Re: OT: Nate is going to hate me...

["Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@ieee.org>]

Robert Citek <rwcitek@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:
> Is this really a quad 64-bit processor

It is (2) Socket-940, each with (2) physical cores.
You are getting (2) _true_ cores per Socket.

> or does AMD also do hyperthreading?

Only the Intel P4 core design is inefficient enough for
something like "HyperThreading."  HyperThreading was
introduced by Intel to overcome the fact that most of the
very long stages in various pipes of the P4 are virtually
doing nothing.  HyperThreading does _not_ give you (2)
processors, it just lets the OS scheduler use what it shows
as (2) processors.

Intel's P3 and AMD's Athlon cores will _never_ do
HyperThreading.  Intel and AMD have multiple cores.  Intel
does its P4 core now, but it's moving back to the P3 core for
future processors.  AMD Athlon64/Opterons are dual-core.

In the future, Symmetric Multithreading will be done across
multiple cores.  That's a completely different approach, one
that has not been done ... yet.

Don't confuse HyperThreading on a single core with Multicore
processors -- regardless of any multithreading over multiple
cores which, again, is the future.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                | Sent from Yahoo Mail
mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org     |  (please excuse any
http://thebs413.blogspot.com/ |   missing headers)

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