Dual Musings

http://www.overclockers.com/articles1111/

Wanted to say i found this a well-written and thought-over article. Somehow fun to read as well. Hail to the writer!

I also thought this article raised some interesting questions from some different perspectives.

Thread rated a 5.

great article, can't wait for a smidget of this technology to become available.

I like the idea of the hybrid chips. Too bad that they are from different manufacturers, but i believe that a triple core consisting of one Via Nehemia 1 Ghz and two Dothan cores of 2.5Ghz would kick *** with the same idea as is put up in the article: Nehemiah for windows stuff, dothan for performance stuff. Extremely low heat output, and as we have seen, the dothans offer an interesing overclocking perspective, and are high-performance.

For AMDroids, replace the dothans by A64's

Bah humbug - to hell with the heat; mewants quad core now.

Actually, the idea of multipurpose dedicated CPUs in one core package is quite interesting. The most infamous suggestion would be that of a prescott core and A64 working in tandem, the two canceling out each other's negatives (computational efficiency and high-bandwidth performance, respectively)

Also, a dedicated sub-CPU that could do window drawing and text rasterizing and antialiasing would really be sweet. However, it'd require a new API. But the chip itself would consume next to no power and accelerate window drawing like never before.

Umm, cV, that's what a GPU is (used) for

A few comments on the article itself:

{} Unmatched-speed CPUs: This can already be done on a dual-mobile-athlon system, with the small problem that Windows stuffs up if you try to do it, and Linux stuffs up unless you disable RDTSC timekeeping. This is obviously just a simple software issue.

{} Putting a Barton and an A64 on the same CPU doesn't help much. The only way for the two to work together (access the same RAM) would be to re-engineer the Barton to use hypertransport for memory access, at which point you've more or less got a dual-core hammer. Having a dual-core where you can shut down one core (which can *almost* be done with dual Athlon systems via halt disconnect) or step down the frequency/voltage (can already be done on dual Athlon systems) is a much more practical/efficient way to go. On the Intel side, though, a Dothan/Presscott combination would be good (as long as Intel didn't throw out the MP capability when they were moving from the P3 design), since the Dothan probably won't be as good at encoding as the Prescott.

I'd say that CPUs are going to drift back more towards being general purpose chips (ie: more P3, less P4), and GPUs will become much more general DSPs (which the most recent ones are, to a limited extent). In terms of pure FPU grunt, a P4 or Athlon gets absolutely crushed by the latest GPUs. We're talking an order of magnitude here (X800 XT does ~200 gflops peak IIRC, compared to a 3.6GHz P4's paltry 15 gflops), but unfortunately it just can't be harnessed in todays cards (for both hardware and political issues).