OT: Future AMD motherboards

apit34356 wrote on 9/22/2006, 1:22 AM
AMD announced today the following;

AMD has expanded its friends and family program in an obvious way by allowing partners to plug their CPUs, accelerators and other components directly into Opteron processor sockets. AMD's unveiling today of Torrenza 2 - aka the Torrenza Innovation Socket - builds on an existing deal that let third parties tap into the company's Hypertransport technology. Now, AMD has agreed to open up the entire Opteron socket specifications to preferred partners willing to pay a licensing fee. As a result, customers could start seeing some odd but fantastic motherboards with, for example, a mix of Opteron and Cell chips or even an UltraSPARC T1/Opteron combo.

Now companies such as Sun, IBM, Cray and Fujitsu have agreed to pay for an Opteron socket license.

IBM and AMD have already teamed on a supercomputing win at Los Alamos Lab where they'll be combining Opteron- and Cell-based servers. In the future, such chips could sit together on the same motherboard. Likewise, Sun could put its mutli-core UltraSPARC T1 chips on an Opteron motherboard, giving the industry standard server market some serious flash.

DRC's CEO Larry Laurich applauded AMD's move.

"This invites more competition in one sense, but I think it benefits the market as a whole," Laurich said. "I think AMD is being smart and aggressive."

XtremeData, which also makes FPGA accelerators for Opteron sockets, already has plans in place to deliver a new product for AMD's Socket F designs. It should start shipping gear in the next six months, said CEO Ravi Chandran.

"Everything is going to Socket F very soon," he said. "That has always been on our roadmap."

Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 9/22/2006, 5:51 AM
wow1 Intel slashes price at a loss to get back market share, AMD goes back to the '90's & allows competitors to use their socket designs to increase the options on the MB. :)
Coursedesign wrote on 9/22/2006, 7:28 AM
Yeah, it's deja vu all over again, only in reverse (take that, Yogi Berra!).

AMD Opteron is on a major upswing with computer server manufacturers that have to see beyond the consumer ad hype. The most serious companies are betting on Opteron's 4-way and up processors with built-in Hypertransport, memory management, virtualization, etc., and they are seeing that Intel won't be catching up anytime soon, perhaps not even in this decade (due to all the time spent on the Itanic, er, Itanium CPU).

A friend of mine just bought a Sun dual core-Opteron workstation for less than $1K in base configuration, it really rocks and Sun shows there is a way forward with this.

(Before you fire up your flame throwers, note that this has nothing to do with Intel Core 2 Duo, AMD X2 or other *desktop* processors.)

TheHappyFriar wrote on 9/22/2006, 10:01 AM
most people don't know this, but you can buy sigle Opteron CPU (on a duel cpu mb) for ~the same price as an X2 or Core 2 (well, maybe a little more expensive then the mid range ones) which is a steal. If only more companies supported 64-bit, these would probley be flying off shelves.
Coursedesign wrote on 9/22/2006, 10:52 AM
Well, there's a little bit more to it.

You also have to buy registered memory which is more expensive (although not as bad as the FB-DIMMs to feed Intel's latest).

And it's about more than the 64-bit instruction set, too.

Intel tried to convince the world that their incompatible Itanic, er Itanium 64-bit processor was the bee's knees. Then AMD came along with processors that ran all of Intel's 32-bit instructions + a whole bunch of powerful 64-bit instructions simultaneously.

This was successful enough that Intel was forced by Microsoft and others to add AMD's 64-bit instruction set tot their processors (MS said "we already made Win XP 64 for AMD, and we're certainly not going to make a separate version for Intel processors").

So between 64-bit OSes and 64-bit apps, there is already a beginning out there, and it runs on both AMD and Intel.

What will REALLY make the Opterons take off is when the software vendors take off their gloves again and write for the Opteron specifically, without putting in immense amounts of their own code to software-control the pokey Intel peripheral chips to do what the Opterons can do on-chip all by themselves, really fast, too.

No waiting to communicate between CPU cores, no soft virtualization, no manual memory management, etc., etc.

Then you get vastly better performance, better security, and remarkably also an opportunity for lower pricing ahead thanks to this strong competition.
DataMeister wrote on 9/22/2006, 11:24 AM
So the question is why doesn't Sony take off the gloves and write some native AMD 64bit software. Surely this would help in the hi-def arena especialy if you try for 2K resolutions. Might even make enabling a 4K editing feasible in Vegas.



jwcarney wrote on 9/22/2006, 12:05 PM
Because the majority of Vegas users don't and won't use high cost Opteron systems. It cost money (developer resources) to optimize for a certain chip that maybe represents a very very small segment of your customers. Be nice if they did that though.
DataMeister wrote on 9/22/2006, 12:28 PM
It would definitely be nice.

It'd be like Maxon Cinema 4D being the very first 64bit 3D system avaiable when Windows XP x64 shppped. I can't assertain whether it helped their bottom line, but it definitely makes you feel like the developers are on the cutting edge rather than sitting back and waiting for 64bit to become the default installations at Dell.
Jay-Hancock wrote on 9/22/2006, 12:38 PM
A 64-bit Vegas could be awesome. You could say goodbye to many of the "out of memory" errors that sometimes cause complicated renders to fail. And renders can get faster. This is already true running 32-bit Vegas on 64-bit XP, but would be more so with a 64-bit native Vegas.

A big problem is that running a true 64-bit Vegas would require codecs that are also written in 64-bits. Currently the only 64-bit codecs I know of are XVID and WMV. Maybe there are a couple others.

And people who complain about lack of available 3rd party plugins would find the problem getting a whole lot worse.

DAW vendors are already embracing 64 bit technology (Sonar Cakewalk being a leading example). If major NLE vendors follow suit and get codec vendors onboard, things could change a lot. VirtualDub has already released a 64-bit native version, and so has Microsoft with their WMV encoder, but I don't think these would be categorized as NLEs.

Having seen my "cutting edge" PC pegging my dual cores at 100% for 23 hours straight and consuming approx. 2GB of address space, I would certainly welcome these improvements.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 9/22/2006, 6:54 PM
like I said, an Opteron system isn't much more then anything else we'd buy. I just priced out an Opteron & Core 2 Duo system from monatchcomputer.com

Supermicro MB (vid included) that supports Quad Duel Cores (4 CPU's at duel core each)
Opteron 850 x1
Extra fan
2gb ram (supports up to 12 slots aparently!)
~$1800

Asus MB (no vid included)
Core 2 Duo Extreme
2gb memory
~$1550.

Remember, that Intel Core 2 is the fastest, the Opteron is the lower end one. And it supports 4 duel core CPU's. And (possibly) up to 48gb ram. And SATA & SCSI.

Vegas rendering on that & support for the 64-bit with the multi core, it would be like comparing Maya 1 on a SGI o2 & a WinTel P3 700.

Of course that Opteron setup maxed out is ~$50k But video studios/tv stations/movie studios/etc. would be willing to drop that much $$ for a system that would not just fly, but soar. That's less then a top end Avid system. :)
GlennChan wrote on 9/22/2006, 9:14 PM
As a result, customers could start seeing some odd but fantastic motherboards with, for example, a mix of Opteron and Cell chips or even an UltraSPARC T1/Opteron combo.
You could see significant performance improvements if they were to put a Cell or FPGA co-processor in there. Greater specialisation in the parts means greater performance. Like 15X faster (the figures will range wildly depending on what you're doing). FPGAs are like custom CPUs and they are more specialised than the Cell processor.

For people who need high performance, this is huge. A single system might perform the work of 15 blade servers, at a fraction of the cost. Or for real-time video processing, having this much processing power and high bandwidth will help make 4k (and real-time 2k) possible.

Unfortunately, I don't think these schemes would work with Vegas. I think the OS needs to be designed with co-processing in mind... i.e. DRC's product will only work on Ubuntu Linux.
You also have to specifically re-program things to work on the Cell or a custom FPGA.

2- 64-bit wouldn't make such a huge performance difference as a co-processor would.