Alot is going on in the CPU market today. Both Intel and AMD are going to relese some interesting new CPUs and architectures. Single core CPUs are going obsolete, dual core CPUs has been around for a while and now it is time for the next step, quad core..!
Intel demonstrated at IDF in Taiwan their new server CPU code-named Clovertown featuring two dies with two execution units or cores per die. Also each die has a 4MB cache that the two cores of that die share, making the total amount of cache 8MB. This CPU ran at a clockspeed of 2GHz and is designed for dual-socket servers(that would make it 8 physical cores..!).
There are problems however, or there should be problems. The FSB should be a huge bottleneck, to be more precise. As each die has an enormous amount of computing power it also needs to feed with data, data coming from the RAM. And without a really good bandwidth solution the CPUs can’t be fed with data fast enough, thus rendering the CPUs out of work. The AMD Opteron CPUs sports 3x HTT links (I’ve heard rumours about 4x in the AM2 Opterons, but I’m not sure about that one) which are supposed to eliminate that problem.
However here is a picture of the CPUs running Cinebench 9.5 scoring 1723 points. The system here used two of there CPUs (that’s a total of eight cores) and seems to perform very well.
Let’s just hope that we’ll see a review comparing the newer Intel server CPUs to AMDs new line of Opteron CPUs. The Clovertown is due to be relesed in ’07.
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