| Sharky54 said: Wait, I'm confused lol. Its going to be 8 cores. But smaller cores? Explain it in simpler terms. I am so bad with all this computer mumbo jumbo. What i get is 8 cores, something like hyper-threading, so basically 16 thread like things for the 8 core and 32 for the 16? how is this different then my intel quadcore with 8 threads? |
I wasn't sure if you were interested so I didn't go into a lot of detail. I'll do a longer explanation. Some words I use may be how AMD uses them but not how Intel does.
Definition of core: integer code execution unit. Basic workhorse for CPU tasks.
Definition of FPU: Floating point execution unit. Less commonly used by desktop CPU tasks. More like a Cell SPU in terms of what it can do.
Intel's hyperthreading is one core with the ability to run two threads to fill up gaps in the execution pipeline. Best case (encoding) this can improve performance, worst case (some games) this can actually perform slower than running only one thread because they choke the integer core. Performance is 95% to 120% of a single non-HT core.
AMD's version (not called CMT, but I'll use that name) is two integer cores with some parts (like the bit that reads and decodes instructions, and L2 Cache) shared and a single FPU between them (This is a 'module'). Since the shared parts aren't bottlenecked this only incurs a slight performance penalty compared to two completely seperate cores. The FPU is shared because you need less of them to do normal CPU tasks. But there's still two full integer cores there, executing one thread each. Performance is consistently 180% of a single core.
Both methods add about 5% to the die size of a single core without HT/CMT.
8 core Bulldozer die = 8 integer cores, 4 modules, 4 FPUs
16 core Bulldozer die = 16 integer cores, 8 modules, 8 FPUs
Single-thread performance for Bulldozer will be much higher than current AMD chips. And as I said, a 16-core, 16-thread Bulldozer will perform 60% better than a 12-core, 12-thread current Opteron. From current server performance data, clock for clock, AMD's 6-core, 6-thread Opteron performs similarly to Intel's 4-core 8-thread Xeon, because physical cores (AMD's current ones and future CMT ones) are better than virtual cores (HT). So we can expect Bulldozer's performance with 8 cores to be MUCH greater than your 8-thread.
AMD believe there method is better than Intel's in terms of performance and consistency of performance. We will see when the chip comes out whether they are right.
