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what will amd do if hyperthreading catches on?

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draggoon01

Senior member
with reviews due in days, and at least 1 review up early, it seems hyperthreading will give a nice small boost. would have been great move on intel if they had included it or allowed it to be turned on in some of the more recent processors ~2.4ghz and up, to help prevalence of ht, and thus speed up development of applications with ht optimizations.

regardless, ht seems good enough to be desirable and sought after, especially when it comes with cpu's in mid to low price range in the future. and already talk of ht2. so i got to wondering, what will amd do in the face of this? will they try to develop future cpu's with ht? do they already have cpu's in the pipeline that will support ht?

or does this just mean they adjust their performance rating again; with ht being no different than a bump in cache or ghz.
 
Sit in a dark corner, rocking back and forth holding their knees to their chest, sobbing incomprehensibly about hyperthreading....


Seriously though. I hope they come out with something SOON that will have Intel back on their heels.

/me thinks back to the good old days when AMD was first to 1GHz....
 
Symmetrical multi-threading (i.e. hyper threading) wasn't invented by Intel. If they want it they can use it, too.
 
In the short term, I don't think AMD has that much to worry about. My understanding is that hyper-threading will still only really benefit programs that are multi-processor aware. So, users of Windows 9x or XP Home will not get any benefit at all, and other users of the XP Pro and the other NT kernal OSes will notice some improvement when using multi-processor aware software. So, until there is more softare available to support hyper-threading (assuming I am right in the "awareness" issue) AMD will have time to decide if/when/how they will answer Intel's technology.

I imagine that they will, just to have competition with Insmell in similar markets (servers high0end workstations) where SMP is popular.

\Dan
 
Actually, both versions of XP support HT. If you read the HT reviews, you will see that there are already several applications/multi-tasking scenarious where HT helps (with the degree of help ranging from small to significant). I really hope AMD gets the Bartons out relatively soon...hopefully the extra cache will be enough to counteract the advantage of HT. Beyond that, AMD had better be working on a HT version of Hammer!
 
Right now AMD doesn't have to do anything to compete in the marketplace with hyperthreading. The XP2800 333mhz bus/nForce2 combo did quite well. Barton's doubling of L2 cache will hold off the HT chatter until the desktop Hammer is released and available to compete with Intel's Prescott in 2nd Half 2003.
 
Right now AMD doesn't have to do anything to compete in the marketplace with hyperthreading. The XP2800 333mhz bus/nForce2 combo did quite well. Barton's doubling of L2 cache will hold off the HT chatter until the desktop Hammer is released and available to compete with Intel's Prescott in 2nd Half 2003.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately the XP2800 isn't even out yet. In fact, where I am, XP2400s are just being released, and in most shops XP2200s are still the fastest you can get.
 
Well....newegg.com has the XP 2800+ listed...and, if you can only get XP 2200+ I would assume that 3.06Ghz HT chips won't be appearing in your area anytime soon either....
 
Well according to all the engineers at Intel, the computer industry as done just about all it can to optimize the CPU's in their current form. There just isn't much more that can be done in the conventional way to increase the IPC. Thus they went with hyperthreading. If they are correct, then eventually AMD will have to do something similar.

"My understanding is that hyper-threading will still only really benefit programs that are multi-processor aware. So, users of Windows 9x or XP Home will not get any benefit at all"
Hyperthreading is already giving Intel a good boost in a signficant fraction of the programs out there - and these weren't built with hyperthreading in mind. One must wonder how well hyperthreading will do once programs are designed from the ground up with hyperthreading.

"Symmetrical multi-threading (i.e. hyper threading) wasn't invented by Intel. If they want it they can use it, too."
But AMD will be several years behind on this. It took Intel two years after it was first put into the P4 chips to have enough confidence in their hyperthreading optimizations to turn it on. Who knows how many years before the P4 were spent working on it?

"The XP2800 333mhz bus/nForce2 combo did quite well. Barton's doubling of L2 cache will hold off the HT chatter until the desktop Hammer is released and available to compete with Intel's Prescott in 2nd Half 2003."
Yes the 2800+ did live up to its 2800+ PR rating. But the Athlon itself is reaching its clockspeed limit. It just cannot scale up anymore as quickly as the P4. So while it is fine now, I'm not sure how it will be doing in one year. Remember AMD itself thinks Barton will be a much better processor than Hammer for all of 2003 in price/performance. So I'm not sure if Barton can compete with Prescott. I really think we have to wait for San Diego to hit stores in 1st half of 2004 for the Hammer to compete with Prescott.

"Unfortunately the XP2800 isn't even out yet. In fact, where I am, XP2400s are just being released, and in most shops XP2200s are still the fastest you can get."
In very limited quantities the XP2800 is out. Look at the Newegg thread.
 
They'll do the same thing Intel will do if x86-64 catches on. Adopt it quickly based on the work of their secret deveopment team(s)..........

Thorin
 
I don't think they have too much to worry about. The vast majority of PC users don't do any tasks which really benefit from HT such as video encoding, video editing, or other very intensive processes. AMD still does well in the Winstone and Content Creation benchmarks, which have a lot more to do with the average user. As well, the XP still is very competitive in most games. So, HT will definitely put a hurting on AMD in the server world, and maybe even among some power users, but those aren't the largest markets by far.
 
Actually everyone uses stuff that HT will be helpful, like simultaneously burning a CDR on an IDE-based CDRW drive and playing a Dvix at the same time.
 
By the way, AMD has a good response to Intel's HyperThreading technology. It's simple: two processor cores stuck in a single package. So, we get two CPUs in one, which is quite contrary to HyperThreading where two "logical" processors are created within one core. One more advantage is evident: the number of execution units (ALU, FPU, SSE and so on) doubles and so, at least in theory, does the processor speed. It can never be achieved by HyperThreading. There are certain shortcomings, though. For instance, the dual-processor OS license would be required, as I can't think of a mechanism to distinguish between an extra CPU core and an extra CPU. Well now we're trying to share the bearskin before the bear is shot. It's not certain yet whether a processor like that will ever be manufactured?
Click to expand...

Hammer Preview @ xbitlabs
 
Originally posted by: PrinceXizor
Well....newegg.com has the XP 2800+ listed...and, if you can only get XP 2200+ I would assume that 3.06Ghz HT chips won't be appearing in your area anytime soon either....
Click to expand...

Touché!!!! 🙂
 
Actually everyone uses stuff that HT will be helpful, like simultaneously burning a CDR on an IDE-based CDRW drive and playing a Dvix at the same time.
Click to expand...
Well, of course it will benefit everyone, but only negligibly. Under 10% of a performance boost is pretty hard to notice unless you are really trying. That is about the max (Being generous) that HT will provide while multi-tasking outside of the tasks I mentioned in my previous post.
 
Its at sub-maximum performance where this will matter. You don't have to run 100% to fubar the stream and create a coaster.
 
Well, the 3.06GHz P4s aren't out here, but the 2.8 and 2.66 are already appearing in decent quantities, so intel does have a lead on AMD around here.
 
Originally posted by: gf4200isdabest
who cares? AMD is habitually one step behind. They will just lower prices and continue to sell CPU's to people who can't afford Intel...
Click to expand...

Eh? That's a bit of an overstatement, considering that it wasn't *that* long ago that AMD was consistently *beating* Intel.
 
Well, you can still buy TWO athlon MP 2200+ for 200 or 300 bucks less than a 3.06GHz P4, and that's two REAL proccessors.
 
According to some of the benchmark testing done on Anandtech...

HT did help the P4-3ghz performe better than with HT turned off. And in SOME of those same tests, the HT enabled (and faster) P4 3ghz did NOT surpass the 800mhz slower clock rate AMD XP2800+

Intel is NOT constantly beating up on AMD, they just recently equaled AMD in many tests and real world performance.

In many games, the 2800 AMD was still putting out MORE FPS than the P4 3ghz HT chips.

And whart do MOST of us do on our power systems???? Play games. Same results in general office type usage.

Also, it not just that a program must be multi-cpu aware, but that the programs are multi-threading.

Example : Eudora, Forte Agent and multithreading programs.

Photoshop, Outlook, CDR software are not.

 
the way i see it is simple:

AMD and Intel are both good.

And with an AMD you can get a MUCH cheaper chip that can come close preformance wise....

whie that isn't that much true today considering AMD's processors are cheaper and are on equal footing, it was very true back in the k5 k6/2 days.
 
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