First I remember everyone driving the price up of an AMD video card just because bitcoin mining.
Second they got the backing in PS4 and Xbox One hardware.
Now an Arm 8-core CPU...although I find the clock speed (2GHz) kinda underwhelming, still AMD's pricing would entice me to buy 2 for the price of 1 Intel i7
All that said, I have a 16 core AMD server in colo that is running at about 3% usage across all CPUs, and yet it is slow as hell because the disk subsystem can't keep up (replacing the spinning disks with SSDs as we speak). The reality is that CPU is not the bottleneck in the vast majority of web service applications. Memory and disk subsystems are the bottlenecks in every system I manage.
So, I love the idea of a low power, low cost, CPU that still packs enough of a punch to work in virtualized environments. Dedicate one of each of these cores to your VMs; would be pretty nice, I think.
[1] http://ark.intel.com/products/75053/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-...
I agree that I/O and not the CPU is usually the bottleneck though.
Three generations back is still plenty fast for me. I'm running a Core 2 Duo on my desktop, as mentioned, and I don't see any reason to upgrade. I can't imagine needing vastly more in a web server.
I think it'd be interesting to see how these two product lines stack up on all the variables: cost, performance, power under load, etc.
works just fine.
http://ark.intel.com/products/77988/Intel-Atom-Processor-C27...
I have one of these sitting on my desk with an m-sata SSD. It compiles emacs just as fast as a R510 with 2 X5570s @ 2.93GHz.
When Intel goes 'tock' on these this Summer and manufactures them in 14nm rather than the current 22nm, the power consumption will drop even further.
and then there is Denverton. :-)
There's also going to be the Broadwell SoC, which will fit somewhere between Denverton and E3 v4's.
So it's technically possible that AMD could build ARM chips that are a lot more competitive (FLOPS-wise) with Intel than other manufacturers can.
What sort of issues with ARM memory/cache do you have in mind? These systems have been sufficiently powerful to keep the ALUs saturated on compute-heavy tasks on all recent ARM micro architectures with which I am familiar.
Of course it does in real life - unless you're working on very small amounts of data, cache level latencies (where Intel chips - non-atom at any rate - generally have much lower latencies) and cache pre-fetchers and branch prediction units (where Intel is generally 5/6 years ahead) can make or break the difference between the FP units being constantly busy or regularly stalled waiting for data.
There are more specialized HPC workloads (sparse matrix computation, for example) where gather and scatter operations are critical, and the efficiency of the memory hierarchy comes much more into play (but in these cases even current x86 designs are stalled waiting for data). There are also streaming workloads (which you seem to reference) where you have O(1) FPU op data element, which stress raw memory throughput and prefetch. However, one doesn't typically use these to make a general claim about which core is "more competitive (FLOPS-wise)”, precisely because they are so dependent on other parts of the system.
EDIT: looking at your comment history, you seem to be focused on VFX tasks, which tend to be entirely bound by memory hierarchy; even on x86 the FPU spends most of its time waiting for data. For a workload like that, you absolutely want to buy the beefiest cache/memory system you can, but that shouldn’t be confused with a processor being more competitive “flops-wise".
I have been having this argument since the 1980s in the school playground when kids with Spectrums would claim their 4Mhz Z80s were faster than 2Mhz 6502s...
With single-byte addressing, I'd say even a 1 MHz 6502 can make a 4 MHz Z-80 sweat. ;-)
And, for the MSX crowd, having to do 3 OUT's, one IN and an OR just to set a pixel is definitely ludicrous.
Commodores and Ataris of the time had very clever ideas about expansion. The intelligent peripherals are a brilliant idea and we should have done more of that.
Remember that the clock speed is not necesarely everything. AMD may be able to get more work done with those 2Ghz than a Snapdragon 800 might using similar or less energy.
As far as I know, x86 (P6-based) is still king in IPC.
Then, a few years later I tried to install Gentoo on it. With X. And OpenOffice.
It chugged for days.
Learning exercise
>Why not compile on a different architecture thats faster or use distcc to make a compile farm? Last times I used Gentoo I just used the packages, took no longer to install than an rpm based distribution.
Well this was 10 years ago. I was 17 or so and I didn't know about distcc. I was young, dewy-eyed, and a huge noob.
It still feels really fast if you don't use X.
I lost that poor little machine when I moved across the country; not sure where it could have ended up. Now my only "system to screw around with" is my RasPi.
Cost of software and hardware for that was £0!
I still spend most of my time in a terminal window, but it's on a machine with ~1120x as much CPU horsepower and ~1638x as much RAM. Just calculating that made me go "wow" and realize how far we've come in the last 20 years or so.
Does not mean much. Their APU used in these consoles is very weak compared to what we have in mid to high end PC graphics cards. They were obviously chosen for their price there, not for the performance (which is MEH at best).
Also, I'd like to see your source for the statement that they are making money. I'm sure they aren't as huge loss leaders as they were in the past, but I'd be surprised to know if they are making money on them. If Microsoft could cut the MSRP, they would have.
If Microsoft could have, I think they would've offered their subsidized consoles (like they did the 360), and launch with Halo as their premiere title....
(this will probably get a lot of hate) then again Playstation actually decided to play video games this time and xbox one is trying to be a super Roku.
This was clearly mentioned by Sony before the launch of the console. As for the Xboxone, Microsoft also mentioned that if someone buys one game with the system, they are already making a profit overall. They are NOT selling their systems cheap compared to the previous generations, in terms of what's inside the box. I'll have to find the quotes, but I'm sure you can find them as well if you have 5 minutes.
Sorry but let me call BS on this one. We're not talking about PS3 kind of hardware here, where the architecture was unknown and new and developers had to learn a lot. The PS4 and Xboxone are using basically PC hardware under the hood, and the learning curve should be close to zero for most developers involved.
My point is that when the Xbox 360 came out, for example, the games running on it at launch were very impressive versus what the PCs could do at the time. In this generation, watching the launch games on PS4 and Xboxone just feels MEH at best. They are way too late in the game vs the power they are packing in.
In regards to the latest consoles, I have a ps4...and while most "anticipated," games are still on preorder, I don't think it's fair yet to call the hardware a joke, I don't feel the studios have taken full advantage of the hardware.....now the games offerings right now....yeah I agree, but I think the studios really compiled their games (at least the ones I play :: COD: Ghosts, and Battlefield 4) for previous gen consoles.
I am interested to see how the new halo plays though...just can't get past the fact that the xbox one requires kinect to be...ummm, connected to play.
Why? What's the point of doing that?
Though it is an interesting segue from this article about AMD supporting ARM chips (one of the biggest problems facing data centers is power density and with that heat removal) -- the PS4 has a total power consumption of 137W. That's the eight cores, GPU, 8GB of DDR5, blu-ray player...the entirety of the box consumes 137W.
The nvidia GTX770, undoubtedly a higher performance card, not only costs almost as much as a PS4, alone it consumes significantly more power than the PS4. That's excluding the rest of the box around it. That just isn't tenable for a living room gaming machine, which is exactly why consoles represent a necessary compromise. Similarly, several of the most interesting Steam boxes have GPUs significantly less powerful than the PS4's 7870, because you just can't drop a 450W device in the living room and call it a day.
I don't care if it costs more. It's available. Hardware better than the PS4 in consoles is NOT. That's the whole point. If I want to have better hardware than the PS4, I'll have to wait another 10 years for another console cycle to come. No way. In 2 years time the PS4 and XBoxone will be extremely weak even compared with low-end PC gaming rigs.
And you bet I'll want a high performing card (no matter what it costs) when the VR headsets come around (whether Occulus Rift or Valve).
Then these makers are missing the point. It will be more interesting to build your own Steam Machine then, and install SteamOS on it if no one is willing to put power in the living room. PC market is not console market.
Seriously did you miss that? http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnyegriffiths/2013/11/19/re...
ANd that's just a third party evaluation, I have no doubt Sony gets way better hardware price deals when ordering millions of parts through their purchasing contracts, so of course they are making some kind of profit on each PS4 sold. They actually want to avoid what put them in the red with the PS3 sales.
> IHS iSuppli, having totted up the parts costs, has come up with a total of $372, with an estimated $9 labor cost bringing it to $381 – $18 below the recommended retail price.
So retail price is 399, out of which retailers make how much? 199 ? Tell me again how Sony is making a profit.
I really hope MS ports windows server to it...