Dual core AMDs (was Re: [Gllug] Recording Ogg streams?)

[John Hearns]

On Tue, 2005-07-12 at 00:17 +0100, Chris Bell wrote:


>    By contrast, the Intel Pentium II onwards use a RISC (reduced instruction
> set computer) core running at extremely high speed to emulate the CISC 486
> and Pentium I. It uses a long pipeline, which has to be cleared and refilled
> frequently.
>    Is the trend now towards ever more complex CISC architectures, or RISC
> chips designed for efficiency? We hear about overheating problems, but are
> we just running unneccessary hardware?
>    I can understand the need for specialist chips for number crunching, but
> what about server applications?
I'll leave others to answer that question.
The RISC/CISC wars are over, and I think the answer is that CISC has
won, with elements of RISC, as you say.

Large caches are needed, because there is a lot of instruction prefetch
and also speculative prefetch.


Re. the need for specialist chips.. Noooooooo..... the Beowulf
revolution came about by using common off the shelf components,
ie ordinary PCs and general purpose CPUs and motherboards,
instead of exotic custom chips. Even now, not my area of expertise,
the 64 bit chips are designed for the mass market of webservers
and database servers, graphics workstations etc.


But re. specialised chips there IS a big interest in the HPC world in
the Cell processor, coming to a Playstation near you soon.

Also having said that, specialised chips for high performance
applications live.  The latest Cray has specialist ASIC applications
boosters, which can be programmed to so certain tasks.
We co-operate with www.clearspeed.com who make compute engines which go
on PCI
cards. You use the standard libraries (your code doesn't change) but the
intensive floating point stuff runs on the Clearspeed card.

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