Thank You AMD!

Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 7:41 pm

I'd like to thank the nice people at AMD for allowing us to have 2 pre-production engineering samples of their Opteron 2352 CPUs. These cpus have been installed in our primary database server (as of this afternoon) and we'll definitely be following up in the near future with our impressions of these particular cpus. (Although I'll admit that we ran all of our web traffic for about 20 minutes earlier today on those cpus without any issue, so they're certainly powerhouses).

Specs in Comments.

UPDATE (IH): Due to some spectacularly misinformed reporting, here are some correction:

* We are running samples of unfixed 2352's with the TLB bug present. We are testing both with and without BIOS workaround.
* We relocating servers to Canada has nothing to do with escaping copyright. We are based in Canada so go figure.
* We are not pro piracy, but we are pro fair use, pro Creative Commons, and pro freedom of speech.
* When corporate firewalls block MSN for example, it must mean some conspiracy at work too?
* For some more facts, use the Wikipedia.

Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:18 pm

I have been an AMD guy all my life, nice to see them throwing something at us! (If you find anymore, I know someone who would jump at the chance of using these!

Hint, O*****0

Thanks AMD, a company with soul, cool to see!

Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 9:42 pm

I also AMD Die Hard Fan. Bought their products since Athlon XP era to Athlon 64 X2 & HD3XXX era. And now Phenom are out!

Nice to see isoHunt got the powerful CPU on their hamsters heart.

Very Happy

Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 7:59 pm

Here are the CPU specs:

Code:

processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 16
model : 2
model name : Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2352
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 2100.089
cache size : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 0
cpu cores : 4
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 5
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow constant_tsc pni monitor cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm cr8_legacy
bogomips : 4209.90
TLB size : 1024 4K pages
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 48 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts ttp tm stc [6] [7] [8]

Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2008 8:32 am

I'd just like to point out for the computer illiterate that there's 4 cores per CPU, meaning the box has essentially 8 CPUs, with 16.8ghz of proccessing power total, for ~33672 million instructions per second.

I think I just came my pants.

Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2008 12:44 pm

this is the first thing ive posted... ever... hmm anyways... whats the deal with AMD? i mean.. ive only owned one amd (600 MHz hahaha... damn slow) and i liked it.. aside from the constant overheating (yeah... she didnt like to be overclocked...) well anyway... im an intel guy (by default i guess)... so.. why should i get AMD?

and yeah 4 cores per CPU... holly orgasmic

Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2008 3:39 pm

The last time I used Intel CPU was Pentium 3 1Ghz. Usually Intel CPU lost their Hertz if used for long time.

That 1 GHz Pentium 3 lost about 3 MHz (left only 997MHz). After frustrating with Intel I switch to Athlon XP & I used until last year 2007 (Before the motherboard broken). Surprisingly, It maintain the stock clock 1.833 GHz (2500+). I bought the CPU back in 2003 & Used it like a server. (Torrenting 24H since 2004!)

never the less, compare for price & performance AMD offer better. Cool

Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2008 11:43 pm

Nirvash77 wrote:

The last time I used Intel CPU was Pentium 3 1Ghz. Usually Intel CPU lost their Hertz if used for long time.

That 1 GHz Pentium 3 lost about 3 MHz (left only 997MHz). After frustrating with Intel I switch to Athlon XP & I used until last year 2007 (Before the motherboard broken). Surprisingly, It maintain the stock clock 1.833 GHz (2500+). I bought the CPU back in 2003 & Used it like a server. (Torrenting 24H since 2004!)

never the less, compare for price & performance AMD offer better. Cool

You're absolutely clueless and ignorant if you think your CPU lost 3 mhz.

Timing crystals aren't perfect nor are all speeds perfect numbers. CPU speed is front side bus multiplied by a multiplier. For example, 166.166 * 6 as likely in you case = 997 mhz.

AMD is about 6 months behind Intel in technology and in most cases is better value price/performance-wise (at least in the last year or so).

Not to mention the headache that comes with AMD. I could take the processor I bought 4 years ago and plop it into my current motherboard and it would work fine, not possible with AMD. (I actually ran my Pentium 4 on this board before I got my Core 2). Factor in motherboard and platform upgrade costs and Intel comes out on top.

In the server arena AMD has a bit of an argument due to power usage being a factor in the equation, however I've always trusted Intel for stability and reliability.

Sorry, but AMD is crap now as much as Intel was crap during the prescott era. Hopefully AMD will actually have some useful innovations and beat out Intel again (wont happen anytime soon) so that Intel can lay the beat down AGAIN and we'll have another Conroe-type revolution.

That aside, kudos on the free gift! Put those hamsters to work!

Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2008 2:13 am

forbiddenera wrote:

Nirvash77 wrote:

The last time I used Intel CPU was Pentium 3 1Ghz. Usually Intel CPU lost their Hertz if used for long time.

That 1 GHz Pentium 3 lost about 3 MHz (left only 997MHz). After frustrating with Intel I switch to Athlon XP & I used until last year 2007 (Before the motherboard broken). Surprisingly, It maintain the stock clock 1.833 GHz (2500+). I bought the CPU back in 2003 & Used it like a server. (Torrenting 24H since 2004!)

never the less, compare for price & performance AMD offer better. Cool

You're absolutely clueless and ignorant if you think your CPU lost 3 mhz.

Timing crystals aren't perfect nor are all speeds perfect numbers. CPU speed is front side bus multiplied by a multiplier. For example, 166.166 * 6 as likely in you case = 997 mhz.

AMD is about 6 months behind Intel in technology and in most cases is better value price/performance-wise (at least in the last year or so).

Not to mention the headache that comes with AMD. I could take the processor I bought 4 years ago and plop it into my current motherboard and it would work fine, not possible with AMD. (I actually ran my Pentium 4 on this board before I got my Core 2). Factor in motherboard and platform upgrade costs and Intel comes out on top.

In the server arena AMD has a bit of an argument due to power usage being a factor in the equation, however I've always trusted Intel for stability and reliability.

Sorry, but AMD is crap now as much as Intel was crap during the prescott era. Hopefully AMD will actually have some useful innovations and beat out Intel again (wont happen anytime soon) so that Intel can lay the beat down AGAIN and we'll have another Conroe-type revolution.

That aside, kudos on the free gift! Put those hamsters to work!

HAHAHA! INTEL SUCK! FSB problem is bottleneck! Direct Connect Architecture + hyper transport 3.0 5200HT/s are the best!

I got AMD 790FX MoBo + HD3850 CrossfireX setup! It rocks!

No more Moore's Law

Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2008 2:24 am

Quote:

I'd just like to point out for the computer illiterate that there's 4 cores per CPU, meaning the box has essentially 8 CPUs, with 16.8ghz of proccessing power total, for ~33672 million instructions per second.

I think I just came my pants.

lol that is not how that works.... if i have a 3GHz Intel Q6600 it doesnt mean i have a 12GHz processor...

processors dont scale like that.

anyways nice update. I hope to God AMD can pull their shit together and get some fantastic products out there. Because right now Intel is murdering them. Stock prices went from above intel at $50 to $6.... in under 2 years.. Anyways i have faith in AMD, you guys can do it!

Quote:

HAHAHA! INTEL SUCK! FSB problem is bottleneck! Direct Connect Architecture + hyper transport 3.0 5200HT/s are the best!

I got AMD 790FX MoBo + HD3850 CrossfireX setup! It rocks!

No more Moore's Law

by the way, Intel doesnt suck lol, they hold the performance crown right now. Their processors use less power, create less heat, overclock like a dream, and they are much more powerful in most cases.

Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2008 9:32 am

Nirvash77: You sir have no idea what you are talking about. I strongly suggest you google Moores Law before making moronic statements.

What was said above is pretty much the way it is now. Intel is currently wipping the pants off AMD. Alot of this is due to AMD/ATI merger, but thats not really an excuse, so in the mean time, Intel and Nvidia own this market.

And assuming Intel don't bring out another moronic release like the Prescott core, they should stay on top for at least a year.. But good luck AMD, Increased competition = Greater and cheaper products.

Anyways, grats on the new hamsters, hope they run well in their wheels >.<

Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2008 9:53 am

EL1aS wrote:

Quote:

I'd just like to point out for the computer illiterate that there's 4 cores per CPU, meaning the box has essentially 8 CPUs, with 16.8ghz of proccessing power total, for ~33672 million instructions per second.

I think I just came my pants.

lol that is not how that works.... if i have a 3GHz Intel Q6600 it doesnt mean i have a 12GHz processor...

For single threaded applications, CPUs don't scale like that. But on SMP systems with applications using proper threading (mysql, php, lighttpd, memcached), it does scale that way. The CPU does have 16.8ghz proccessing power on the chip, it's just about how well software abstracts. Stop trying to sound like you know what the f**k you're talking about.

Quote:

by the way, Intel doesnt suck lol, they hold the performance crown right now. Their processors use less power, create less heat, overclock like a dream, and they are much more powerful in most cases.

Uh, first off, Intel is on a completely different fabrication proccess. Right now they've got 45nm fab facilities. If you compare proccessors of the same fab proccess, while intel has a higher clock speed, an AMD proccessor does more work per clock, because it's fed more data off HT vs FSB, which explains it's power consumption(and thus heat), but it's only 1 or 2c hotter when using proper cooling. If you're having thermal issues with your CPU, you are an incompetent (pseudo)tech that doesn't account for thermal requirements. Also, I'd like to point out that when you run an intel chip in 64 bit, you cut its performance almost in half , where as an opteron doesn't. And, which chip exactly do you think beats the barc line of opterons? Intel doesn't make a chip(not even the netburst xeons) that could compare. There's a reason that any serious hardware monkey gos with AMD:

Intel has big marketing to make it's proccessors appear fast. The pentium 4 line is a great example, achieve high clockspeeds with low per-clock performance, fooling the ignorant(that'd be you) into thinking it was a decent proccessor via a huge advertising budget.

AMD sits back and lets their chips speak for themselves in realworld implementations and independant benchmarks.

Quote:

You're absolutely clueless and ignorant if you think your CPU lost 3 mhz.

Timing crystals aren't perfect nor are all speeds perfect numbers. CPU speed is front side bus multiplied by a multiplier. For example, 166.166 * 6 as likely in you case = 997 mhz.

While you're correct, I just wanna point out that crystals aren't used in CPUs to generate the clock, transistors are.

PS: The reason that AMD is "behind" on fabrication proccess, is because intel has enough money and market penetration to build it's fabrication proccesses in-house. AMD doesn't have enough fab capacity to do the kind of R&D intel does when it comes to finer(45nm) fab proccesses... yet they're still competing with far fewer resources. AMD is the reason you aren't on a useless pentium 4 right now that can be out benchmarked by pentium 3 coppermine systems of 1/3rd the clock speed. Get a f**kin clue people.

Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2008 4:16 pm

Shadow wrote:

Uh, first off, Intel is on a completely different fabrication proccess. Right now they've got 45nm fab facilities. If you compare proccessors of the same fab proccess, while intel has a higher clock speed, an AMD proccessor does more work per clock, because it's fed more data off HT vs FSB, which explains it's power consumption(and thus heat), but it's only 1 or 2c hotter when using proper cooling. If you're having thermal issues with your CPU, you are an incompetent (pseudo)tech that doesn't account for thermal requirements. Also, I'd like to point out that when you run an intel chip in 64 bit, you cut its performance almost in half , where as an opteron doesn't. And, which chip exactly do you think beats the barc line of opterons? Intel doesn't make a chip(not even the netburst xeons) that could compare. There's a reason that any serious hardware monkey gos with AMD:

Intel has big marketing to make it's proccessors appear fast. The pentium 4 line is a great example, achieve high clockspeeds with low per-clock performance, fooling the ignorant(that'd be you) into thinking it was a decent proccessor via a huge advertising budget.

AMD sits back and lets their chips speak for themselves in realworld implementations and independant benchmarks.

Quote:

You're absolutely clueless and ignorant if you think your CPU lost 3 mhz.

Timing crystals aren't perfect nor are all speeds perfect numbers. CPU speed is front side bus multiplied by a multiplier. For example, 166.166 * 6 as likely in you case = 997 mhz.

While you're correct, I just wanna point out that crystals aren't used in CPUs to generate the clock, transistors are.

PS: The reason that AMD is "behind" on fabrication proccess, is because intel has enough money and market penetration to build it's fabrication proccesses in-house. AMD doesn't have enough fab capacity to do the kind of R&D intel does when it comes to finer(45nm) fab proccesses... yet they're still competing with far fewer resources. AMD is the reason you aren't on a useless pentium 4 right now that can be out benchmarked by pentium 3 coppermine systems of 1/3rd the clock speed. Get a f**kin clue people.

Not entirely true: http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3099&p=7

Barcelona with HT and on-die memory controller is still superior in design (no need for FB-DIMM, super fast memory access, cheaper for mobo) but Intel is way ahead in manufacturing process (harpertown is their 2nd gen 45nm cpu) and their new Core microarchitecture is a score. Anandtech's benchmarks show they beat Barcelonas (at 2.0ghz and ours is an engineering sample at 2.1ghz, but still). Also worth noting that the benchmark is run on Windows while we use custom built Gentoo Linux (which potentially have better optimizations for AMD64 than Intel which we'll likely end up compiling under generic arch, unless we find a way to use Intel's optimized compiler).

So, Intel Netburst was a joke, GHZ war is a marketing myth, but Intel is back in the game with Core. That said, we aren't throwing away our AMD based hardware just yet, Barcelona still shows promise despite AMD's failure to deliver (we were planning to install the Barcelonas last year, but they had to pull them from the market due to the TLB bug). Here's hoping they fix and launch the Barcelonas for real, and doesn't get slaugtered by price war with Intel.

If only AMD+IBM catches up with manufacturing on 45nm and lower. IBM already has the tech (they announced their Hi-K tech at roughly the same time as Intel). I'm not sure what's taking IBM's fabs.

The new 2352 cpus in our database is working well without problem (we are trying it without bios workaround for the TLB bug and we haven't hit it yet with the mainly Mysql workload). Performance is as we expect, more than double of our old dual-core opterons for raw number crunching. But although Mysql is multithreaded, it does not scale linearly with SMP, not by far, so we aren't exactly doubling mysql throughput. Although it does smooth out the kinks no doubt, and we thank AMD for delivering samples which doesn't disappoint. We'll be shopping for new slave db server(s) soon and while we want to keep AMD for all our servers, I have to say we also can't ignore looking at Intel. It'll depend on how Barcelona is priced compared to Harpertowns and on, and how higher clocked Barcelonas perform.

Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2008 4:23 pm

Core/Core2 are nice architectures(built off the pentium 3 line), but they'll still get stomped in any real world applications, especially in 64 bit. If you run an intel chip in 64 bit(save the netburst xeons), you cut it's performance in nearly half. Intel doesn't make a chip right now that matches AMD in a performance system. Mobile systems? Sure. Economy dell/hp/compaq boxes? Sure. But opterons hold the crown for performance.

edit: Also, yes, Intel's on 45nm because they have more resources for R&D. Betcha the AMD line of 45nm is going to spank the shit out of Intel's, as usual.

Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2008 4:49 pm

Shadow wrote:

Core/Core2 are nice architectures(built off the pentium 3 line), but they'll still get stomped in any real world applications, especially in 64 bit. If you run an intel chip in 64 bit(save the netburst xeons), you cut it's performance in nearly half. Intel doesn't make a chip right now that matches AMD in a performance system. Mobile systems? Sure. Economy dell/hp/compaq boxes? Sure. But opterons hold the crown for performance.

edit: Also, yes, Intel's on 45nm because they have more resources for R&D. Betcha the AMD line of 45nm is going to spank the shit out of Intel's, as usual.

Operating System/Software
Windows 2003 Enterprise x64 SP2
SQL 2005 Enterprise x64 SP2

from http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3099&p=5

If comparing clock for clock and on same fab, AMD > Intel. Unfortunately we can't make that comparison. Delivered products are what counts. And I've said how Harpertown compares with Barcelona under 64bit Linux is still uncertain.