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

jam2k · Oct 19, 2009, 01:40 PM

Over the past few years multi-core processors have been coming into our computer systems more and more aggressively.

AMD’s and Intel’s marketing efforts were not in vain: they managed to convince the consumers and software developers that increasing the number of computational cores is one of the most optimal ways of increasing the performance of contemporary computer systems.

The first half of 2009 turned out extremely significant in this respect, when the dual-core processors were almost completely ousted into the inexpensive solutions segment, and quad-core processors settled down in the upper price segments of the market. However, you shouldn’t think that the arrival and spreading of dual-core and then later quad-core processors is a process with an endpoint.

Although not all contemporary tasks can be easily split into parallel threads for easier processing by several processor cores, most resource-hungry algorithms, including applications for media content creation and processing in the first place, can scale their performance perfectly well as the number of parallel thread increases. As a result, there remains room for speeding up popular software applications by introducing CPUs with more computational cores, which becomes a major requisite for the soonest arrival of consumer processors with over four cores.

More @ X-bit Labs

FiggyG · Oct 19, 2009, 06:00 PM

It would be more interesting if the system wasn't starved for bandwidth. The old motherboard they tested on has a 1GHz hyper transport vs 2.2GHz that the CPU defaults to. Registered DDR2-667 doesn't help things as well.

Oct 19, 2009, 01:40 PM	#1	Advertisement (Guests Only) Login or Register to remove this ad
jam2k Cozumel Island Join Date: Sep 2005 Posts: 2,020	A Glance into the Future: Six-Core AMD Istanbul in a Desktop Platform Over the past few years multi-core processors have been coming into our computer systems more and more aggressively. AMD’s and Intel’s marketing efforts were not in vain: they managed to convince the consumers and software developers that increasing the number of computational cores is one of the most optimal ways of increasing the performance of contemporary computer systems. The first half of 2009 turned out extremely significant in this respect, when the dual-core processors were almost completely ousted into the inexpensive solutions segment, and quad-core processors settled down in the upper price segments of the market. However, you shouldn’t think that the arrival and spreading of dual-core and then later quad-core processors is a process with an endpoint. Although not all contemporary tasks can be easily split into parallel threads for easier processing by several processor cores, most resource-hungry algorithms, including applications for media content creation and processing in the first place, can scale their performance perfectly well as the number of parallel thread increases. As a result, there remains room for speeding up popular software applications by introducing CPUs with more computational cores, which becomes a major requisite for the soonest arrival of consumer processors with over four cores. More @ X-bit Labs __________________ From Anandtech:"I asked two people at NVIDIA why Fermi is late; NVIDIA's VP of Product Marketing, Ujesh Desai and NVIDIA's VP of GPU Engineering, Jonah Alben. Ujesh responded: because designing GPUs this big is "***ing hard"." Last edited by Android1 : Oct 20, 2009 at 10:11 AM.*

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Oct 19, 2009, 06:00 PM	#2
FiggyG Rage3D Veteran Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Oklahoma, USA Posts: 2,960	It would be more interesting if the system wasn't starved for bandwidth. The old motherboard they tested on has a 1GHz hyper transport vs 2.2GHz that the CPU defaults to. Registered DDR2-667 doesn't help things as well.

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