AMD's "Istanbul" 6-core Opteron reviews

[fellix]

AnandTech
TechReport

 

[hoom]

Doing nicely in the virtualisation tests

Strikes me that it could have been better to just add another 4-6MB of L3? (or would that mean it'd have to be slower L3?)

There seems to be a fairly big chunk of empty die there, with bits like IO pads not moved to match the wider die -> quick & dirty copy + paste (which I've got no big issues with mind you)

Edit: Presumably the true impact of this chip should come in the 4P setup where the HT Assist kicks in, but neither review had a 4P setup to test with.

 

[fellix]

Yup -- without new native multi-core design, stacking more CPU cores over the old one is likely to lead to such wasting of real estate. It's a quick patch solution, but at least it works with minimum upgrade requirements. Now if only AMD has some dedicated SRAM cell design for denser L3 cache...

Edit: Presumably the true impact of this chip should come in the 4P setup where the HT Assist kicks in, but neither review had a 4P setup to test with.

And a new chip-set platform with HT 3.x support, combined together.

 

[hoom]

Just finished reading the TechReport review, some very interesting results there

If only they were bulldozer cores...

And a new chip-set platform with HT 3.x support, combined together.

OK, fair enough if the mobos aren't ready yet.

 

[3dilettante]

Kind of a neat optical illusion where the slightly offset position of the fifth and sixth cores makes it look like they are smaller.

 

[fellix]

RS890 is on its way to the shelfs -- Tyan S8212
A true enterprise chip-set the new Opterons deserve, now with IOMMU support... Oh, boy! Oh, boy!

 

[Davros]

With virtualization, guest operating systems can use hardware that is not specifically made for virtualization. Higher performance hardware such as graphics cards use DMA to access memory directly; in a virtual environment all the memory addresses are remapped by the virtual machine software, which causes DMA devices to fail. The IOMMU handles this remapping, allowing for the native device drivers to be used in a guest operating system.

does this mean better hardware 3d on vm's ?

 

[fellix]

Yup!

 

[hoom]

And not like the NV style where you need a dedicated card per VM.

 

[fellix]

A Glance into the Future: Six-Core AMD Istanbul in a Desktop Platform

With a better more modern core logic, the thing could fly off.

 

[Albuquerque]

Sadly, with more modern core logic, it might not have to play catch up in 92% of the benchmarked applications. From a performance standpoint, I don't see how it's going to supplant the nearly year-old Core i7 architecture. In light of the even newer and cheaper Core i5, I can only see more pain for AMD's CPU division.

Here's hoping that I'm wrong, but I'm not very inspired by those results.

 

[rpg.314]

Well, it wasn't an equal matchup, but yeah, it's prolly not good enough. May be AMD should just switch to bulk process for cpu's instead of sticking to SOI, as GF is transitioning to smaller nodes faster in that area. Also, only their CPU's use the SOI process (for the most part), so having both the CPU's, and GPU's made on same process will help there too.

 

[Mat3]

Well, it wasn't an equal matchup, but yeah, it's prolly not good enough. May be AMD should just switch to bulk process for cpu's instead of sticking to SOI, as GF is transitioning to smaller nodes faster in that area. Also, only their CPU's use the SOI process (for the most part), so having both the CPU's, and GPU's made on same process will help there too.

What about this?

http://www.arm.com/news/26070.html

It seems to show that SOI is still providing benefits over bulk (it seems to disprove the popular opinion that the benefits of SOI are progressively diminished at the smaller nodes). AMD needs any potential advantage it can.

 

[rpg.314]

Then why not make gpu's on SOI? At any rate, it seems that SOI processes are slower to migrate, for whatever reasons. AMD is more than a year behind Intel in process transitions now, and the gap seems to be only increasing.

 

[rpg.314]

I'd say a less power efficient but smaller process will still turn out better... Are they confirmed to be using SOI for bulldozer too?

 

[Mat3]

They have confirmed 32nm SOI, for Fusion and most certainly Bulldozer. In the earnings call script if you haven't seen it, there are a few questions about using SOI beyond 32nm, and it sounds like they might have some answers to that next month.

 

[entity279]

At any rate, it seems that SOI processes are slower to migrate, for whatever reasons. AMD is more than a year behind Intel in process transitions now, and the gap seems to be only increasing.

It don't think that has anything with SOI.

 

[hoom]

Been a while since we've had any updates here but details seem to be leaking out now.
According to Dresdenboy & other sites Thuban is shaping up to be more than I'd been expecting.

Looking like they will be launching a 3.2Ghz chip with 125W ACP.
Still AM3 socket.
They've got a Turbo Boost like auto-overclock system.

a dynamic core boosting feature called Core Performance Boost. When a specific condition is present, a subset of the cores on a system are boosted beyond their P0 operating fr

Talk of up to 3.3Ghz on the 2.8 chip & 3.6Ghz on the 3.2

Had been about to finally pull the trigger on an i7 860 but I think I'll wait to see how this 3.2Ghz Thuban performs.

 

[Miksu]

Thanks for the info.

Do you happen to know if the new 6 core processors will work in a AM2+ -motherboard? If yes, I think i'm gonna upgrade to a new processor this summer...

 

[Lightman]

Thanks for the info.

Do you happen to know if the new 6 core processors will work in a AM2+ -motherboard? If yes, I think i'm gonna upgrade to a new processor this summer...

They will work in AM2+ boards with BIOS update.
There are already many boards supporting Thuban, just look at Gigabyte or Asus websites.

@hoom: surely you meant 125W TDP and not ACP
ACP is used only for server CPU's from AMD.
I was very surprised to find out Thuban will fit into 125W TDP with 3.2GHz clock across all 6 cores
A little disappointed that un-core stayed at 2GHz freq. I was hoping for 2.4GHz stock, but luckily by getting Black Edition I will set it to whatever will be stable @ reasonable voltage.