[Gllug] Dual socket AM2 motherboards?

Christian Smith csmith at thewrongchristian.org.uk
Mon Oct 2 11:16:07 UTC 2006


Martin A. Brooks uttered:

> Mike Brodbelt wrote:
>> Out of curiosity, why? Not that I've got anything against AMD - the
>> Opteron chips are great, but what's wrong with Intel that you'd feel the
>> need to avoid them. 
>
> Appalling marketing, mostly.  That is, for example, pushing all of the 
> advantages of HT (the worst single processor invention of the last 5 years 
> imo) without giving the required list of conditions to be met should you wish 
> for your code to actually take advantage of the sibling cores rather than, as 
> was more often the case, giving marginal improvements in general and in 
> specific cases actually being slower.


To be fair to Intel, HT is not an actual bad idea, just a bad 
implementation on top of a bad architecture.

The HT-like model is also used SUN's T1 processor, giving up to 4 threads 
per core. It is actually a clever solution to make use of ALU units that 
would otherwise be idle due to pipeline stalls. And Netburst had lots of 
stalls!

I share most of your anti-Intel sentiment, however:)

Christian


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