Interesting details on AMD's moves

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Ashlee Vance covered the Barcelona launch yesterday, of course, but his piece had two interesting bits of tid I hadn’t seen before. First, in the “fight fire with fire” department, AMD is changing the way it measures power

AMD has shifted to the average power measurement in the hopes of presenting “apples to apples” comparisons with Intel. AMD has tended to give maximum power consumption figures in the past – usually only attainable in the labs – and chastised Intel for giving average power consumption figures. In addition, Intel tends to leave out the power consumption issues it faces from things such as FB-DIMMs.

And thence on to the next processor bump, octacore* chips

AMD, of course, also has a 45nm four-core follow-on to Barcelona called Shanghai set for 2008. Then the company should follow with a pair of octal core chips in 2009, according to Pat Patla, director of AMD’s server and workstation business. So far, AMD has confirmed the latter chip as running on a new “Sandtiger” core but has yet to release a code-name for the earlier octal-core part.

* N.B.: Ashlee actually used the term “octal core.” I’ve also seen “octal-core.” Both of these strike me as awkward. I hereby create a new term, “octacore,” and will use it with wanton abandon when writing about the next generation of chips. Also, I’m going with quadcore from now on (not quad core or quad-core or Quad Core). Just so you know.

Comments

  1. I was using the word octacore early last year searching for news on its development. I found several sites using the very same word “octacore” how you think you’ve come to be the first i don’t know.

    perhaps you claim to have invented other things that are already in use?

    does the term “bollox” mean anything to you?

  2. sijarvis – first of all, we try to keep things civil here, so tone it down a bit. Secondly, if you’re going to be snarky, pay closer attention to the dates. You posted your comment on Oct 9 of 2008 on an entry published September 12, 2007.

    Future aggressively snarky posts will be deleted.

  3. Yeah ok that’s fair enough.

    I didn’t look at the date of the original post. However, after a quick google search I found use of the word “octacore” from as early as feb 2005, over 2 1/2 yrs previous to the blog in question.

    Imho people posting such threads on the net must learn that reality comes before fantasy. Anyone can sit in front of a monitor and pretend they invented such and such. It’s only when someone points their stories out that they at least have a chance to get a grip with the truth. Really this should have been done before.

    If you think this reply is “snarky” delete it. I personally see it as being straight forward. Perhaps something the computer community isn’t ready for.

  4. Nope, this post isn’t snarky at all, no need to delete it. I’m very careful with the facts, and my readers know that I appreciate being called out when I’m wrong.

    I suspect you aren’t a regular reader of insideHPC. My regular readers have grown accustomed to that tone, and that comment was intended to be humorous (note my use of the phrase “wanton abandon.”) During this time the world was on fire with multicore frenzy, and I was poking fun.

    That said, I hope you will become a regular reader of insideHPC if you are interested in supercomputing and high performance computing applications. We tend toward to the ultra high end, but also spend a fair amount of time (and this is increasing) on the other end of the market as well.