Working Phenom RV670 system spotted

[Azriel]

Intel chips have always been incredibly fast. AMD suxxorz teh big one!11

Okay, now that we are not fighting:

The point I was trying to make is that There are no AMD fanboys really. AMD is weak right now, and I see it as a major setback for everyone.

My 3800 is a 939. Yes, it's a big steaming turd. I really doubt an chip of the same time frame clocked equally could beat it though. I like it, even though it's a dead socket.

Personally, I think that AMD could pull back out front if they dropped the current idea of what a dual or quad is. A dual or quad that is seen by the system as separate processors will rarely realize it's full potential. Even if their cores were individually slower, I think a chip that could distribute the workload internally and report itself as a single processor would smoke the hell out of todays multicore cpus. I don't care who does it, but this is what I see as the next breakthrough in performance. Multiple cores don't do a damn thing for you under windows unless the software is written to take advantage of it.

That oughta get the flames comming in. Someone call me a ****tard, plz. I love that word.

[Wolf2000me]

Originally Posted by Azriel

Intel chips have always been incredibly fast. AMD suxxorz teh big one!11

Okay, now that we are not fighting:

The point I was trying to make is that There are no AMD fanboys really. AMD is weak right now, and I see it as a major setback for everyone.

Oh but there are.

Originally Posted by Azriel

My 3800 is a 939. Yes, it's a big steaming turd. I really doubt an chip of the same time frame clocked equally could beat it though. I like it, even though it's a dead socket.

Personally, I think that AMD could pull back out front if they dropped the current idea of what a dual or quad is. A dual or quad that is seen by the system as separate processors will rarely realize it's full potential. Even if their cores were individually slower, I think a chip that could distribute the workload internally and report itself as a single processor would smoke the hell out of todays multicore cpus. I don't care who does it, but this is what I see as the next breakthrough in performance. Multiple cores don't do a damn thing for you under windows unless the software is written to take advantage of it.

Here is where I disagree with you. Chip design is always done with intent towards the business market. Not towards consumers like us. Multi CPU platforms that are cost effective are a good step forward into fulfilling the needs of various information and calculation systems for companies. It's only natural that they will also sell this technology with some minor differences to us, consumers. Now downscaling of transistor size has gone to the point where more processors are possible to place on a CPU. So why not.
Many operating systems support multithreading and you're right that the application needs to be written accordingly. But if no one has a multi core CPU no one will want to write software that takes advantage of that.
Or how about encoding and decoding for example?
And then there's the ease of use that allows more smooth computing for every day actions that is available through multi core CPU's.
I'm sure someone else will also be able to point out more advantages of multi-cored CPU systems.

That part of AMD's strategy is good, imo. But fact of the matter is that as consumer one shouldn't really care which companies provide the better choice for processors. As long as there is good competition it's all good. And yes AMD needs to do something about that.
I'm pretty sure my next CPU will have Intel written on top of it.

[dsio]

Well... I'll support Az to the extent that I firmly believe that the entire Pentium 4 generation was an embarassment and failure. Intel knew that the P4 sucked as early as 2003, when they began dumping Pentium 4s as laptop chips and replacing them with MP3Ms, which were the godfather of current Core2 chips.

Early on in the piece I had a Duron 1300Mhz overclocked to 1430Mhz, which was beating the pants of 2.0Ghz+ Pentium 4s despite being the cheapest chip on the market at the time, and despite the brief respite that was the early northwoods, the entire range start to finish, was naff.

It was a Windows ME of a chip, and hey, some people love Windows ME. Some people love autoasphyxiation as well. To each his own.

[keithwalton]

Originally Posted by Azriel

Multiple cores don't do a damn thing for you under windows unless the software is written to take advantage of it.

Multi core cpu's are not about out right performance yes single programs can be tweaked to benefit. However the main use of them is being able to multi task much better. Which is what alot of users do these days.

Its what the original hyperthreading did well, you could run a cpu intensive program to its max and yet you could still use your os as if your cpu was otherwise idle.
When doing an antivirus scan you dont have to stop work for an hour whilst it does it.

Microsoft have realised this and have implemented this heavily into vista, if you run vista on a single core machine it quite simply sucks, its slow bloated and mostly useless.
Run it on dual core and its seemless, smooth and efficent. simply because one core does all the background tweaking / pre-loading, optimising etc whilst the other core is left for what the user wants to do. In this configuration the computer will rarely bog down if you ask it to do several things at once.

I remember years ago when converting videos from my video camera to a smaller format I then had to go and read a book or somthing whilst it the processing as i just couldnt use the computer.
Then i got a P4 'C' which allowed me to keep surfing.
Now that i have Quad and dual core machines I can leave the program running in the background!

[dsio]

There was a downside to HT, particularly with some operating systems which were not sophisticated enough to understand the difference between physical and logical cores (which at the time... was most of them). Especially when you get into a SMP HT system, a non HT aware kernel can waste alot of resources, and in particular, if its treating all 4 logical processors as normal SMP cores, it can load two logical processors, which are in fact on the same physical processor, while the second whole CPU sits idle.

I had a dual Xeon 2Ghz machine running an old kernel and it did exactly that, and pissed away all its performance until I forced it to disable HT and run SMP only, at which point performance increased dramatically.

That said, it was still a Netburst based Xeon, so was rubbish regardless.

[Wolf2000me]

HT had a few problems but it showed the use of having more than one core sufficiently. HT made it possible to do integer and float calculations at roughly the same time. It was practical in some ways and useless in others.
Netburst should have been a transition between the old PIII and Yonah typed architectures.

[keithwalton]

It seems the bug affecting the phenom is also affecting the barca' AMD are yet to mass ship the Barca' core based cpu's and apparently this has now slipped back to sometime in Q1':l08, not bad for a chip launched in september (Q3) 2007

[Daniel ~]

Begining to wonder if AMD has the legs to walk past all this...