pococurante]

nVidia SLI is crap. Now ATI Crossfire looks killer.

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.

[Fabricated]

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.

[Merusk]

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.

-Always here to help.

[Nija]

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

[Merusk]

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.

[Shockeye]

unless you masturbate to compiling speed charts.

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

[schild]

BAD, SHOCKEYE, BAD.

[Shockeye]

I am ashamed.

[Trippy]

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.

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).

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.

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').

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

[Trippy]

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>.

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.

[Fabricated]

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>.

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.