An AC was so kind to post this link about AMD's plans (or lack of) for the FX platform.
I can only surmise that AMD took so long to create the new FX chips that they just decided to create an entirely new platform. Fair enough - why bother with NVidia? I mean it's not like they are a stellar software engineering company. For example NVidia forgot to assign some of our motherboards a MAC address or better yet how about those 8800 GTX drivers that finally work 8 months after Vista's RTM launch? To their credit they still have the worlds fastest (consumer) graphics card a year later.
It's also quite evident from the motherboard lineup that Phenom will be their platform going forward. That was always something that bothered me about the FX - there was just one motherboard available. It seemed like that wasn't quite enough.
Anyway - it is unlikely that I will continue investing my money in this platform. While I will carry a banner on principal for a time, AMD is so badly beaten at this point that it will be time to make a switch. I might have stayed with AMD but the fact that a year ago we were promised upgrades which never came - no new technology. No investment by AMD in the products WE invested in. We'll - that's hard to swallow.
In the coming months I will be putting up a new blog - I'll post the URL here for anyone that might be interested.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Intel unloads a new salvo
I just stumbled along this link:
http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Intel_Skulltrail_and_Penryn_Performance_Preview/
Looks like the FX platform may not be so great after all...
It would be nice if AMD had answer for this.
http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Intel_Skulltrail_and_Penryn_Performance_Preview/
Looks like the FX platform may not be so great after all...
It would be nice if AMD had answer for this.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Smoke and mirrors
It's disappointing that AMD feels the need to mislead the market place into thinking that something has been realeased when it really hasn't.
Take for example the 2360 SE and the 2350 parts.
Shortly after the announcement I poked some of my favorite sites that carry such things - to no avail. In fact, one site indicates that the 2350 is ETA: Past Due and that there are -4 parts in stock.
Wow.
For a company that has in the past been critised for difficulty in delivering - this doesn't help any.
I have also noticed that Dell carries high efficiency quad core chip propoganda on their site, but none of the servers can be configured with any of the new parts.
I don't know about anyone else but I would prefer that a launch date actually mean something.
Sadly, I just purchased two dual quad core E53XX servers from Dell.
Take for example the 2360 SE and the 2350 parts.
Shortly after the announcement I poked some of my favorite sites that carry such things - to no avail. In fact, one site indicates that the 2350 is ETA: Past Due and that there are -4 parts in stock.
Wow.
For a company that has in the past been critised for difficulty in delivering - this doesn't help any.
I have also noticed that Dell carries high efficiency quad core chip propoganda on their site, but none of the servers can be configured with any of the new parts.
I don't know about anyone else but I would prefer that a launch date actually mean something.
Sadly, I just purchased two dual quad core E53XX servers from Dell.
Barcelona Benchmarks
An interesting write up recently in tech report on Barcelona...
http://techreport.com/articles.x/13176
The bottom line is this - in the highly business oriented benchmark SPECjbb2005 the opterons pulled ahead of their competing Intel parts. In some of the scientific benchmarks such as MyriMatch the Opteron also performed well. However when it comes to raw compute the chips don't perform that well.
Another item of interest is the single threaded performance of the 2300 parts in benchmarks such as POV-Ray. The new chips actually finish last among Intel AND previous generation AMD parts.
This tells me that the plumbing in the new chips is exceptional. The raw core performance seems to be lagging, but the internals must be able to handle IO very, very well to keep pace with Intel.
Overall - they still lag far behind Intel based on these test benchmarks.
For those of us that game this is not good news. As I wrote a while ago gaming performance is largely dictated by the performance of core and does not see much benefit from multiple processors. If the FX-90's don't see a significant boost on raw core performance we will find that most of games will perform worse - not better than they do now.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/13176
The bottom line is this - in the highly business oriented benchmark SPECjbb2005 the opterons pulled ahead of their competing Intel parts. In some of the scientific benchmarks such as MyriMatch the Opteron also performed well. However when it comes to raw compute the chips don't perform that well.
Another item of interest is the single threaded performance of the 2300 parts in benchmarks such as POV-Ray. The new chips actually finish last among Intel AND previous generation AMD parts.
This tells me that the plumbing in the new chips is exceptional. The raw core performance seems to be lagging, but the internals must be able to handle IO very, very well to keep pace with Intel.
Overall - they still lag far behind Intel based on these test benchmarks.
For those of us that game this is not good news. As I wrote a while ago gaming performance is largely dictated by the performance of core and does not see much benefit from multiple processors. If the FX-90's don't see a significant boost on raw core performance we will find that most of games will perform worse - not better than they do now.
Saturday, September 8, 2007
My 4x4 in the news
There was a write up a few months ago featuring my machine...
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/Help/60d9b045-e2fe-4f7a-9111-e2f2222851991033.mspx
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/Help/60d9b045-e2fe-4f7a-9111-e2f2222851991033.mspx
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Vacation
For anyone that is actually still subscribed to this blog... lol you know I've taken a bit of a vacation.
Here are a few updates!
When I built this machine last year I had expected that I would be upgrading to two 8 core processors. This unfortunately has not happened due to AMD seriously slipping on their delivery schedule for the Phenom line. At the moment it looks as if there is going to be a serious wait for those of us who wish to take advantage of 8 cores. I'm really disappointed by these turn of events. So much for the 4x4 becoming a "platform". More information about the release schedule is available here. I think I'm tempted to wait for the FX-91 to launch. I can't really see the benefits of taking a step back in MHz. Of course, clock is not everything but...
When I make the move to 8 cores it will be time for a disk upgrade as well. One of the issues that the current machine faces is that a large number of processes causes excessive I/O and effectively limits the capacity of the machine. Vista indicates a ling queue length. A good example of this is running 3 or four virtual machines in addition to "normal" development tasks. I've been exploring options. At the moment, out and deep come to mind. I'm thinking about adding another array and possibly trying a 3 disk RAID 0 to see if there is better performance. I'm not convinced that will alleviate queing issues though so it might be worth test (how?).
The drivers for the 8800 are now WHQL, there have not been too many issues with it. Upgrading using NVidia's package has been easy. I would not recommend using Windows update to upgrade the NVidia drivers, especially the storage drivers as I have had issues in the past. There is a new board package for the 680a although I'm really not too interested in "upgrading" anything that has to do with the RAID array. As they say "If it ain't broke don't fix it".
Performance monitoring still does not work correctly and I have no idea why.
The recently reported bug involving decreased network performance while playing audio under Vista affects this machine. It's really bad too. When transfering Multi-GB virtual machine images over the network I can get 107 MB/s peak and appx. 90 MB/s average between another Dell server with a RAID 0 array. The same transfer with audio playing will reduce the transfer speed to appx. 16 MB/s average. Terrible.
Overall the system continues to run well and continue to meet and exceed the demands that I place on it.
I'm still on the fence if I will move to the AMD chipset. We'll see if they are able to provide a compelling reason to make a move. Although, it looks like the 680a is largely dead. NVidia has already released a new version of the 680i chipset with more features. To be fair I'm not sure what they could add to the 680a besides SLI drivers that work!
LG
Here are a few updates!
When I built this machine last year I had expected that I would be upgrading to two 8 core processors. This unfortunately has not happened due to AMD seriously slipping on their delivery schedule for the Phenom line. At the moment it looks as if there is going to be a serious wait for those of us who wish to take advantage of 8 cores. I'm really disappointed by these turn of events. So much for the 4x4 becoming a "platform". More information about the release schedule is available here. I think I'm tempted to wait for the FX-91 to launch. I can't really see the benefits of taking a step back in MHz. Of course, clock is not everything but...
When I make the move to 8 cores it will be time for a disk upgrade as well. One of the issues that the current machine faces is that a large number of processes causes excessive I/O and effectively limits the capacity of the machine. Vista indicates a ling queue length. A good example of this is running 3 or four virtual machines in addition to "normal" development tasks. I've been exploring options. At the moment, out and deep come to mind. I'm thinking about adding another array and possibly trying a 3 disk RAID 0 to see if there is better performance. I'm not convinced that will alleviate queing issues though so it might be worth test (how?).
The drivers for the 8800 are now WHQL, there have not been too many issues with it. Upgrading using NVidia's package has been easy. I would not recommend using Windows update to upgrade the NVidia drivers, especially the storage drivers as I have had issues in the past. There is a new board package for the 680a although I'm really not too interested in "upgrading" anything that has to do with the RAID array. As they say "If it ain't broke don't fix it".
Performance monitoring still does not work correctly and I have no idea why.
The recently reported bug involving decreased network performance while playing audio under Vista affects this machine. It's really bad too. When transfering Multi-GB virtual machine images over the network I can get 107 MB/s peak and appx. 90 MB/s average between another Dell server with a RAID 0 array. The same transfer with audio playing will reduce the transfer speed to appx. 16 MB/s average. Terrible.
Overall the system continues to run well and continue to meet and exceed the demands that I place on it.
I'm still on the fence if I will move to the AMD chipset. We'll see if they are able to provide a compelling reason to make a move. Although, it looks like the 680a is largely dead. NVidia has already released a new version of the 680i chipset with more features. To be fair I'm not sure what they could add to the 680a besides SLI drivers that work!
LG
Friday, May 11, 2007
Driver Upgrade
NVidia has released a new driver package!
Drivers for x64 vista have been spotty to date but this update to nTune seemed to go a long way in providing me with decent system stats. It is also the only way we'll be able to OC the 8800.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/ntune_5.05.38.00.html
Also, new 8800 drivers were released on May 2nd!
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x64_158.18.html
The install process is easier. I can now play texas hold 'em with out that nasty flicker. Stay away from the DreamScene content though, it apparenly causes major issues.
**Note** I would highly recommend running all of the control panels as administrator, they seem to crash when they are not.
Drivers for x64 vista have been spotty to date but this update to nTune seemed to go a long way in providing me with decent system stats. It is also the only way we'll be able to OC the 8800.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/ntune_5.05.38.00.html
Also, new 8800 drivers were released on May 2nd!
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x64_158.18.html
The install process is easier. I can now play texas hold 'em with out that nasty flicker. Stay away from the DreamScene content though, it apparenly causes major issues.
**Note** I would highly recommend running all of the control panels as administrator, they seem to crash when they are not.
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