Re: AMD planning 45nm 12-Core 'Istanbul' Processor ?

In article <DoxQj.2146$PM5.1745@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Augustus <no_one@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
>Let's hope they can pull it off. I'm still waiting for a dual core from
them 
>that actually signifigantly ouperforms my S939 Opteron 185 2Mb unit at 
>3.2Ghz. The performance increases I've seen from my A8N-E system versus
the 
>one I just built for my son, with an X2 5600+ 2Mb unit clocked at 3.2 Ghz

>are solely due to the newer chipset and DDR2 clockings.

To a considerable extent, the effect of multiple cores that you notice
will
depend on whether your apps take advantage of it.  A program that insists
on
running everything in a single thread won't run any faster at all; you
might
see a slight improvement in responsiveness that comes from the OS getting
to
schedule your app to run on one processor and itself (or other apps) on
another processor, but that's about it.  Multithreaded apps can get spread
across multiple processors/cores, up to the lesser of what you have
installed and what the programmer decided to use.

I upgraded one of my machines to a Core 2 Quad Q6600 a while back;
mencoder
has a limited amount of multithreading sup****t that's available with
different codecs.  The highest CPU usage I see with one mencoder process
transcoding a DVD to H.264 is usually somewhere around 200-250% (400%
would
be fully loaded on all 4 cores).  To take full advantage of the processor,
I
just do two transcodes at a time. :-)

(With the encoding processes niced, it can still play HD MPEG-2 from
across
the network without any hiccups, too.  That slows down encoding a little,
as
decoding and displaying HD takes up a fair chunk of one core.)

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