Date:
Monday , September 18, 2006
Author:
Kyle Bennett
Editor:
Joey Seiler
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AMD Quad Core Discussion & Editorial

A chat with AMD's CTO about the upcoming K8L Quad Core AMD processor gives us some new insight as to just how AMD is looking to handle the newly competitive market served up by Intel's Core 2 Duo and beyond.

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Parallelism

One of the biggest issues surrounding multi-core processors is the ability to truly utilize them. As we mentioned above some applications can take advantage of all of these cores right now. Most of these applications involve image and movie manipulation and editing. Ask any diehard camcorder guy that has recently moved from single to dual cores, and he will tell you it is a blessing. Not only can he render his movies almost twice as fast, he can also use his computer to do other things while it is rendering. But once you leave the world of video editing, there is currently little use for more than two cores. AMD has pointed to the “megatasker” as being the focus of their upcoming 4X4 (dual-processor) enthusiast system. But while not many of us are using multi-core apps, we are trying to use one computer to do many things at once. Sometimes I think I could use an AMD 4X4 system for megatasking, but those moments are still far and few between for most desktop users.

The desktop world has little to offer those owning systems with more than two core processors but dual-core processors from both AMD and Intel offer up a world of smoother computing on the desktop compared to their single core brothers. But, beyond video editing, why do we need four cores? Phil Hester and AMD are banking on console gaming to open the doors for them. While PC games are still dominantly single-threaded applications, Phil sees the Microsoft Xbox 360 and the Sony Play Station 3 as the hardware devices that will bring gaming around to being true multithreaded applications. We’ll ignore the unreleased PS3 for now, but the Xbox 360 has enjoyed tremendous success. The Xbox 360 has three dual-threaded processors onboard, and Phil thinks that this has game developers moving down the multithreaded path. Obviously AMD and Intel’s own dual-core processor have been out of for a while now and are also driving the market to some extent, but I have yet to see much progress on this front—until possibly this last week. Intel announced their winners in their multithreaded gaming contest. Undoubtedly game developers are aware that the frequency jumps they enjoyed in the past are going the way of the dinosaur, but the last Core 2 Duo gives a great bit of promise in the gaming world as it seems to scale very well. While GPUs seem to now be the biggest bottleneck for high-definition gaming, that will change soon and processors will once again have to pick up the slack. For that to be achieved, games are simply going to have to become multithreaded.

Phil Hester himself said that “The 4X4 initiative was driven by multithreaded games,” even though there are hardly any “true” multithreaded games on the market. Is AMD looking ahead in the gaming arena? Absolutely.

The fact of the matter is that we see the industry mature like this all of the time: the hardware has to be in place before software takes advantage of it. The true burden of progress lies at the feet of companies like AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and ATI. And while these four must push forward with new features, they are at the mercy of software development companies to actually utilize those features. In the past we have seen these top four evangelize their hardware’s strengths. Sometimes it gets taken advantage of and sometimes it doesn’t. The long list of SIMD extensions is proof enough. Then look at the slow and trudging migration to 64-bit computing, though market-leading Intel is partly to blame for being late to the party. AMD and Intel are both on board with multi-core processors, but we will see a quad core from Intel first, likely in Q406 with their “Kentsfield” processor. AMD will follow with their Barcelona quad-core processor “mid next year.”

So what do we know right now? Unless you are a “megatasker” or a video editing guy with a desire for shorter rendering times, the future of what will be done with quad-core processors is a bit cloudy. Do I want a quad-core AMD 4X4 system? Hell yes. I’ll find something cool to do with it. If nothing else, it will make a heck of a folding box.

Upgrading to Barcelona

Many of us that are currently running socket 939 systems are out of luck on this one, but if you have a socket AM2 AMD system with DDR2 support, moving to a quad-core processor should be as simple as changing out the processor itself and moving on. This could obviously impact your next upgrade path. For their upcoming 4X4 enthusiast platform, AMD has said that you will be able to install two dual-core processors before Christmas and then upgrade to a dual quad-processor system by the middle of next year. Also, as many folks have invested in NVIDIA SLI motherboards, but initially only populated one X16 slot with a video card and left the other open to upgrade later, you will be able to do the same with an AMD 4X4 platform. 4X4 will surely support “pay as you grow,” and I doubt you’ll see AMD keep the platform in the exclusive flagship segment. AMD is realizing that the computer enthusiast is not necessarily the guy with the biggest wallet. (I think they lost sight of this for a while, but that’s another editorial.)

This easy upgradeability will really hit home in the enterprise segment. Phil Hester explained to me that if you have any new, socket AM2 servers you should be able to upgrade them to quad-core processors. For anyone that worries about how many processors they have “per U,” this is looking to be a great thing. Given what AMD has said, a socket AM2 dual-processor or dual dual-core processor system should be able to easily and quickly move into the dual quad-core realm . By pushing up the cores while keeping the power envelopes the same, AMD will be opening doors to tremendous processing power where it simply cannot be implemented currently without a huge enterprise budget.