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AMD details its desktop plans for the next year, though be it a quarter later than originally planned

AMD this week took the covers off its quad-core desktop CPU codenamed Agena FX in Sunnyvale, California. The processor was featured in single and dual-socket configurations -- the dual-socket configurations mark AMD's first demonstration of an 8-core desktop. 

Next week Monday, AMD will reveal the brand name for this Agena FX-based brand, Phenom FX.  The official launch date for Agena is still undetermined.

"Quad-core, codenamed Barcelona will launch later this summer, in the July, August kind of time frame -- followed by [Agena FX] on the desktop," stated Robert Rivet, AMD executive vice president and CFO.

AMD demonstrated the power of this Phenom FX system by encoding a 1080p movie trailer into H.264 in near-realtime.  The company would not reveal the clock frequencies to DailyTech, though previous company guidance indicated Agena FX will debut at 2.6 GHz clock frequencies. 

Agena FX is just the halo product for the desktop AMD K10 lineup.  Agena (non-FX) will constitute the bulk of AMD's Phenom offerings.  Agena is essentially identical to Agena FX, though the non-FX processor does not support symmetric multiprocessing -- Agena FX can support up to two sockets at this time.  AMD will also announce its dual-core Agena bins, codenamed Kuma, shortly after Agena.

Intel is slated to launch its 45nm Penryn processor family in late 2007.  "Penryn will be shipping in 2007," stated Intel representative Nick Knupffer.  "We are launching server versions of Penryn in the second half of 2007," he added.

Intel's desktop variants of Penryn, dubbed dual-core Wolfdale and quad-core Yorkfield, surfaced last month.  The server counterparts to these chips, dubbed dual-core Hapertown and quad-core Yorkfield will suceed the existing Clovertown and Woodcrest Xeon components.

AMD's Rivet makes one promise; we'll see quad-core desktop components in 2007.  "That'll launch a little after the server part, it'll be called Agena. You'll see that in the Christmas line-up," Rivet claimed.

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Nehalem Just Over a Year Away...
By EndPCNoise on 5/10/07, Rating: 0
RE: Nehalem Just Over a Year Away...
By kamel5547 on 5/10/2007 7:58:47 PM , Rating: 5
*Shrug* Seeing as I ahve a hard time finding apps that will stress 2 cores I think 8 is relatively pointless outside of high-end servers and workstations. Not that it isn't a nice achievement, but I'd rather see speedier dual core chips (or more software).

Personally I'm more worried about reports that beyond 8 cores we are likely to see a performance decrease if the architecture doesn't change. I sure hope Intel doesn't make the mistake it made in the past and push cores the way it pushed MHZ.


RE: Nehalem Just Over a Year Away...
By EndPCNoise on 5/10/2007 8:12:18 PM , Rating: 1
For some time now, software companies have been developing optimizations for multicore cpu's. Software will "automatically scale" (I apologize for lack of a better term) for n-cores.

Please refer to this article from AnandTech concerning multicore capable software:
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i...


RE: Nehalem Just Over a Year Away...
By Justin Case on 5/10/2007 10:49:28 PM , Rating: 4
No, it won't. SMP optimizations aren't a magic dust that you can simply sprinkle on top of software to make it run faster. A lot of problems simply cannot be broken down into multiple threads.

Even software with years of multi-core optimizations (like 3D rendering and compositing applications) have some single-threaded stages, and adding more CPUs or more cores won't speed those up, so the scaling is far from linear (even on AMD platforms, that aren't bottlenecked at the bus).

In any case, most people's CPU stays idle for 90% of the time, so all this is a bit irrelevant. Having two CPUs (or two cores) does make a noticeable difference in system responsiveness. Beyond that, you're only likely to benefit in very specific tasks (video encoding, 3D rendering, some compilers, busy database servers and not much else).

People need to understand that multithreading will not necessarily speed up "traditional" tasks, but it does give developers the ability to do more things at the same time. In other words, a dual-core system at 2 GHz probably won't run a game faster than a single-core system at 2.2 GHz, but it can have much improved AI, for example. You get the same FPS (or even slightly less), but a better gaming experience.


RE: Nehalem Just Over a Year Away...
By EndPCNoise on 5/10/2007 11:48:50 PM , Rating: 1
Did you even bother to read the AnandTech article about multicore optimized software with the link I provided?

Software in the near future will greatly benefit from multicore systems. Is it linear scaling, not exactly, but it's close enough. The performance increase is very significant.

Software engineers are working hard on breaking down typical single threads into smaller threads which can be spread over multiple cores.

If you took the time to read the short 10 page article you would have learned about these new developments.

Even AMD's own representatives have publicly stated (addressing their losses) that they regret not developing quad core cpu's much earlier on.

I have nothing against AMD. My last three systems were AMD based, and I am using an AMD system now.

Intel has also recently stated that quad core systems will become mainstream in the near future.

If you choose to believe that multicore systems are for workstations, servers, etc., than stick with your single or double core system. The mainstream will move on without you. Barcelona is coming, and Intel will be offering quad cores at $266 later this year.


RE: Nehalem Just Over a Year Away...
By Flunk on 5/11/2007 12:15:00 AM , Rating: 4
What about smaller developers who can't afford to write the significantly more complex code the sort of optimizations you are talking about require?

Multithreaded code is much harder to conceptualize and build, not to mention horribly difficult to troubleshoot.

Couple this with the fact that in order to be scalable in the way you want the program would need to be written to spawn new threads on a continual basis that returned information to the main thread (for output) which would decrease performance on chips with only one core.

Multithreaded applications are not a magic bullet. Programming multithreaded applications is difficult, time consuming and expensive.

This is NOTHING like linear scaling, but if done right it will improve performance.


RE: Nehalem Just Over a Year Away...
By EndPCNoise on 5/11/2007 12:43:36 AM , Rating: 1
quote:
Multithreaded code is much harder to conceptualize and build, not to mention horribly difficult to troubleshoot.

That's why multicore software development kits, and new multicore game engines are being created. These will then be licensed out to other companies/developers.

quote:
This is NOTHING like linear scaling, but if done right it will improve performance.

A quad core's performance will not be equal to that of two dual cores, but it will be over 90% of the performance of two dual cores. That is very significant. Not linear, but close enough.

Please read this short 10 page AnandTech article. It will address each of your questions/concerns.
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i...


RE: Nehalem Just Over a Year Away...
By gramboh on 5/11/2007 2:13:44 AM , Rating: 4
As Justincase says below, you are grossly overstating the implications of the article which discusses what Valve (a single game developer) is attempting to do with multi-threading. You are overestimating the 'impact' multicore CPUs will have on desktop users in terms of software in the short-term. Dual core has been around in the mainstream for a few years, dual socket has been around for 10+ years (with desktop mainboards, although only a tiny % of users had SMP in the old days). It's not an easy problem to just use a devkit to 'break down single threads into multiple threads'.


RE: Nehalem Just Over a Year Away...
By TomZ on 5/11/07, Rating: 0
By Amiga500 on 5/11/2007 10:39:06 AM , Rating: 2
Yeap, broadly agree with Justin Case etc... for conventional computing, it will soon reach a bottleneck in terms of computing power/returns.

Heck, in some apps we are there a long time... how many CPUs do you need for openoffice again? :-)

Not that I care if AMD/Intel pile 528 cores onto a die - I'll use them for my CFD work :-D

AMD/Intel get the majority of their profits from the workstation/server area do they not? Workstations simply cannot get enough power (as long as communication times between CPUs are kept down - quite important that), parallel processing is a great way of achieving that.

Expect the CPUs 2 generations down the road to have 4 or 8 cores on them... half of which will be GPUs ;-)


RE: Nehalem Just Over a Year Away...
By Proteusza on 5/11/2007 7:29:19 AM , Rating: 2
The article has nothing about thread scaling or breaking down threads, its about valves distributed computing service!

Breaking down a thread into smaller threads suffers similar problems to using superscalar out of order architectures (issueing multiple instructions of a thread on different engines in a different order to what they were intended to be executed), but only worse.

Its not that it isnt worth doing, its that its very very difficult, and it may be better worth making each thread really fly on each processor than having lots of small threads, which might worsen overhead due to things like context switching.

There are some things that, no matter what, have to be done sequentially.


By GoatMonkey on 5/11/2007 3:25:26 PM , Rating: 2
That's true, there are lots of sequential processes happening in a computer. And a multi-core CPU can handle many of those sequential processes at the same time. Why worry about whether or not your apps are multi-threaded? Your OS does multi-tasking in a way that takes advantage of all of your cores. I currently have Visual Studio, Eclipse, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, and Textpad open and 4 things running in the systray, not to mention all of my running services and background processes. I wish this PC I have at work had more than 1 core.


RE: Nehalem Just Over a Year Away...
By goku on 5/14/2007 3:08:42 PM , Rating: 2
exactly, people just don't get it.. Some tasks simply can only be run on one processor at a time, balancing equations between two processors and having them come out in an orderly and timely manner isn't easy. Sure the processing capability is near linear but only in circumstances such as simple number crunching which is a best case scenario, otherwise, exponentially speaking you'll be gaining only by 1. So for example if you add 4 cores, it's really only +2 performance, *2 and then it's +1 *2 and then it's +1 etc. Thats the way I see it anyways, wouldn't be surprised if it was wrong. Anyways it just needs to be made clear that performance increases aren't going to be easy as adding another core.


RE: Nehalem Just Over a Year Away...
By Justin Case on 5/11/2007 12:23:51 AM , Rating: 4
With all due respect for Anandtech (and interpret that sentence as you will), I don't need to read an article on a website to understand a field that I've been involved in (both as a user and a developer) for almost 10 years. You see, I am a software engineer.

In any case, I did read the article, when it was originally published. Mainly because I like Valve's games and wanted to know what they're up to. But it's not exactly an advanced technical document about SMP development.


RE: Nehalem Just Over a Year Away...
By darkavatar on 5/11/07, Rating: -1
By clayclws on 5/11/2007 2:52:13 AM , Rating: 4
What Justin Case said is very true. When YOU graduate, you'll start to realize his points. I don't need to go on because clearly you don't understand his points.


RE: Nehalem Just Over a Year Away...
By Proteusza on 5/11/2007 7:30:56 AM , Rating: 2
He didnt say he wasnt writing multi threaded software already, just that the article presented is in much less depth than he works. he's an expert in the industry, who are you to say he doesnt use multithreaded code?


RE: Nehalem Just Over a Year Away...
By TomZ on 5/11/2007 3:25:00 PM , Rating: 1