Processors the next generation (Barcelona and not Balona)

[Cyberman]

Everyone has been very excited about the intel quad core processors, I hope those who are, realize these weren't quad core processors. If you look carefully they merely put 2 dual core units on the same chip and fused there buses together. This is Quad core balona and not Barcelona (faking it.. it's like the GHZ game intel use to play to sell processors).

Enter AMD's Barcelona this is a much bigger change to the old x86 than anything Intel has thought up.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/...cgd=2007-02-08
A bit biased article but informative, click the 'skip advertisement' to see the actual article. Too many sites have such anoying advertisement practices these days.

Cyb

[t0rek]

I want to see the first benchmarks ! Agena will be the desktop solution based on Barcelona. There will be dual core CPUs with this new improvement as well

[Cyberman]

I think one can safely say based on many of Intels acts of recent crazyness, they have problems. They EOL'd most of there embeded processors for example. (EOL == End Of Life) this is very sudden compared to there normal behavior. I think the reason Intel lost the 'edge' with AMD was simply that there leadership, ... stunk. AMD is ahead because AMD took a VERY good exec from Motorolla to take up the reigns after the first major AMD CEO (outspoken one that is). I'm impressed with his ability to do the job without being a hyprocritical whiner like many others turned into.

Bottom line Intel has leadership issues, not just market issues. AMD has good leadership and inspite having a LOT less resources is steadily moving forward with a well thought out plan.

As for benchmarks I believe Barcelona is do 3rd quarter right? Although there are rumors it might be released earlier, I think AMD will make sure everything works right before that. Don't want to pull an Intel do they?

Cyb

[Stezo2k]

cant wait to see benchmarks, I hope its better than anything intel are offering. would be nice to see AMD back on top

[BlueFalcon7]

cant wait to see benchmarks, I hope its better than anything intel are offering. would be nice to see AMD back on top

Fanboy

This is looking good. Knowing AMD, this thing will spit out heat when under a full load. It will also probably cost an arm and a leg (and probably the left nut for now) Unfortunately, most of us can't afford a quad core CPU. However, the 128 bit SSE sounds nice, and even though I don't exactly understand this whole paging table thing, its looking good. What I'm saying here, is it would be nice to see a cheaper dual core version of this chip. After All, in gaming, no game I know of optimizes quad core, and very few use even dual core.

[Cyberman]

Well the problem is a combination of the game and OS. Threading began to have support under linux circa 1997 in the kernel. What really is important is to understand how threading works and its mechanisms. This unfortunately has not been shown to be done much with games because threading is extremely complex and requires OS support. Windows threading is really fake threading, evne Linux threading isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Essentially threading splits multiple tasks up that are asynchronise too each other. An example of threading is copying from one drive to another under win2K and browsing a new section of the drive. That is threading in action. One thread is handling the GUI actions while another thread is handling actions executed on the file system. The kernel is being reentered frequently for this to happen, from multiple points and processes. That is threading.

So to make games take advantage of more cores etc. there are 2 things that must happen. First the OS must be able to split a thread to another processors. Second the code running on that other processor must be able to run independantly enough from the main code to be of use. An example of a good program for this to work with is VirtualDub. There are two processes going on with it, a foreground task of viewing the encoding monitoring progress reading and writing data etc. and a background task of processing the actual data and spitting the results out to the foreground task. With proper use of threading the background task which is extremely intensive could be split between 3 cores on a Quad Core unit and the foreground task can run on one core (reading writing spliting merging the data streams etc.) It's speed would significantly exceed that of a single core because the tasks would better utilize the existing resources. (IE speed would be better than just 4x)

So for a game to take advantage of this it would have to split up several processes in the game between threads. A primary thread for handling UI input loading and story etc. A second thread for rendering data. A third thread for moving and AI.. etc. It's not far fetched but it does require restructuring. It's not easy to do. Emulation has to do this. A thread is oft split off for the core of the emulator and the main UI. The main UI turns on and off the core that is doing most of the emulation. Synchronization is handled via the primary thread.

Even though this sounds great the OS must support true threading and be able to distinguish which processor the thread should operate on. Not an easy task.

I have to do this for an emulator I'm working on.. it's stalled because I'm being lazy.

Cyb