Can AMD salvage QFX with an in-house chipset?

Hexus is also reporting that they can show a defect in the NUMA implementation of the Asus board BIOS ( this post was going to be called "Did Asus and nVidia drop the QFX ball") that maybe why games are suffering so much from latency problems.

Only time will tell if AMD had planned to create an entire reference system based on an Ati chipset while allowing nVidia to be the launch partner.

Let's go AMD! Show your true potential.

Hey, now you simply gotta believe.... believe in miracles.... believe that that potential is there it just hasn't been unleashed.... believe that if you sprinkle pixie dust over the rig it will cool down by 1/2 and improve 20 % in performance, then it would be competitive.

If you build it they will come....

   

A chipset is not going to make this turkey fly.....

Baron, it is a failure of the architecture.... the cHT and NUMA arrangement was never meant for the desktop.

Perhaps when quad core comes out and if they can cut the latency by 80% between the two CPUs, then you will see something. Until then, anytime you strap in a second CPU it will hurt performance.

Being an AMD stockholder, the QFX, or 4x4 as many know it, has left me less then thrilled. Could I even say less then disappointed? I was thinking of building a new computer around one of these things, but as it stands, forget it.

A new motherboard might help, but looking at how crowded the Nvidia motherboard is, I wonder if an all new motherboard is needed, one that is physically larger so there is more room for the cpu's, more room for bigger and better coolers, and more room for PCI/PCIe slots. Things look so crowded at present that I wonder if it would really be to fit a pair of 8950GT cards and still have room for a sound and a PCI card.

There seem to be too many problem to overcome. Sure, maybe a lot of development could help, but why not put that development into the AM2 board and its cpu's, or even the AM3? It looks to me that the present route is nothing but dollars wasted and opportunities lost. And I can gaurentee that at the next stockholders meeting, a lot of questions are going to be getting asked. Wonder how many heads will roll because of this QFX failure?

A chipset is not going to make this turkey fly.....

Baron, it is a failure of the architecture.... the cHT and NUMA arrangement was never meant for the desktop.

Perhaps when quad core comes out and if they can cut the latency by 80% between the two CPUs, then you will see something. Until then, anytime you strap in a second CPU it will hurt performance.

Only time will tell if AMD had planned to create an entire reference system based on an Ati chipset while allowing nVidia to be the launch partner.

Let's go AMD! Show your true potential.

When a CPU it's good, it performs well almost everywhere, we're not yet at the point to have such task-specifis CPUs and furthermore claim one as such. it's just like when they say that a celeron is good for office apps.

Yes, in terms of megatasking -- after you reach 12 background processes competing then finally the BW advantage begins to show up.... this helps you if you want to run 6 VMs with say 2 process in each VM... but even for Enthusiast Joe-- I doubt they will be burning 6 DVDs, encoding 4 video clips, and playing 2 games at the same time..... kinda pointless. The TechReport review was very kind in how they setup and ran the benchmarks, C2Q still came out on top.... their memory bench, for example was carefully chosen -- the did not show the 2 K, 4 K blocks with the 256 or 512 byte strides.... that was where 4x4 really fell apart -- it is not truly objective review they way they handled it.... and you should be more challenging of the data so as not to be fooled.

The valve test were indeed interesting --- C2Q just crushed the 4x4 in this regard.

Give up, it does not work and will not work, the BIOS is not responsible for NUMA anyway, it is only responsible for initializing the processor to map the memory a particular way. A BIOS update will have little to no affect at all.

Give up, it does not work and will not work, the BIOS is not responsible for NUMA anyway, it is only responsible for initializing the processor to map the memory a particular way. A BIOS update will have little to no affect at all.

Both tests show that clock for clock AMD is scaling at better than 100% with QFX while C2 is not getting the same scaling. The theoretical nature of the tests show the same thing that PD used to show.

Only time will tell if AMD had planned to create an entire reference system based on an Ati chipset while allowing nVidia to be the launch partner.

Anands test show clearly what most people expected, a 3.0 GHz quad core system from AMD 'strung' together by a serial line is getting it's A$$ kicked by QX6700 (a 2.67 GHz processor) and even a Q6600 (a 2.4 GHz processor), barcelona had better be something special.

Also, this is a poor data set for you to be 'showing off' the mediocrity of your x-mas platform. Your 'perfect scaling' is not accounting for clockspeed delta's as well.

AMD's approach to answer QX6700:


* Courtesy of some creative photoshoping by gOJDO.

sailer you did this to me !!!! make it stop!

A chipset is not going to make this turkey fly.....

Baron, it is a failure of the architecture.... the cHT and NUMA arrangement was never meant for the desktop.

Perhaps when quad core comes out and if they can cut the latency by 80% between the two CPUs, then you will see something. Until then, anytime you strap in a second CPU it will hurt performance.

Well, the QFX has been released and while certain scenarios show incredible promise, certain areas are also saddled with too much baggage.

The fact that the Opteron dual can be outfitted with SLI in a wksta and offer good perf without these power levels implies that the total package could have been done better.

The Opteron 285 runs at 2.6GHz and this graph shows that without the additional SLI power AMD runs at 322W and the dual 5160 runs at 267W (full load).

Looking at the varous articles around teh web, it seems as though only Anand managed to actually find suitable tasks that were reasonable for multi-tasking. In his case he used BluRay movies which totally killed all the dual core systems.

His power numbers were also at least 100W lower than other test sites. He turned on CnQ and got the idle temps down to within 4W of the C2Q system. Of course this didn't dent the 456W the system drew at "full load" with an 8800GTX ( which I believe draws 225W+ ).

And these are FX74 numbers. FX70 is shown to use even less so I believe OEMs can get reasonable wksta power levels out of it in teh next few months, especially if AMD releases a new rev( they sorely need to drop power by at least 10%- perhaps more and the lessons learned can help get Agena down below the reported 125W)

Hexus is also reporting that they can show a defect in the NUMA implementation of the Asus board BIOS ( this post was going to be called "Did Asus and nVidia drop the QFX ball") that maybe why games are suffering so much from latency problems.

One review ( most are posted at AMDZone) stated that AMD is reporting that the Interleave mode will need to be turned off for Vista and on for XP.

I believe AMD reported that they would release their own branded chipset and hopefully it will be less power hungry than the 680a, which is reported to use more power than even 975X. Having two of them surely doesn't help. nVidia does have a two socket SLI hipset in the 3600 and ASUS' implementation is only $300. Even the $400 Asus 680i for Intel implements less PCIe for less power reserves.

Because 7950GT and the probably forthcoming 8950GT only require two slots for Quad SLI. I can see the need for 4 low end GPUs for certain content creators but even 3 PCIe slots can't really be used right now as no "Havok" type apps or cards have been released, except for the server (AMD Stream).

Only time will tell if AMD had planned to create an entire reference system based on an Ati chipset while allowing nVidia to be the launch partner.

But the real judgement is that only expert builders will make QFX something not too loud or hot, while Vista X64 may do wonders for it in multithreaded apps so it is not yet ready for prime time.

Let's go AMD! Show your true potential.

Intel shows better scaling in the 'VRAD Map Compilation' benchmark, but AMD shows better scalling in the 'Particle Systems Test' benchmark. Hardly an advantage to either camp in terms of pure scaling.

However, regardless of scaling, it is clear that Intel is significantly faster than AMD in both tests.

The only reason it looks like AMD scales better by looking at the graphs is because you are looking at the scaling of a 2.8GHz FX-62 vs 3GHz FX-74, whereas with Intel you are looking at a 2.93GHz X6800 vs 2.66GHz QX6700.

Notice how I calculated scaling by comparing at the same clockspeeds?

Paints a whole different picture, doesn't it Baron?

Myth debunked! Nothing to see here people, just AMD fanboy dribble. Move along now...

The NUMA support in Vista is supposed to be better than in Windows XP so Vista should give better performance. For NUMA to work well in this two node set up, node to node traffic should be minimized. I know that in multi node systems it can sometimes be an advantage to use node interleave mode, such as in databases. The problem with Quad FX on the hardware level is the HT link. I do not think HT2.0 is adequate and it would take a FULL HT3.0 link to do the job viz., a 2.6GHz link that is 32bits wide. If you look at some of the memory benchmark figures you will see that they are very low and is probably caused by excessive cross-fire.

The NUMA support in Vista is supposed to be better than in Windows XP so Vista should give better performance. For NUMA to work well in this two node set up, node to node traffic should be minimized. I know that in multi node systems it can sometimes be an advantage to use node interleave mode, such as in databases. The problem with Quad FX on the hardware level is the HT link. I do not think HT2.0 is adequate and it would take a FULL HT3.0 link to do the job viz., a 2.6GHz link that is 32bits wide. If you look at some of the memory benchmark figures you will see that they are very low and are probably caused by excessive cross-fire.

(...) In the best case scenario for QFX - RAM wise - you have 4GB of RAM which even Vista's process load can't overwhelm, all of the OS processes AND data can be loaded to CPU 0 and CPU 1.

If the current request allocates more RAM than is available in the first set, the process is loaded in the second set with CPU 2 and CPU 3. Now if swapping is required by the process "over-filling" the second set, it should maintain a contiguous line by not reloading data to CPU 0/1s RAM banks in the case of the process that caused the overfill.

In this scenario, all game threads (single, dual or multi) should remain on CPU2/3 with their data. It may require a patch on AMDs part that assures this (like the dual core patch for sync) but this scenario should allow the two cores to fully use all of their potential bandwidth and processing wise.

For cases where OS code needs to be called, it should be just be passing the necessary data and recieving a return from CPU 0/1.

I expect big things with a refined implementation. Even you realized the defects in the first rev of C2D.

Only time will tell if AMD had planned to create an entire reference system based on an Ati chipset while allowing nVidia to be the launch partner.

VALVE'S SMP TESTS SHOW GREATER THAN 100% SCALING!!

If a core accesses its local memory then it has a bandwidth of 12.8GB/s(using DDR2-800). If it accesses the memory of another node, then this transfer has to take place across the HT2.0 link which is only 4GB/s (8GB/s aggregate). So as well as the added latency associated with the node hop, the transfer would take LONGER than it would from local memory-this is why the HT link bandwidth is important.

Well, the QFX has been released and while certain scenarios show incredible promise, certain areas are also saddled with too much baggage.

The fact that the Opteron dual can be outfitted with SLI in a wksta and offer good perf without these power levels implies that the total package could have been done better.

The Opteron 285 runs at 2.6GHz and this graph shows that without the additional SLI power AMD runs at 322W and the dual 5160 runs at 267W (full load).

Looking at the varous articles around teh web, it seems as though only Anand managed to actually find suitable tasks that were reasonable for multi-tasking. In his case he used BluRay movies which totally killed all the dual core systems.

His power numbers were also at least 100W lower than other test sites. He turned on CnQ and got the idle temps down to within 4W of the C2Q system. Of course this didn't dent the 456W the system drew at "full load" with an 8800GTX ( which I believe draws 225W+ ).

And these are FX74 numbers. FX70 is shown to use even less so I believe OEMs can get reasonable wksta power levels out of it in teh next few months, especially if AMD releases a new rev( they sorely need to drop power by at least 10%- perhaps more and the lessons learned can help get Agena down below the reported 125W)

Hexus is also reporting that they can show a defect in the NUMA implementation of the Asus board BIOS ( this post was going to be called "Did Asus and nVidia drop the QFX ball") that maybe why games are suffering so much from latency problems.

One review ( most are posted at AMDZone) stated that AMD is reporting that the Interleave mode will need to be turned off for Vista and on for XP.

I believe AMD reported that they would release their own branded chipset and hopefully it will be less power hungry than the 680a, which is reported to use more power than even 975X. Having two of them surely doesn't help. nVidia does have a two socket SLI hipset in the 3600 and ASUS' implementation is only $300. Even the $400 Asus 680i for Intel implements less PCIe for less power reserves.

Because 7950GT and the probably forthcoming 8950GT only require two slots for Quad SLI. I can see the need for 4 low end GPUs for certain content creators but even 3 PCIe slots can't really be used right now as no "Havok" type apps or cards have been released, except for the server (AMD Stream).

Only time will tell if AMD had planned to create an entire reference system based on an Ati chipset while allowing nVidia to be the launch partner.

But the real judgement is that only expert builders will make QFX something not too loud or hot, while Vista X64 may do wonders for it in multithreaded apps so it is not yet ready for prime time.

Let's go AMD! Show your true potential.

As a former owner of an Opteron 270 (2 x dual-core at 2.0 GHz per core, 1 MB L2 cache per core, ccNUMA using 2 x nodes of Dual-Channel Reg ECC DDR1-400).

The Opteron 200/800 series did not support Cool'n'Quiet as Registered DIMMs need a constant flow of energy to work and the memory controller is integrated (has pros and cons).

Since these new CPUs likely support Cool'n'Quiet, I'd recommend just disabling C'n'Q to get the stuttering to stop.

In addition to this add /usepmtimer to C:\boot.ini
http://search.microsoft.com/results.aspx?q=boot.ini+%2F...

ccNUMA really wasn't designed for games, it will likely stutter a fair bit if it is used and /usepmtimer is not used at the same time.

You can run ccNUMA enabled or disabled in both Windows XP, XP x64 Edition, 2003 Server (x64), and Vista (and Linux, etc too). It depends what gives you the best performance.

"Node Interleaving" is disabling ccNUMA, so instead of having the OS control it the 'chipset' controls it, it will stutter less but the performance of the memory will not aggregate as well compared to ccNUMA. (Latency vs Throughput arguement)



The ccNUMA vs Node Interleaving being for one OS and not the others is total garbage. All Windows Kernels based on NT 5.1 will support it, just games may not scale well (stuttering) if ccNUMA is used.

Vista will not improve ccNUMA performance in gaming, the technology is years old, well established, and can not be improved very much at all (from a inter-latency perspective within an OS's Kernel).

Just google "NUMA" and "ccNUMA", it is an idea perhaps a decade old now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Uniform_Memory_Access




VALVE'S SMP TESTS SHOW GREATER THAN 100% SCALING!!

If a core accesses its local memory then it has a bandwidth of 12.8GB/s(using DDR2-800). If it accesses the memory of another node, then this transfer has to take place across the HT2.0 link which is only 4GB/s (8GB/s aggregate). So as well as the added latency associated with the node hop, the transfer would take LONGER than it would from local memory-this is why the HT link bandwidth is important.

so baron, how do you explain the comparison - double the cost, double the heat, custom boards, double the power consumption for a mere -20% (yes, less) performance over Intels Q6700, running at lower frequencies, drop in compatible with current 965/975 mobo's? and the fact that intels off die memory controller and old FSB design can take on AMDs latest? go figure.

I wonder if any other manafactuere is game enough other then ASUS to make such a board for it...

baron is stumped,ideals meet reality in a fiery blurr.

i wonder about a baron casewhite link,the information is pretty similar,however its just not working for amd yet.how do you compensate for a 27% rise in memory latency?

Amd does great on long winded equations,but its sooo different from the consumer desktop.you cant have hpc computing on a pc,the end result is slower apps processing.

i think numa could be amd's netburst,they should rethink that.you cant bring hpc to desktop and rule,i dont care how many petaflops you have on your record.

if thats what 4x4 is about ,amd just lost till they ditch that notion.
while hpc designers referr to desktop benches as superficial,the whole array of desktop computing application follows this superficial trend.
i doubt a desktop will do the depth of computing that an hpc does for a long time.

Maybe Jack can enlighten you as to how 90nm 2.6GHz Opterons are running at 55W to allay your fears.

That is pretty much right...

Baron, the low power parts AMD produces are actually binning out higher, they are partitioning their best bin, undervolting and down clocking to hit power.

P=C*V*V*F so by down volting and underclocking one can achieve a cubic functionality to reduce power. Hence a 10% reduction in voltage and fequency gives a 30% reduction (approximately, actually 0.9^3 * 100%) in power.

Almost all Win32 processes are limited to 2 GB of RAM,

Almost all Win32 processes are limited to 2 GB of RAM, the exception is applications designed to take advantage of /3GB and similar switches in BOOT.INI. Games do not fall into this category.

Search for /3GB on www.microsoft.com for examples (There are a few other similar methods used too, but games do not use any of them as games target consumers with 'normal' PCs). 8)

All allocated memory in Win32 / Win.x64 is virtual by nature, and managded by well... the memory manager.

Virtual simply means the physical and virtual addresses do not match up, it may also imply swapping or paging to disk (or to other RAM - no joke).

The problem with ccNUMA is that one process may use 2 nodes, but it may allocate 400 MB to one node and 800 MB to the other.

SANDRA has a test that demonstrates this very well, since the early Opteron days.

As for Vista having "significantly better multi-processor performance" I have yet to see anything that indicates this is even remotely true. In fact most data points to the exact opposite.

The Windows Kernel has not changed much since NT 4.0, NT 5.0 (Windows 2000), NT 5.1 (Windows XP, 2003 Server), etc - They all support 32 CPU cores and beyond NT 5.1 (Win 2K3 Server x64 Kernel) there isn't really all that much to improve.
However in the consumer varients they limit the processor core count to below 32, the Kernel can still do it, it has just been given an artificially low ceiling

Do consider that NT 4.0 was available for DEC Alpha processors (Compaq bought out DEC, then became HP / Compaq), this was around a decade ago. Aswell as SGI MIPS processors - These systems used (cc)NUMA years before AMD was selling it yo you, and it hasn't changed all that much. (There is nothing much left to 'optimize' in the Vista Kernel to get more performance from ccNUMA systems, Vista is mostly a fresh paint job GUI wise).

I think you may have ccNUMA and swapping/paging confused with something else. (In that how it works on a hardware + low level software basis).


As for the /usepmtimer usage:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /usepmtimer

// (Do not wrap the line)


:? I'm not exactly sure what you think ccNUMA is, or how it works, but it doesn't seam to fall in line with the industry accepted definitions and platform descriptions of NUMA and/or ccNUMA systems (in that how they work at a hardware / kernel level). 8O

That is pretty much right...

Baron, the low power parts AMD produces are actually binning out higher, they are partitioning their best bin, undervolting and down clocking to hit power.

P=C*V*V*F so by down volting and underclocking one can achieve a cubic functionality to reduce power. Hence a 10% reduction in voltage and fequency gives a 30% reduction (approximately, actually 0.9^3 * 100%) in power.

You know it's funny that I really didn't read your whole post

..... I tested the first ACPI Alpha on Win2000 - and it was IMMEASURABLY FASTER than any othe chip even close to the same clock speed .....

C2Q also uses the same susbsystem but excels because of it's arch/implmentation. My whole point has been load/swap and OS scheduling. I have said numerous times that I am not thinkiing of this mainly for games, though the above 60fps AND severe multi-threading/tasking capabilities make it a worthy upgrade to prep for 8 cores. .....

The funny thing is that for my needs I could go with a 5200+(2.8GHz = 11x260), 8800GTS SLI, with 8GB RAM, and then Agena.

I want two sockets. It has shown the promise I wanted (EXCEPT IN THE POWER AREA - though FX70 is tamer with careful construction).

Well, the QFX has been released and while certain scenarios show incredible promise, certain areas are also saddled with too much baggage.

The fact that the Opteron dual can be outfitted with SLI in a wksta and offer good perf without these power levels implies that the total package could have been done better.

The Opteron 285 runs at 2.6GHz and this graph shows that without the additional SLI power AMD runs at 322W and the dual 5160 runs at 267W (full load).

Looking at the varous articles around teh web, it seems as though only Anand managed to actually find suitable tasks that were reasonable for multi-tasking. In his case he used BluRay movies which totally killed all the dual core systems.

Mmmmm, the only way to reduce this latency issue between cores is to do 2 things. 1) Reduce the number of memory reads/xtransfers between cores 2) Increase the speed of the link

I believe Intel has already accomplished this by increasing the cache for each processor. I bet if AMD would come out with a Dual Core processor with 2 or more Megs of L2 cache we would see a big performance boost for the 4X4 System. At least that is it looks like AMD could do to boost the performance of the 4X4 system using the K8 core processor.

Jack, does this ring true to your thinking?

His power numbers were also at least 100W lower than other test sites. He turned on CnQ and got the idle temps down to within 4W of the C2Q system. Of course this didn't dent the 456W the system drew at "full load" with an 8800GTX ( which I believe draws 225W+ ).

And these are FX74 numbers. FX70 is shown to use even less so I believe OEMs can get reasonable wksta power levels out of it in teh next few months, especially if AMD releases a new rev( they sorely need to drop power by at least 10%- perhaps more and the lessons learned can help get Agena down below the reported 125W)

Hexus is also reporting that they can show a defect in the NUMA implementation of the Asus board BIOS ( this post was going to be called "Did Asus and nVidia drop the QFX ball") that maybe why games are suffering so much from latency problems.

One review ( most are posted at AMDZone) stated that AMD is reporting that the Interleave mode will need to be turned off for Vista and on for XP.

I believe AMD reported that they would release their own branded chipset and hopefully it will be less power hungry than the 680a, which is reported to use more power than even 975X. Having two of them surely doesn't help. nVidia does have a two socket SLI hipset in the 3600 and ASUS' implementation is only $300. Even the $400 Asus 680i for Intel implements less PCIe for less power reserves.

Because 7950GT and the probably forthcoming 8950GT only require two slots for Quad SLI. I can see the need for 4 low end GPUs for certain content creators but even 3 PCIe slots can't really be used right now as no "Havok" type apps or cards have been released, except for the server (AMD Stream).

Only time will tell if AMD had planned to create an entire reference system based on an Ati chipset while allowing nVidia to be the launch partner.

But the real judgement is that only expert builders will make QFX something not too loud or hot, while Vista X64 may do wonders for it in multithreaded apps so it is not yet ready for prime time.

Let's go AMD! Show your true potential.