I read an article a few days ago about AMDs little surprise in the AM2 format.

The boffins have engineered a way of making a dual core processor appear to non multi-threaded applications as though the dual-core is just a single more powerful one.

By jimny thats clever stuff. Details are a bit hazey at the moment.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32589

Cheers
Tongy

and as if by magic...

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32885

As always see it and believe it

Oh well, still bloody clever in concept.

Cheers
Tongy

TBH the performance crown is all well and good, but when you take bang-for-buck into consideration you always have to consider AMD.  They might reduce their prices for a bit to compete if conroe really is as good as they say, but they also said the same about the Xeon and we all know it couldnt compete with similarly priced Opteron at the time.  

Ive been using mainly AMD for years, i may stay that way, i may not.  But tbh im more concerened these days about the PC being fast enough, cool enough and quiet enough that i can ignore it for months on end.

Quote from: TongyOh well, still bloody clever in concept.

Cheers
Tongy

Yeah, when I saw it I initially thought WOW, sounds great then I thought how they could achieve such a feat without very poor efficiency and couldnt.

OTOH believe it when you see it is great with hindsight.

Lastly theinquirer is the same people as the US National Inquirer and not very trustwothy, they regularly put out spoofs.

And the latest story on The Inquirer is Reverse Hyperthreading doesnt exist

Quote from: BeakerTBH the performance crown is all well and good, but when you take bang-for-buck into consideration you always have to consider AMD.  They might reduce their prices for a bit to compete if conroe really is as good as they say, but they also said the same about the Xeon and we all know it couldnt compete with similarly priced Opteron at the time.  

Ive been using mainly AMD for years, i may stay that way, i may not.  But tbh im more concerened these days about the PC being fast enough, cool enough and quiet enough that i can ignore it for months on end.

I think future plans and fast stuff will be cool but tbh, if you have a duel core AMD thats about 3ghz, your pritty well set for a while
Memory increase, better graphics card and tweeked motherboards along with physics cards are pritty much it.
Hard drive perfomance boosts i think will be the big things over the years, and way we store data, tbh we may see the old style hardrive outdated with a new way soon.

Wont be impressed i dont think much till they change the way cpus etc are made, new circuits etc, That way warlrus said, cant remember being 2:30 am what it was, but things like that.

Even HD is a bit meh in terms of records.

Quote from: neXusI think future plans and fast stuff will be cool but tbh, if you have a duel core AMD thats about 3ghz, your pritty well set for a while
Memory increase, better graphics card and tweeked motherboards along with physics cards are pritty much it.

I have a 2500+ barton and Im not bothering upgrading it this year. Would like 2GB but it isnt strictly needed.

QuoteHard drive perfomance boosts i think will be the big things over the years, and way we store data, tbh we may see the old style hardrive outdated with a new way soon.

Magnetic memory chips might come in useful there.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5164110.stm

QuoteWont be impressed i dont think much till they change the way cpus etc are made, new circuits etc, That way warlrus said, cant remember being 2:30 am what it was, but things like that.

They already have alternate manufacturing methods but they are expensive and use some nasty materials so wont be going mainstream yet.

Pfff they already use frickin horrible materials, thats not whats holding them back.  E-beam lithography is way to slow to ever be useable on even a moderate scale, X-ray lithography will pretty much always be a pipe dream and stuff like nanotube transistors are still at the development stage.  They do a lot of research on those in my department, its something I might try to get involved with after I graduate.

Conroe etc is indeed impressive and while AMD will be loosing their crown for the next few quarters I dont see them panicing too much. From what Ive read of the quad core K8L and the whole 4+4 modular setup theyll be coming out guns blazing in 07.

As others have mentioned though, were getting to a stage where these kind of architecture updates (multi core etc) will mean a slowing in the upgrade cycle (unless you change your system frequently regardless), as things have been pretty slow adapting on the software side to fully utilise this potential.

The whole virtualisation thing sounds great, but I dont see that working to efficiently until another few more core revisions come out.

I think Ill be investing in Core 2 Duo for my HTPC. I can upgrade my dual Opteron 2.0Ghz to dual cores, slot in another 7800GTX or a PhysX card and thatll do for my workstation. Must resist dual quad cores, will mean upgrading the whole system!

So they are doing an Intel then, just with a slightly different spin.  Intels normal response to losing the speed crown:
"MORE MEGAHURTZ!"
Now AMDs response will be:
"MORE COREZ!"

There was supposed to be a replacement for the K8 core by now, K9 which was supposed to go down the P4 route of more Megahurtz  They scrapped it and went back to the drawing board.