• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

12 Core AMD Processors

sprognak

sprognak

sprognak

Associate
Joined
27 Jan 2006
Posts
481
Apologies if it's already been posted, just found this!

If your interest in processor speeds doesn't extend much beyond "is it fast?" then these juicy tidbits likely aren't for you. That said, AMD is certainly getting excited about its upcoming Barcelona successor: the 45nm Shanghai. The main points of interest out of the gate are HyperTransport 3.0, which was nixed late in the game on Barcelona, and six cores, which are meant to pit the chip up against Intel's upcoming six-core Dunnington chip. Where things get really exciting is a few months after Shanghai's late 2008 debut, when AMD plans do release a twin-die version, with 12 cores of happiness connected by HyperTransport 3.0. What does all that mean? Beats us, but we hope it's fast.
Click to expand...

http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/18/amds-shanghai-proffers-12-cores-hypertransport-3-0/

AMD making a comeback? I'd love to see them knock Intel down a peg again ;)
 
mmj_uk said:
I havent found a game that REALLY makes use of dual core yet, 12 has to be an insane waste outside of servers.
Click to expand...

encoding, rendering, video editing, etc etc

all of the above use multiple cores so it isnt just servers that a 12 core cpu would be usefull in
 
mmj_uk said:
I havent found a game that REALLY makes use of dual core yet, 12 has to be an insane waste outside of servers.
Click to expand...

Supreme Commander, Unreal 3.

Alan Wake won't work (literally will NOT run) with only one core. With the exception of P4 with HT, where it will run at vastly reduced detail, 2 core CPU's are considered the min, and 4 cores (clocked at 3GHZ+) is best for performance.

Why? Because there are 4 threads, and the physics thread takes 80 percent of 1 core alone!

All video editting software can take as many CPU's as it can, indeed I could be wrong but I don't think that Adobe Premiere actually has a limit on how many CPU's it can handle.

I noticed a LARGE difference in Photoshop, Supreme Commander and other CPU intensive tasks going from a E4300 dual core to a Quad core Q6600.
 
Cool!

Exciting news, finally the CPU is becoming the new transistor :)

please .. not the "no game uses" arguments again .. computers are general purpose machines.
 
Klo said:
I can't imagine that many applications being optimized for 12 cores though.
Click to expand...

Agreed. No developer can guarantee what hardware your going to be on. They have to code for the lowest requirement. At the moment, if your a gamer, then games companies can be fairly sure youve jumped on the Dual core wagon, and if you write hardcore video and media applications for serious users, you can be sure your customers have atleast 2 and probubly 4 cores... If designers now have the choice of 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 or 12 cores... they just arent goign to bother optimising for 12 cores if they think most people will have 2, 3 or 4. Personally, ive likened the core race to the razor race. Who needa a razer with 6 blades when 2 or 3 does the exact same job? the increase is there to make the company look good, and doesnt offer any real world performance over the lower end stuff...

How about getting some 4Ghz + dual and quad cores out!
 
Skeeter said:
Agreed. No developer can guarantee what hardware your going to be on. They have to code for the lowest requirement. At the moment, if your a gamer, then games companies can be fairly sure youve jumped on the Dual core wagon, and if you write hardcore video and media applications for serious users, you can be sure your customers have atleast 2 and probubly 4 cores... If designers now have the choice of 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 or 12 cores... they just arent goign to bother optimising for 12 cores if they think most people will have 2, 3 or 4. Personally, ive likened the core race to the razor race. Who needa a razer with 6 blades when 2 or 3 does the exact same job? the increase is there to make the company look good, and doesnt offer any real world performance over the lower end stuff...

How about getting some 4Ghz + dual and quad cores out!
Click to expand...

Have you ever developed threaded software?

From some of my experience you can benefit with more cores available on a general line.

Loading times, and other general "init" phases can use any number of cores easy ... at least this is an improvement for a start.

Furthermore, with 12 cores you can have 1 machine for all your tasks. Render a video, fold, play games, and dowload at high speed for example.

The benefits are many, it can only get better certainly not worse.
 
Last edited:
Skeeter said:
Agreed. No developer can guarantee what hardware your going to be on. They have to code for the lowest requirement. At the moment, if your a gamer, then games companies can be fairly sure youve jumped on the Dual core wagon, and if you write hardcore video and media applications for serious users, you can be sure your customers have atleast 2 and probubly 4 cores... If designers now have the choice of 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 or 12 cores... they just arent goign to bother optimising for 12 cores if they think most people will have 2, 3 or 4. Personally, ive likened the core race to the razor race. Who needa a razer with 6 blades when 2 or 3 does the exact same job? the increase is there to make the company look good, and doesnt offer any real world performance over the lower end stuff...

How about getting some 4Ghz + dual and quad cores out!
Click to expand...

Its well known that multi cores are the best way of increasing power for a pc.

2 Cores now is really considered min for a decent and smooth PC. Your comment is flawed because you fail to remember some people do intensive tasks.

2 CPU's may do the job on something, but I don't want to wait a minute for a filter to be applied and have my PC grinding away. Would rather it take half the time or so with the Quad.

Anyways, we can already overclock most CPU's to well past 3.5 GHZ anyways. I would rather they concentrate on more cores and more efficient CPU's rather than doing what intel did back on the P4 and simply hike up the MHZ.
 
If it's coded properly software with 8 threads will run fine on a dual core CPU, it just will run slower. (depending and how fast the CPU is clocked, and whether the GF is bottlenecking it)
 
Monkeynut said:
If it's coded properly software with 8 threads will run fine on a dual core CPU, it just will run slower. (depending and how fast the CPU is clocked, and whether the GF is bottlenecking it)
Click to expand...

Um... but thats the point isn't it?

The idea of increasing the CPU speed and cores is to make things well - faster.

As said though, sometasks such as rendering, video and sound editting, image editting, compiling and whatever else (creative work in other words) are CPU based only.

And some games do love multi CPU's, as per mentioned, Supreme Commander chugs on larger more intensive battles with a dual, Alan Wake is meant for quad. For gaming, its not necesary at the moment for more than quad - but in a year or two it may be. But some of us do more than game, and therefore I encourage them to get more cores out there :)
 
Devil_Spawn said:
what kind of cooling will be needed to cool that kind of a beast?!?
Click to expand...

proberbly not much more than needed now, its 45nm and it'll proberbly be clocked quite low to keep temperatures down, for overclocking however you'll need a cooling tower, the sort they use on power stations :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom