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AMD Multicore CPUs - whats the crack?

adolf hamster said:
bugger :( seems I can't find this setting for pair up, all i'm getting is the usual 'turn off modules' option. even flashed the bios [I was running a hideously out of date version] but no change [although ironically the bios screen looks and performs better]

edit: it's the board, the crosshair 5 does it, i'm on a sabertooth and realising one of the reasons the ch5 is more expensive.....

on a brighter note, found this:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums...ew-(4)-!exclusive!-Excuse-for-1-Threaded-Perf

seems that it is indeed better if you aren't going to be using all 8 cores.
Click to expand...


Thats an interesting read but i'm not sure he proved what he appears to have set out to try.

I'm struggling to understand whats going on in that thread.

He ran a lot of test, all of them multithreaded and in that what he did prove was that in multithreaded apps locking the modules into 1 core significantly reduced multithreaded performance.

He hasn't run a single 1 thread application to actually test for single threaded performance improvements :confused:

Look at his slides, every single one has 2CU/4C and 4CU/4C slower than 4CU/8C and often with 2 modules turned off altogether its better than all 4 modules locked into 4 cores
 
humbug said:
Thats an interesting read but i'm not sure he proved what he appears to have set out to try.

I'm struggling to understand whats going on in that thread.

He ran a lot of test, all of them multithreaded and in that what he did prove was that in multithreaded apps locking the modules into 1 core significantly reduced multithreaded performance.

He hasn't run a single 1 thread application to actually test for single threaded performance improvements :confused:

Look at his slides, every single one has 2CU/4C and 4CU/4C slower than 4CU/8C and often with 2 modules turned off altogether its better than all 4 modules locked into 4 cores
Click to expand...

I dunno, the way I see it, whilst obviously for multithreaded having all 8 is definitely better, assuming you are limited to 4 threads [in his case intentionally] or for example in a game that isn't good with more than 4 threads, going for the 4cu4t is better than 2cu4t. which I should assume roughly translates to each individual thread being better.

its an interesting idea, but I suppose it depends on where the boost is coming from, and more importantly does the chip do it automatically? I don't know about the rest of the world, but any time I open task manager it's always cores 1,3,5 and 7 are active with only slight blips in the others [they usually register as parked]. this is ofc when i'm not doing anything heavy like rendering etc.

i'd love to be able to try it but sadly it seems I wont be able to with this current setup.
 
Yeah, thanks for the link.

I found that I was getting very different results though. Maybe I simply misunderstood .. everything?

Since losing much of the use of my left hand, I can no longer play FPS games ( great excuse cos my son hammers me anyway ) and the only games I can play, is really the Dawn Of War series. I could perhaps offer some results on them games?

I help run a Ghost hunting club and I use my PC for mainly gettign everyones videos and plonking them all onto one DVD and I use ConvertXtoDVD since that lets me grab all kinds of Media files at once.

I have been using this for the benchmarking and for me, thats where the speed is more important than how well a game plays... Even though I usually play a game while converting and it finishes converting way befoe I finish the game, so in truth Id probably be happy with a Celeron...NAH.

So far, the most ridiculous thing I have found with this PC, is that if I pair up the cores and get 4 Cores, it boots up and access the disks very nicely. But, if I run all 8 cores then it does not.
Having all 8 cores only makes it a small ammount faster CPU wise, but having 4 makes the disk one hell of a lot quicker.

This is simply not possible, but its what is happening?

I dont have a good Disk benchmark ( Suggestions ) but the windows experience index is 7.3 on 4 and 4.7 on 8

Of course while I can disable cores, when I say 4 and 8, I mean 8x1 or 4x2 so its still doing 8 cores, but only 4 are visible.

The Motherboard being used is the Gigabyte 990XA-UD3 BIOS F13
 
Tuvoc said:
I have two of these. They are great boards, and rock solid. But I have Phenom II X6 in both.
Click to expand...

Hmm..?

Well, mine I got off a mate a few weeks ago, and he had the 1090T in his ( Also aquired ) and that ran sweet as a nut.

I do have one issue with mine however, in that Its incompatible with my best RAM... If I want to use 4 sticksthen its generic junk, but if I want to use the good stuff, then I am stuck with only the far right slots. The UD3 also does this too, but not the 970A-DS3 ( All gigabyte )

It does do 4 sticks of Kingston however, but I only have 4x2GB.

Anyway, this forces me to buy massive sticks... I shoud simply STFU and buy a high end Mobo really.
 
humbug said:
Just a wild guess... I wonder if what its doing is in 4 core mode its locking the modules into one big core giving you 4 big cores, and splitting into 2 for 8 smaller ones in 8 core mode..

Be that as it may, it may give better performance where the software only uses 4 or less cores, and in 8 core mode give better performance where the software uses 8 cores.

You know, I could spend a couple of days playing with that :)

Edit- 'I think' that is what its supposed to do while in operation, its supposed to decide, or the software is supposed to decide what's best and then set its self to that.
Click to expand...

i have read up on google that you can cancel 4 cores to get performance increases so you cancel cores 1,3,5,7 and then use cores 0,2,4,6 or the othe other way round
and it makes it faster in certain cases because 2 cores are not sharing the cache, only one core per one cache, better in certain cases but not multi-threaded programs
 
So, I am still confused?

When its showing up as 4 cores, is it ONLY running the 4 cores and getting great performance out of it because of the CPU no longer having to share...

Or is it sharing the cores and only showing up as 4

I am leaning towards the former
 
FatRakoon said:
Hmm..?

Well, mine I got off a mate a few weeks ago, and he had the 1090T in his ( Also aquired ) and that ran sweet as a nut.

I do have one issue with mine however, in that Its incompatible with my best RAM... If I want to use 4 sticksthen its generic junk, but if I want to use the good stuff, then I am stuck with only the far right slots. The UD3 also does this too, but not the 970A-DS3 ( All gigabyte )

It does do 4 sticks of Kingston however, but I only have 4x2GB.

Anyway, this forces me to buy massive sticks... I shoud simply STFU and buy a high end Mobo really.
Click to expand...

I run two sticks of 4GB Kingston in each of mine, so 8GB per machine. I haven't tried 4 sticks.

Yes they do run sweet as a nut with the 1090t and 1100t that I have.
 
It's making it go 1 core per module = greater performance due to not sharing resources.
Long and short of it.

But software should be doing that anyway now 1,3,5,7.
 
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Tuvoc said:
I run two sticks of 4GB Kingston in each of mine, so 8GB per machine. I haven't tried 4 sticks.

Yes they do run sweet as a nut with the 1090t and 1100t that I have.
Click to expand...

I need either one of my sons to grab the 4xkingston to have a play... The GSkill is Reaper stuff and does not fully fit under the CPU Cooler, but the Kingston stuff will. The Kingston is 2GB each, but if that works, then I will buy 4x4G and sell off the 4xGSkill to recoup some of the money.

Martini1991 said:
It's making it go 1 core per module = greater performance due to not sharing resources.
Long and short of it.

But software should be doing that anyway now 1,3,5,7.
Click to expand...

Its clear that AMD cutting that corner have hurt themselves then. The HEX Cores are being raved about and the 8 cores are being slated hugely... Says it all really.

I wonder how much better these CPUs will be if they didnt have to share?

Do AMD do such a CPU?

For me, I am simply going on the idea that its just like the 4 core I7... Its sort of a HT thing... Kind of.. Sort of..
 
The fx6300 is the same as the 8 core for sharing. I don't know what you mean about the hex cores being raved about, unless you mean thuban, which is a different architecture, now eol.
It's not cutting corners, it's just an approach which was meant to make adding more cores easier.
 
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FatRakoon said:
I need either one of my sons to grab the 4xkingston to have a play... The GSkill is Reaper stuff and does not fully fit under the CPU Cooler, but the Kingston stuff will. The Kingston is 2GB each, but if that works, then I will buy 4x4G and sell off the 4xGSkill to recoup some of the money.



Its clear that AMD cutting that corner have hurt themselves then. The HEX Cores are being raved about and the 8 cores are being slated hugely... Says it all really.

I wonder how much better these CPUs will be if they didn't have to share?

Do AMD do such a CPU?

For me, I am simply going on the idea that its just like the 4 core I7... Its sort of a HT thing... Kind of.. Sort of..
Click to expand...

No, they are all this module stuff, unless you get a much older Phenom II....

AMD have put a lot of work into mobile chips, Jaguar has a 20% + IPC boost over Bobcat, end performance is up 30% with the same power consumption as Bobcat. that IPC seems about Sandy Bridge level

Whatever they did it may or may not arrive in the new FX chips when they arrive. be that as it may it will make them so much better.

There is a Steamroller slide here, I don't know if its real as it was not actually published by AMD themselves, though apparently it is real.




If that is real that's at least a 20% IPC boost.
 
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humbug said:
No, they are all this module stuff, unless you get a much older Phenom II....

AMD have put a lot of work into mobile chips, Jaguar has a 20% + IPC boost over Bobcat with the same power consumption. that IPC seems about Sandy Bridge level
Click to expand...

Didn't cat post a link which puts it in between llano?
Which is a far cry from SB.
 
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Martini1991 said:
Didn't cat post a link which puts it in between llano?
Which is a far cry from SB.
Click to expand...

Right, I have just looked again.

The A4 has lower power consumption than the i3. the trouble is the A4 is its SoC, while the i3, i5 and i7's they used in comparison are designed for larger, much more expensive units like the ultra book, while the A4 is a tablet / Netbook chip. the only SoC chip from Intel they used was the Atom Z2760, which the A4 completely destroys in everything, but again the Z2760 uses a great deal less power.

The 15w TDP A4-500 is much slower in single thread, but about the same in multithreaded as the 17w TDP i3, while being much faster than the 4w Z2760

The A4 has the same, perhaps a little better performance per watt than Sandy Bridge, but only when using all 4 of its cores vs the 2 + HT on the i3.

While the power envelope is very good, end performance actually looks like junk. even far worse than Bulldozer vs Sandy Bridge.
The IPC (clock for Clock core for core) difference vs the i3 looks like about 50%, which means Bobcat had about a 70% deficit.

Yet can you compare SoC to the type of chips you find in ultra books?
 
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On the Intel pricing, the i3 one comes in laptops at 300 pound, the tray price of the i3 and i5 is the same (But to consumer there's a difference)
Clovertrail is overpriced to hell, coming on at 399.99.
New 8" tablets will be cheaper.

However, Intel have been making noise about the price of bay trail which is a quad, it's at the very least double the total performance of the Z2670 in cpu, and it's a fair bit better igp as it's using hd4000.

Either way, there's choice in the market and that's good for everyone.

This is actually a situtation I've brought up before ; Temash against Intel.
By the time Temash tablets are actually kicking, we're very likely to have Baytrail out, so AMD have let Intel get through clovertrail (Which is a brilliant SOC as far as a stepping stone goes) but Baytrail will be a lot better than Clovertrail.
The i3 they're mentioning would quite easily go into a tablet, I mean Surface Pro is using the same CPU, except it's got Turbo and thus is called an i5.

The thing is, mobile Jaguar, it'll be like Bobcat versus Clovertrail now. Jaguar will have the better IPC than Baytrail, but Baytrail much higher clocked, so they'll probably be neck and neck CPU performance, if AMD can get the pricing right, we might have decent choice between Intel/AMD W8 tablets at the lower price points.

And the thing about comparing to Sandybridge, it's a Q1 2011 CPU that's 2 generations old now (Haswell is in the arms of E-tailers, Intel could bring the launch forward quite easily) Intel have raised their performance per watt etc.
 
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Martini1991 said:
On the Intel pricing, the i3 one comes in laptops at 300 pound, the tray price of the i3 and i5 is the same (But to consumer there's a difference)
Clovertrail is overpriced to hell, coming on at 399.99.
New 8" tablets will be cheaper.

However, Intel have been making noise about the price of bay trail which is a quad, it's at the very least double the total performance of the Z2670 in cpu, and it's a fair bit better igp as it's using hd4000.

Either way, there's choice in the market and that's good for everyone.

This is actually a situtation I've brought up before ; Temash against Intel.
By the time Temash tablets are actually kicking, we're very likely to have Baytrail out, so AMD have let Intel get through clovertrail (Which is a brilliant SOC as far as a stepping stone goes) but Baytrail will be a lot better than Clovertrail.
The i3 they're mentioning would quite easily go into a tablet, I mean Surface Pro is using the same CPU, except it's got Turbo and thus is called an i5.

The thing is, mobile Jaguar, it'll be like Bobcat versus Clovertrail now. Jaguar will have the better IPC than Baytrail, but Baytrail much higher clocked, so they'll probably be neck and neck CPU performance, if AMD can get the pricing right, we might have decent choice between Intel/AMD W8 tablets at the lower price points.

And the thing about comparing to Sandybridge, it's a Q1 2011 CPU that's 2 generations old now (Haswell is in the arms of E-tailers, Intel could bring the launch forward quite easily) Intel have raised their performance per watt etc.
Click to expand...

Baytrail vs Jaguar is a more realistic comparison then.

I guess the A4 Jaguar chip are not the traditional Laptop chips, for that we will have to wait for the Trinity replacements, which will probably also have an A6 and A8 prefix. I think they will be the Kaveri chips, for the Desktop APU's to.
 
I'd like to see AMD come out with some really cheap SOC, say a 2 core Jaguar chip just for really cheap W8 X86 tablets.
Windows RT's flopping, only Dell are trying to do anything about it.
 
I tell you what guys I can vouch for the 8 core Piledriver. I bought an 8320 last week to replace my aging Xeon and I've been having more fun with it than people realise.

I've been benching against a mate of mine and even with his 2550k at 4.7ghz he's really struggling to get out in front. I'm only running mine at 4.2ghz but I benched off against an I5 3570k earlier (4.3ghz) and beat it in 3dmark (13).

And Crysis 3? well you can beat a 3770k with a £113 CPU, nuff said really.

To those who doubt what Piledriver can do? big mistake. It costs peanuts and give it six months? Athlon XP all over again. Peanuts for a ridiculous gaming chip.

The good bit is you don't need to take my word for it, how does the word of every game developer out there right now sound?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-future-proofing-your-pc-for-next-gen

Enjoy ;)

We approached a number of developers on and off the record - each of whom has helped to ship multi-million-selling, triple-A titles - asking them whether an Intel or AMD processor offers the best way to future-proof a games PC built in the here and now. Bearing in mind the historical dominance Intel has enjoyed, the results are intriguing - all of them opted for the FX-8350 over the current default enthusiast's choice, the Core i5 3570K.
 
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