So AMD are now worth a good bit less than they paid for ATI only 18 months ago, according to this report. If they do go under, would fair trading laws allow Intel to absorb the lot, and then shaft us any way they like? I think not, but neither do I see anyone replacing them in the market, which would let Intel shaft us any way they like anyway.

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i eat paint

I'm surprised ATI was so cheap. Were they going down that fast as well?

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Why snark works.

As far as I know AMD is still worth more now than they were five years ago in relation to their assets.

They also have plenty of new stuff coming out.

While anyone can choose whom they like more, one thing is for sure, no one wants just a single major CPU manufacturer around. Imagine if you had to pay Intel prices all the time. Building a machine would be ridiculously more expensive.

Edit: Oh hell yes. The AMD Phenom is finally out. It has their Quad Core direct architecture thing (I don't remember the name). Check It.

$240 USD seems a bit steep at the moment ... but for an introductory price that's not half bad! (Especially considering Intel's Quad Cores are two dual cores linked by a common L1 cache, which is a bad idea, and they cost anywhere from $40 to $100 more)

Well ... I know what processor I'm getting next year. I think it'll be in AM3 socket flavor by then.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I got an AMD laptop.

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Aaron's Stuff

Sorry to say, Phenom is just too slow. I'm forced to buy Intel to get the speed i want. My next chip will be the q6600.
Amd should be able to sell a crap ton of Phenoms in the prebuilt sector. I hope.

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Reality has become a commodity.

You'll notice a difference when things are actually optimized for quad core architectures. Most everything that is out now isn't even optimized for dual core and the OS generally manages who is doing what. I imagine this is the reason why you see Phenom in benchmarks performing lower than the Q6600. Well, that and the Phenom, for some unknown reason to me, has half the amount of cache. If things were optimized differently, I imagine the ratios they chose would make more sense.

I don't think this is the full blown implementation of what I saw before ... what they had before was nuts (4x 1MB L1 caches, for example), though this isn't bad.

In all actuality, both processor types are being wasted right now, since nothing actually uses them properly.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

But they told me in the adverts that dual core lets me surf the internet and check my email at the same time!

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

Is time running out? more like time to invest :razz:

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o

I'm an AMD and ATI user myself, so the company got my sympathies. But really, the whole "we got 4 cores, you only got 2x2" sounds an awful lot like the PS3 "cell processor" marketing. Especially because not even the speed gain seems to be as significant as it should (and I don't think this is solely because of software).

You can always blame/challenge the developers. But see where this led with the PS3. It's probably an even less inviting platform than any PC (and quite a different architecture, I'm just using this as an example for technology in general, not specifically multi-core) but it's hard not to see similarities.

Multi-core is so full of compromises. I just can't get excited about it.

I wished AMD and ATI focused more on perfect compatibility and good price-performance ratio, something you could rely on with their previous generation products. Both "real quad-core" and the new Radeon's "DX 10.1" sound like there won't be any developer taking advantage of these features anytime soon.

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Why snark works.

You'll notice a difference when things are actually optimized for quad core architectures...

Not that i have any grasp on how the software market is evolving, but I'm guessing it will be years before multi core is fully supported. Phenom kills Intel in HD DVD play back compared to Intels chips in the same range.

I was going to buy a 8800 gt until i found out that Ati produces a superior picture quality, though it is slightly slower. Now I will be buying the 3070.

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Reality has become a commodity.

The projected year that Quad core will be standard-ish is 2009.

Software isn't evolving, that's the problem. Everyone wants the OS to take care of it, and the OS everyone is using is Windows. In particular they're looking at Vista ...

There's no applications now that require quad core ... and only one game, in particular, I can think of that would benefit greatly from it (that isn't out).

As for the comments on the PS3. Well, here's the thing, it's just like the PC market, developers don't want to do this stuff themselves, which I don't blame them ... but the 1st party solutions are generally weak.

PS3 has a lot of potential, but it'll never be realized if developers don't step up to the plate (just like the abilities of the Saturn)

There are only a handful of developers, involving video games, as I'm sure no one here really cares about this stuff for other purposes, that are really jumping into multiple core development. Remedy, is an example, and I imagine CryTek is head over heals with multicore too ... id is probably in there somewhere as well. Everyone else, doesn't really care, they just want their stuff to work (which is the reason why they're having so much trouble understanding it)

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

One you forgot to mention is Valve, they're working to make future versions of Source scale to 4 cores and beyond, and see performance gains and feature abilities. Epic's Unreal Engine 3 also supports multicore, I imagine at a relatively low level since they've spent so much time optimizing for the 360 arch. I think the 360 will help push to make multicore-enabled game engines more common, since it's pretty much a multicore PC at the hardware level, IIRC.

And developing or modifying an engine to be multithreaded is likely to be an expensive proposition and might not be worth the effort from a marketing standpoint. I haven't looked up statistics, but I'm sure the number of PC game-purchasing individuals with single-core PCs outnumber those with dual-core systems by a wide margin, with quad-core accounts for only a tiny fraction. So what do the game developers stand to gain from expending all those resources on multicore?

The game developers that are making it a priority, from what I know, are developing it as middleware also. Unreal is one of the most widely licensed game engines around, Valve seems to be making a push to get Source licensed by more studios, Crytek's new stuff looks like a dream to use with all the procedural stuff and tool development they've done. Multicore-compatibility is surely a selling point, but most game studios don't have the resources or expertise to implement it well. It's a relatively new development in the world of PCs.

OK enough ranting from me for now, I got on a roll after '360' and just kinda crapped my brain onto the keyboard so sorry if it's a little jumbled or incoherent :razz:

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o

I didn't forget to mention Valve. I don't think, in general, they stay up to speed on game technology. The structure of the source engine shows that.

However, I did forget to mention Epic.

Yes, single core is much more popular.

That's my entire point, developers don't understand multi-core systems yet, but they're nothing new. This is just the first specks of CONSUMER level multi-core systems that work on the same chip. And, yes, that is something developers, in general, know about. These are the people who make the standards for the future of software, after all.

Of course, we could both be thinking of different aspects ... as it's a very broad topic.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

AMD is worth less now than what they bought ATI for a year ago. Theres been some problems with the phenom, due largely to the fact that the company found an erratum in the L3 cache Translation Lookup Buffer, and the graphics line is behind compared to Nvidia in performance, but time will tell. AMD is worth 5 billion (US) right now, where INTEL is worth approx 162 billion. The stock is under 10 dollars a share so right now would be a good time to buy. AMD is'nt going anywhere, and as you know success is cyclical in this industry. I honestly wish I had 10 thousand to invest because I would, in a heartbeat.

Juim said:
AMD is worth 5 billion (US) right now, where INTEL is worth approx 162 billion. The stock is under 10 dollars a share so right now would be a good time to buy. AMD is'nt going anywhere, and as you know success is cyclical in this industry. I honestly wish I had 10 thousand to invest because I would, in a heartbeat.

Interesting. Wish I wasn't a poor student, perhaps I can scrape some money together and invest.

Is there any noticable difference using dual-core at all? Thinking about buying new parts, and I think I'll go for a dual-core Intel.

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What the Snarkpitters listen to!

Have single core processors really reached the point where they can't be made any faster? Or is it merely cheaper and easier to go with multiple cores at this point? Mutiple cores kinda seem like an inelegant solution to increasing speed, since instead of improving technology to make smaller and faster processors they just slap a bunch of identical slower ones together and let the software industry face the consequences . Sounds like a half-assed solution I would come up with.

<DIV class=quote>
<DIV class=quotetitle>? quoting Crono</DIV>
<DIV class=quotetext>I didn't forget to mention Valve. I don't think, in general, they stay up to speed on game technology. The structure of the source engine shows that. </DIV></DIV>

Perhaps I don't know what I'm talking about but this: http://techreport.com/articles.x/11237

seems like Valve staying up to speed on (some) tech.

It's exactly the opposite. Making a faster single core processor is much less elegant then a well designed multi-core processor.

Things like pipelining are very elegant designs, even if they are conceptually more difficult to program.

Making a multi-core processor is not as simple as slapping two cores together and calling it good. These are very precise processor architectures that have the sole purpose of increasing throughput with less effort.

The effort, could be weighed in power consumption, and the overall perceived speed could be seen as the throughput.

What do you think about seperate GPU, APU, and various other processor units throughout your computer? Should those all be integrated into a single processor core? They were ... s**t got complicated and slow.

Again, faster isn't better. People don't seem to understand this concept in computing. It's throughput and efficiency that matters. This is true not just with hardware, but software too. Algorithmic efficiency is such an overlooked area, a lot of people, in industry and out, think "hey, it's no big deal, the processor is faster now and I have more memory", but it's just ridiculous.

The more you optimize your materials, the better. With hardware, you also have to consider a lot of other factors, heat and size, for examples. Power consumption. Etc.

As for Valve's source engine, I'm referring to their reluctance to abandon the BSP structure. It's archaic. Their multi-core stuff is fine, as far as I know the things they did with it has vastly improved the engine. But, I would never consider Valve as any sort of LEADER in the game technology field. What they have done is simply made their engine easy to use, a mantle they may not hold any longer.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

That makes sense. I guess I was looking at it from (my own limited) programming standpoint instead of an engineering one. It's probably a good thing I got out of computer science when I did :smile:

All that I know about computer hardware is that you can make some great analogies to juggling with it. :smile:

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i eat paint

Yak_Fighter said:
Have single core processors really reached the point where they can't be made any faster?

Yes. They pretty much have. They are talking ~45 nm feature sizes now, which is only ~90 atomic layers of silicon! Among other things, the power density in such dense architectures is approaching the point where things will start to melt.

? quote:[quote=Yak_Fighter]Have single core processors really reached the point where they can't be made any faster? [/quote]
Yes. They pretty much have. They are talking ~45 nm feature sizes now, which is only ~90 atomic layers of silicon! Among other things, the power density in such dense architectures is approaching the point where things will start to melt.
*error?

Also, a while back they found out that they were sending data though so fast it actually turned the wires in the computer into transmitters. Causing interference. Then they pushed to expand bandwidth. I know what i said was vage but thats all i remember.

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Reality has become a commodity.

Pretty soon there will be expansion slots similar to ram slots for processors. You want more, you just plug in another and whammo you're all set.

/me envisions a generic processor slot much like the old days when you had one ram slot but an immense tower of ram modules plugged into it.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Welcome to 1965. They're called expansion slots and come in familiar form factors like PCI and AGP.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

You heard me.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

<DIV class=quote>
<DIV class=quotetitle>? quoting Crono</DIV>
<DIV class=quotetext>You heard me.</DIV></DIV>

I heard. You didn't grasp. But alas, some things simply cannot be altered, even with time. :wink:

Allow me to reiterate. Back in my old 486/33 you could put but one ram in at a time on the motherboard. However, someone made a generic card that you could put as many as 4 or 6 more, that plugged into the one ram port. (assuming your case allowed you to have a 4 inch card sticking out where your ram was supposed to be)

Anywho, you ruined my joke.

/me luv's you anyway

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Okay, adding any sort of card to one of the expansion slots is adding another processor and increasing the processing ability of the machine. Like adding a graphics card, or a sound card.

Grasps it now?

Doing specifically what you're suggesting (which is an expansion card that allows you to add multiple SYSTEM processors) would be so incredibly slow and expensive it probably isn't worth it. Not to mention the added complexity and special support it would need. Mapping memory to a virtual address and splicing computing power over many processors (over virtual addresses) are two very different things.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.