Dual core Athlon launch tomorrow?

[StormPC]

Read my CPC Bitchin column this month

Where?

[Rave]

Then you'll need to invest money into expensive low latency ram and fancy cooling not to mention fancy motherboard.

No, just run your memory at a slower divider. Fancy motherboard, maybe; but you can pick up a pretty damn fancy board for less than the cost of a dual Opteron board; I haven't yet seen a NUMA capable board for under £200....

I'm not really bitching dual core but I'm just holding the point that a Dual proc setup is more worthy than Dual Core at the moment. And you could potentially go Dual Dual core later on

True. The thing is though, lots of apps right now can take advantage of two cores but according to the TR test very few can properly utilise all four.

Not to mention the stability of the dual proc boards. I don't have a word to say about overclocking, YMMV.

The S940 may/will be a good overclocker since the newer boards use NF4 too.

They tend to have prety limited bios options though AFAIK. How well they'd do with Clockgen I'm not sure.

[Lu-tze]

one thing i think the press is forgetting to mention is that any amd users wanting to upgrade to dual core, will probably need a new OS. the advantage of current amd's is that we can get away with using XP Home, if we want the benefit of the second core, we will have to spend more and buy XP Pro.

does anyone know if Longhorn is going to be exclusively SMP aware? i cant imagine them being able to sell 'home' versions if they wont support the dual core standard.

i think that amd are doing the clever thing with their dual-core line-up in that they are leaving the FX range as single core. afterall, as a gaming chip, it doesnt need HyperThreading. i think Intel would be better off marketing their 840 as a workstation chip rather than use the 'Extreme' label which people associate with the gaming chip. a single 840 has been shown to outperform dual xeons, and is best suited for a workstation environment. of course, i wonder how the introduction of dual core chips will affect the dual-cpu market.

[Dorza]

Where?

The extreme left on page 12. I’m pretty sure its issue 21 David’s referring to. Its a highly accurate bitching column

[nichomach]

Lu tze, you're incorrect; XP (all versions) and Server 2003 treat multiple core processors as single CPUs. MS have stated that they count the number of processors, not the number of cores (physical or virtual) on that processor. Hyperthreading is an irrelevance, since that is basically a feature of Intel processors and doesn't involve multiple physical cores.

[arthurleung]

one thing i think the press is forgetting to mention is that any amd users wanting to upgrade to dual core, will probably need a new OS. the advantage of current amd's is that we can get away with using XP Home, if we want the benefit of the second core, we will have to spend more and buy XP Pro.

does anyone know if Longhorn is going to be exclusively SMP aware? i cant imagine them being able to sell 'home' versions if they wont support the dual core standard.

i think that amd are doing the clever thing with their dual-core line-up in that they are leaving the FX range as single core. afterall, as a gaming chip, it doesnt need HyperThreading. i think Intel would be better off marketing their 840 as a workstation chip rather than use the 'Extreme' label which people associate with the gaming chip. a single 840 has been shown to outperform dual xeons, and is best suited for a workstation environment. of course, i wonder how the introduction of dual core chips will affect the dual-cpu market.

M$ licences are per socket not per core/cpu so there is no need to worry.

Since 840 cannot be used on dual, it cannot be called a xeon.

People use P4 for servers as well so there is no need to "specify" it as a server chip.

[oralpain]

Dual core opterons support cool and quiet.

Cool and quiet means you can lower the multiplier.

[str]

one thing i think the press is forgetting to mention is that any amd users wanting to upgrade to dual core, will probably need a new OS. the advantage of current amd's is that we can get away with using XP Home, if we want the benefit of the second core, we will have to spend more and buy XP Pro.

does anyone know if Longhorn is going to be exclusively SMP aware? i cant imagine them being able to sell 'home' versions if they wont support the dual core standard.

i think that amd are doing the clever thing with their dual-core line-up in that they are leaving the FX range as single core. afterall, as a gaming chip, it doesnt need HyperThreading. i think Intel would be better off marketing their 840 as a workstation chip rather than use the 'Extreme' label which people associate with the gaming chip. a single 840 has been shown to outperform dual xeons, and is best suited for a workstation environment. of course, i wonder how the introduction of dual core chips will affect the dual-cpu market.

Hyper-Threading works fine on XP Home and I would expect to also be able to use a dual core CPU just as easily. I suspect Microsoft will release an update for XP Home users if that currently isn't the case.

[0iD]

150 is the max speed of older core so obviously it does not overclock very good.

All part of having to use Reg ram on older n-force 3 boards. Different scenario on newer ones. Still, being multi-locked is never going to give an amazing o'clock. But then Opterons are Workstation/Server chips, not meant for overclocking. Still, I like mine

[StormPC]

It's true about M$ OS's counting sockets, not cores for licensing. Even if it was not, the cost of a new OS is NOTHING compared to what a motherboard and CPU will run you if you want to go dualcore.

You guys talk about dualcore in terms of overclocking as if it is a gamer or enthusiast chip. Nothing could be further from the truth! Dualcore is for the elite cruncher only. Gamers and enthusiasts (the smart ones anyway) will not be wasting their money on such nonsense.

This brings up an interesting point. Is "smart gamer" an oxymoron?

[Kumagoro]

agree with storm, how long before many games are multithreaded and it makes a difference. 2 years before its common?

[HKPolice]

For ppl who want to overclock these beasts, you might wanna wait until 'revision 2' S939 boards come out. Current S939 mobos won't be able to handle the extra load required by overclocking dual core CPUs. The mosfets will BURN and become unstable. I'm pretty sure that most of the mobo manufacturers are cooking up rev2 boards to cope with it. Extra mosfets, etc etc.

[Timmy!!!]

That may be the case but actually AMD have used transistors that although are slightly slower, are a lot more efficient and therefore produce less heat. Because of this their power consumption is comparable to normal amd 64 processors so cooking mosfets should not really be that much of a problem.

[StormPC]

That may be the case but actually AMD have used transistors that although are slightly slower, are a lot more efficient and therefore produce less heat. Because of this their power consumption is comparable to normal amd 64 processors so cooking mosfets should not really be that much of a problem.

Probably true, but as soon as people find out that these chips are not good enthusiast chips, but rather workstation and server (and crunching) powerhouses the whole point will be moot.

I plan on overclocking them to find their limits and to get a SETI crunching boost, but gaming and 3D benches are not going to be interesting at all on dualcores. San Diego 3200+>>>> <<<<4800+ Dualcore

[Rave]

Clock for clock the dual core seems to perform pretty much exactly the same in games as the single core. For a purely gaming rig the single core makes more sense, true. Not everyone has the space or money for more than one PC though and so if your main PC is a jack of all trades gaming/video encoding/rendering/programming/crunching/whatever box, the tradeoff in outright game performance may well be more than compensated for by the improvement everywhere else.

[Rys]

People seem to be missing the fact that multi-processor systems can affect single-threaded performance, too. PCs aren't consoles, think about it that way.....