Tiger Woods Out...Until August!
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| | | Posted by Alan Dang on Wednesday April 20, 2005 - 09:00 PM |
(Post a comment) » Hands on with Production Dual-Core AMD OpteronAlan sent me this message a few days ago: “In one of our real-world multithreaded benchmarks, the dual Dual-Core AMD Opteron was so fast that I repeated the test five times to make sure something wasn’t amiss.” Turns out it really was that fast. Here's his article. |  Previous news article | Back to main news | Next news article  |
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#24
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Author:
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woodyspedden at 09:47am 05/10/2005
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This article really did the job of helping me decide on which
configuration to use for my photoshop needs with the new Nikon D2X
camera.
However it would be very cool to know (in absolute benchmark
terms)the results from a single core Pentium 4 3.7GHz proc. (I
currently have a Dell XPS Gen3). The Colfax machine I have
configured is about $7,700 so the net benefit over the current XPS
would be very helpful indeed.
Can anyone help?
THanks
Woody Speddenh
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#23
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GA Thrawn at 06:25pm 04/23/2005
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Doh! She taught process communication/synchronization at the same as
threads. But still I can imagine the synchronization issues being
kinda nasty. One prospect that is kinda sweet is precaching level
information in the background.
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#22
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Anonymous at 02:56pm 04/23/2005
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I'm not sure that you were paying attention. Shared memory is a
mechanism for sharing memory between different processes. The entire
process address space is automatically shared by all threads within
a process. With the straightforward use of critical sections to
ensure exclusive access to whatever resources the section is deemed
to gate, it needn't be mind-bendingly difficult.
Some types of task are obviously candidates for parallelism... some
tasks are conceptually parallel... take a game for example. AI,
physics, graphics, user input.
Caveat:
Debugging can be awkward and must be performed on a multi-core/proc
machine; certain synchronisation problems just won’t show up on a
single-core/proc machine.
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#21
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GX-Alan at 10:37pm 04/22/2005
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No one really runs 16GB on the Intel platform -- 16GB DDR-2 requires
special modules which are not made. You need to get them custom
made and it ends up being $12,000 more expensive to get 16GB of DDR2
than it is to get 16GB of DDR-1. :)
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#20
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Author:
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ga thrawn at 05:56pm 04/22/2005
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Yeah, multithreaded is a whole new ballgame. Just the introductory
course to threads in an OS course I took a while back was sadistic.
Thread communication, shared memory, it was all madness.
Complicating things further is the differing thread behavior
depending on the thread library. Porting a game from PS3 which may
use a particular scheme to a system with the pThreads library or
using the OS thread library (like Windows) may prove to be a task to
behold.
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#19
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Author:
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Anonymous at 05:01pm 04/22/2005
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One thing that your article doesn't touch on is the memory accessing
model differences. No, I'm not talking about the location of the
memory controller. I'm talking about the fact that
Opterons/Athlon64s directly access all memory up to 16GB, whereas
32-bit Intel processors (Xeons and Pentium-4s) have to use
excruciatingly slow bounce buffers to access memory above 1GB. Does
an operating system running on a dual core Xeon have to use bounce
buffers on memory over the 1GB limit? Or can it do the x86_64 trick
that is built into that architecture and directly access all 16GB?
That is one of the worst performance problems right now when
comparing a dual Xeon with a dual Opteron on benchmarks/applications
that push that memory limit, the Xeons just fall off a cliff
performance wise. Supposedly Intel's 64 bit offerings, which are
selling quite slowly, are "compatible" with the x86_64
architecture, but these dual core Xeons: are they 32-bit or 64-bit
Xeons? And how will HT affect the processor count? Will a pair of
dual core Xeons appear to the operating system as 8 processors? On
a properly tuned benchmark, that could give a real edge to Intel if
it's the case.
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#18
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Author:
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Anonymous at 06:38am 04/22/2005
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Ha Ha! Intel's dual cores are crap! (in Nelson from Simpsons voice)
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#17
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Author:
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Anonymous at 06:33am 04/22/2005
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I don't think they are going to bencmark the dual core K8 against
intel's pentium d. It would just be too ugly. The beating intel
would recieve would be so severe it would require firingsquad to
rate their website NC-17.
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#16
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Author:
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Anonymous at 10:46pm 04/21/2005
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Well, the game industry is already complaining about the current
lack of innovation since publishers & studio don't want to take
risks on multi-billion dollar projects, increasing the development
costs won't be beneficial at all to that situation (testing
multithreaded apps is also much more costly, there are not just the
development costs).
Also kinda like #14, being a developper, I know that doing efficient
multithreading requires more than just throwing money at it. Some
problems can be threaded efficiently with money, but others just
can't be no matter how much money you throw at them, and that the
XBOX/PS3 cores really *suck* on an individual basis isn't very
encouraging.
I'm afraid we'll only see games just as shallow and bland as
today's, if not shallower, only with better graphics (since that's
the easily parallelizable part), in other words, a world with Doom3
games everywhere. Now that would truly be inferno.
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#15
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Author:
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GX-Alan at 09:13pm 04/21/2005
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Agree 100%. The difference now is that the incentive to spend the
extra costs on development will be there in the form of Xbox2 and
PS3. So right now, it's not worth the extra costs, but in the
future it wil be.
I'm not a professional programmer, but one of my good friends is
working with the new consoles and another of my friends is an former
EA games producer (back when they were cool) who managed budgets for
games.
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