If Intel can sell 2011, what is stopping AMD from having an enthusiast platform?

[IntelUser2000]

What's the point of calling it enthusiast when it'll be slower in significant majority of the applications they run, like games? That's the only reason Sandy Bridge E is 6 core, so it doesn't sacrifice per thread performance.

I dont know how they will scale but i believe a dual socket G34 with dual Opteron 6238 (12 cores, 2.6GHz, MSRP $455) will be faster than a single Intel Core i7-3960X in highly Multithreaded apps at the same price.

Or you could use 3930K instead and go against 2x 4284s. Hey if you are going to use best Perf/$ on Opteron, why not the other way around...

I would really like to see a comparison with those two

SpecInt2006_Rate Base/Peak

3960X - 252/267
3930K - 240/250?
2x6238 - 337/384
2x4284 - 251/284

SpecFP2006_Rate Base/Peak

3960X - 198/200
3930K - 190/193?
2x6238 - 318/340
2x4284 - 194/210

 

[Lepton87]

None of the above. From the OS' POV, the fundamentals were hammered out ~20 years ago, and everything since then has been commodity implementation details. You'd need to buy Windows 7 Ultimate to use the second socket, and other than that, you'd just need software that can use those extra cores/threads. To most software, it's a black box with 12 visible threads, no matter if it's twelve single-cores, six dual-cores, four triple-cores, three quad-cores, two hexa-cores, or one dodeca-core (which, for AMD, would be two hexes on a MCM).

It's not as straightforward as you make it out to be. You completely forgot about NUMA.

 

[AtenRa]

What's the point of calling it enthusiast when it'll be slower in significant majority of the applications they run, like games? That's the only reason Sandy Bridge E is 6 core, so it doesn't sacrifice per thread performance.

Or you could use 3930K instead and go against 2x 4284s. Hey if you are going to use best Perf/$ on Opteron, why not the other way around...

SpecInt2006_Rate Base/Peak

3960X - 252/267
3930K - 240/250?
2x6238 - 337/384
2x4284 - 251/284

SpecFP2006_Rate Base/Peak

3960X - 198/200
3930K - 190/193?
2x6238 - 318/340
2x4284 - 194/210

Yeap, we could do that do.

 

[Cerb]

It's not as straightforward as you make it out to be. You completely forgot about NUMA.

No, it is that straight-forward. You purchase a Windows 7 Ultimate license, and there you go. I didn't forget about it, I ignored it, because it is still mostly irrelevant for desktops and small servers.

When was the last time an application failed because you used two sockets?*

How many mass-market desktop/workstation/gaming applications are there supporting Windows 7's NUMA implementation?

You don't need special multi-socket application profiles, you don't need to turn a socket off for random unoptimized application X, etc.. You just need parallel tasks, or a desire for bragging rights, the money to spend, and to remember that Home Premium will only enable half your cores.

Now that most software is made to work on many-thread systems, you generally just have to worry about wasted processors. On a desktop, I doubt inter-socket communications are going to be noticed, unless Windows does stupid things like put half an app's threads on each socket, when they were optimized to be sharing caches. Even then, it'd just be a minor performance annoyance.

* I believe the answer to that lies in the Netburst Xeons, but popular OSes had fixes for P4 cache aliasing in a fairly short time frame, and single-socket machines w/ HT were primarily affected.

 

[BD231]

Does anyone "make good use of" most of these super high end rigs?

Most of the SR-2 rigs I know of ARE used 24/7 for folding @ home.

Just sayin'

You know people who fold!? Thought only tech site members and highschool students did that . I'm all for more performance and in my case going from three to six cores seriously increased productivity, however 2 wrongs don't make a right. AMD is fail at selling CPUs for multi-threaded performance alone and they've been banking on it for some time now.

 

[blckgrffn]

I had a *longish* thread to read this morning

Clearly, interest in this type of setup would be minimal. This is not a surprise, I wouldn't buy it either.

But, should I go over to somewhere like AMD zone and start a rumor???

*IntelUser*

Basically, in INT and FP it is going to take 2x opteron to match the current Sandy Bridge E? Awesome...

 

[Lepton87]

Now that most software is made to work on many-thread systems, you generally just have to worry about wasted processors. On a desktop, I doubt inter-socket communications are going to be noticed, unless Windows does stupid things like put half an app's threads on each socket, when they were optimized to be sharing caches. Even then, it'd just be a minor performance annoyance.

Performance penalties due to lousy scheduling is all I had in mind.