AMD unveils 6 core "Thuban"

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I hope they make some penta-core or something. Don't let me down ACC!
 
Hypertransport / bus clocking with AM2/AM3 CPUs from the Phenom II on has simply sucked. They just don't clock that well. ACC addressed the issue but not well enough. Black Editions are the only way to ever go with AMD CPUs in my opinion. (At least for the enthusiast.)
 
i dun think people even use their quad cores much 0.0 having 6 cores hmm i wonder how does that compare to intels i7 920 having 8 threads i think the 6 cores will be 300 and then intels i7 920 is around the same price maybe even a drop when i9 comes out so hmm cause current amd quads cant even compare against the i7 =/ but hey i saved so much more with amd =]
 
Without major architectural changes, the Core i7 will mop the floor with a six-core Phenom II in any application that doesn't leverage six-cores well. In the reverse scenario the Thuban will be the better performer.

Of course Gulftown will destroy them all. (At a hefty price to be sure.)
 
thanks for small favors, amd. i was planning on upgrading my x4 9850 to a 955, but i think i might hold out...or i might not :)
 
God i hope AMD is heading back on the right path again.. I have been getting my hopes up with each new tech they have released since the Althon 64, and I steadily get let down :/
 
Dan_D said:
Hypertransport / bus clocking with AM2/AM3 CPUs from the Phenom II on has simply sucked. They just don't clock that well. ACC addressed the issue but not well enough. Black Editions are the only way to ever go with AMD CPUs in my opinion. (At least for the enthusiast.)
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I'm simply not seeing this from my experience. You're not going to get crazy 400-500 FSB overclocks like the intel chipsets but it I've had no problem pushing 280.
 
Chops said:
I'm simply not seeing this from my experience. You're not going to get crazy 400-500 FSB overclocks like the intel chipsets but it I've had no problem pushing 280.
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I've rarely been able to break 250MHz on most boards.
 
Chops said:
790 Chipsets? Maybe my MA790X-UD4P is just a freak. I've booted at 290.
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I haven't tried that board but I've worked with 790GX and 790FX boards and none of them would go that high. One of the best overclockers I worked with was based on the NVIDIA 790a SLI chipset. It would do 250MHz without issue. SB750/ACC equipped boards tend to hit about 245MHz-250MHz for me on average.
 
nicknations said:
God i hope AMD is heading back on the right path again.. I have been getting my hopes up with each new tech they have released since the Althon 64, and I steadily get let down :/
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they have been heading in the right direction since the phenom II was announced.. just everyone seems to expect AMD to be better then the i7 and thats not what AMD's current plan is.. they dont want to get in a war with intel.. because AMD will lose misrably due to intels size and pretty much unlimited funds..


Chops said:
I'm simply not seeing this from my experience. You're not going to get crazy 400-500 FSB overclocks like the intel chipsets but it I've had no problem pushing 280.
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depends on the motherboard.. some suck at overclocking with FSB.. and some are absolute beasts like the MSI 770.. that thing can easily exceed 350 FSB and was actually benched at 425 FSB.. if you know what your doing when overclocking an amd processor.. most motherboards have no problems with FSB.. hell even my crappy 780G motherboard can do 325FSB with my 940.. you just need to know what your doing..
 
1+ sirmonkey1985 250 is bit on the low side, 275 is norm for me.

But I think its more to do with the CPU being used than the board, when I had a x3 720 for personal testing. It never got pass 235 but x4 945 for client got to 14* 282 @ 1.54v
 
early 2010 looks like a new stepping, probably the same one they'll use in Magny Cours.

what chance of Thuban appearing at 3.2GHz with a 140W TDP, after all by then there will be a 3.6GHz PII 975 with a 140W TDP.................?
 
R3MF said:
early 2010 looks like a new stepping, probably the same one they'll use in Magny Cours.

what chance of Thuban appearing at 3.2GHz with a 140W TDP, after all by then there will be a 3.6GHz PII 975 with a 140W TDP.................?
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very slim.. 6 cores your looking at probably around 2.6-3.0ghz at 130-140w out of the box.. but that wont mean they cant be overclocked.. the next stepping/core revision should put the 965 at 125w.. if they can then i see no reason they cant do 3.6ghz under 140w..
 
Dan_D said:
Hypertransport / bus clocking with AM2/AM3 CPUs from the Phenom II on has simply sucked. They just don't clock that well. ACC addressed the issue but not well enough. Black Editions are the only way to ever go with AMD CPUs in my opinion. (At least for the enthusiast.)
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Not implying anything, but do you mean sucks in general, or sucks if you are an Intel pumper? Because if you look around the net at the million or so other people at hardware sites, you'd notice that users are generally quite happy with the ~+750MHz - +1GHz cpu clock they are getting with HT. Not that they need them since there is a BE at practially all price points.
And to those that say 6 cores are overkill, one only has to look at your sig and say, junk your i7's then. Because you do realize that that only confirms AMD's assertion of how inneficient Intel's implimentation of hyperthreading is, yes?
 
No doubt real cores are better than hyperthread "cores" but I think the only real advantages we'll see out of it are the typical bullcrap benchmark numbers until Win7 is out en-masse, OpenCL is more commonplace, and developers start really leveraging those available processing cores. BUT I'll prolly make the jump from 3 cores to 6 cores anyway if it comes out when I get my tax rebate. Oh the planning for that extra cash... Win7, DX11, SSD, and now this!
 
flippin_waffles said:
Not implying anything, but do you mean sucks in general, or sucks if you are an Intel pumper? Because if you look around the net at the million or so other people at hardware sites, you'd notice that users are generally quite happy with the ~+750MHz - +1GHz cpu clock they are getting with HT. Not that they need them since there is a BE at practially all price points.
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I meant sucks in general. I didn't say you couldn't get good overclocks on the Phenom II but what I did say was that pure bus clocking with them sucks and it does. When I can drop an Athlon X2 in the same board and get bus clocks of 350MHz all day long I'd say the Phenom II blows goats in that department. I stand by my statement: Black Editions are the only way to go if you are an overclocker and want to buy an AMD CPU.

flippin_waffles said:
And to those that say 6 cores are overkill, one only has to look at your sig and say, junk your i7's then. Because you do realize that that only confirms AMD's assertion of how inneficient Intel's implimentation of hyperthreading is, yes?
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How does AMD's release of a six core CPU (whos performance hasn't even really been showcased) confirm that Intel's implementation of Hyperthreading is inefficient? AMD's CPUs don't even support it and Intel's Core i7 is faster on a clock for clock basis than Phenom II is in most applications even without Hyperthreading. Intel has already had a six core CPU out for some time so I'm less than impressed by the fact that AMD took nearly a year to create one of their own. Granted Intel's six core CPU wasn't ever intended to be used in the desktop market and uses socket 604. So it has little to no relevance in the consumer market. Then again don't forget that Gulftown is coming as well. It will feature six cores and Hyperthreading and drop into existing X58 chipset based motherboards.

All that aside, a six-core Phenom II based chip is hardly worth getting excited for outside of the fact that it might very well be cheap cost wise. The performance of Thuban won't help it out perform Core i7 CPUs in applications that don't make use of that many threads. So it's release is far from a reason to "junk your Core i7" CPUs.
 
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The performance of Thuban won't help it out perform Core i7 CPUs in applications that don't make use of that many threads.
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At less than 3.2GHz, I would not expect to see it win many benchmarks versus i7 that use 5 threads or less so desktop reviews are not going to look good.
 
vvilliamm said:
i dun think people even use their quad cores much 0.0 having 6 cores hmm i wonder how does that compare to intels i7 920 having 8 threads i think the 6 cores will be 300 and then intels i7 920 is around the same price maybe even a drop when i9 comes out so hmm cause current amd quads cant even compare against the i7 =/ but hey i saved so much more with amd =]
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think outside of what you do, plenty of people use 3,4,6,8,12+ cores daily.
 
vvilliamm said:
i dun think people even use their quad cores much 0.0 having 6 cores hmm i wonder how does that compare to intels i7 920 having 8 threads i think the 6 cores will be 300 and then intels i7 920 is around the same price maybe even a drop when i9 comes out so hmm cause current amd quads cant even compare against the i7 =/ but hey i saved so much more with amd =]
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The Intel Core i7 920 can be had for $199.99. Granted only one place sells them that cheap, but they aren't really $300.00 either. Many places sell them for quite a bit less than that. As for Thuban pricing, who knows? We probably won't know much about that for some time now.
 
MrGuvernment said:
think outside of what you do, plenty of people use 3,4,6,8,12+ cores daily.
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I could use >4 cores at work for lung CT research where I have systems that have from 4 to 8 cores. I am looking currently for a new machine to replace an older dual processor dual core opteron workstation. At the top of this list is a i7 940 system (can not overclock on a cancer research machine).
 
I've got an 8 core (2x4 cores) system running Windows Server 2008 R2 with Active Directory etc. and VM's. I use this machine daily.
 
Dan_D said:
The Intel Core i7 920 can be had for $199.99. Granted only one place sells them that cheap, but they aren't really $300.00 either. Many places sell them for quite a bit less than that. As for Thuban pricing, who knows? We probably won't know much about that for some time now.
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since the 920 is discontinued by the time this processors released it will be impossible to buy one.. the question will come down to how willing is intel to drop the prices on its other cores.. by the time AMD released this processor their current quad cores will be 150 or less and half of them will be discontinued as well.. theres just to much time between the estimated release date and now to compare prices..

MrGuvernment said:
think outside of what you do, plenty of people use 3,4,6,8,12+ cores daily.
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more like many people do.. but id say maybe 1 in 10 actually use more then 2 cores on a quad or higher on daily use basis.. even gaming you cant really say they use the entire processor because very few games will even load up a quad core past 25% across 4 or more cores..
 
Sorry AMD fans, this would be the requisite "Intel > AMD" line: Wonderful, still waiting on a decent architecture vs Nehalem. AMD is entirely irrelevant to the enthusiast on the processor side in my opinion.
 
alg7_munif said:
So which is better for encoding? More cores or better efficiency?
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When it comes to encoding more is usually better but that line of thinking can be taken to either extreme. You can have a horrible processor with 6 cores vs. a very efficient and scalable design that has 4 cores in it. The latter would most likely win if the 6 core CPU was really bad. So as an example a 200MHz Pentium Pro with 12 cores wouldn't hope to match a 2.8GHz Gulftown in video encoding. At some point clock speed and architectural design factor in to the equation.

Nehalem and Gulftown are probably more efficient than Thuban is likely to be but when it comes to video encoding Thuban stands a good chance of beating out a Nehalem or Lynnfield processor provided that the clock speeds are relatively close. In such a scenario the extra processor cores will make up for the lack of efficiency or IPC performance in the Deneb (Phenom II X4) core's design compared to Nehalem / Lynnfield. The Deneb (Includes Regor and Propus, and most likely, Thuban) derrived CPUs need about a 400MHz or greater clock speed advantage for decisive wins in tests against Nehalem depending on the application. So a theoretical 2.8GHz Thuban would do well against the Core i7 920 at stock speeds or probably even the Core i7 950. Even though the Core i7 950 has a clock speed advantage against the 2.8GHz theoretical Thuban CPU, it has two less cores.

Now against Gulftown, Thuban doesn't stand a chance. I think even a 2.66GHz Gulftown would probably beat a 2.8GHz Thuban in video encoding. This is all speculation but assuming that there are no architectural changes to Thuban vs. Deneb. We also know that even if it isn't the most effecient or even effective thing in the world, multi-threaded applications do take advantage of Hyperthreading so I think that's another advantage Gulftown has over Thuban in terms of video encoding performance.

Video encoding has always been Intel's domain. Even the Pentium 4 which lost to the Athlon 64 in every other test was superior for video encoding at the time.
 
This is fantastic news.

I've been thinking of upgrading my 45w 4850/5050e virtual machine servers. I built them with cheapie boards that do support the am3 cpu's. They simply rock with KVM and I run about 10vm's on each.

I bought that platform at the time because ddr2 was much cheaper than ddr3 (not true now, but an yhow...). I maxed them with 8G ram and use > 4GB normally.

I have been thinking of dropping in the new 4core 2.6ghz 95W propus, but if 6-cores are around the corner, I think I can wait :)
 
Robstar said:
This is fantastic news.

I've been thinking of upgrading my 45w 4850/5050e virtual machine servers. I built them with cheapie boards that do support the am3 cpu's. They simply rock with KVM and I run about 10vm's on each.

I bought that platform at the time because ddr2 was much cheaper than ddr3 (not true now, but an yhow...). I maxed them with 8G ram and use > 4GB normally.

I have been thinking of dropping in the new 4core 2.6ghz 95W propus, but if 6-cores are around the corner, I think I can wait :)
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If you are concerned about TDP then Thuban probably isn't for you. I'm almost positive it will be more than 95watts. It will probably be in the 130watt range.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
more like many people do.. but id say maybe 1 in 10 actually use more then 2 cores on a quad or higher on daily use basis.. even gaming you cant really say they use the entire processor because very few games will even load up a quad core past 25% across 4 or more cores..
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Ya for sure, most joe blows barely use dual core, or even a fast single core, more so what is using the cores is background crap OEM's include.

but i would say ALOT of people truely can use more cores..


playing TF2 on my Q9650 @ 4.1 Ghz., i assignin hl2.exe to cores 1,2,3 and i get %60-%80 across them when i game, so some games can use it well, games are getting better and have in the last year, any game based on Valve source engine does, UT engie can as well and some others.


i would love to pop one of these into my AM2+ board to replace my tri-core @ 2.7Ghz. for VM's and testing.
 
My server's duties:

OS: Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
Roles:

VM server (3 VM's and counting.)
Exchange Server 2009
Active Directory
WSUS Server
Network testing for motherboard reviews
File / Media server

I'm still in the process of setting all that up but you get the idea. Believe me I can take advantage of the 8 cores.
 
After reading this I want to see what the vid encode benchmarks will show us. I also want to look at it because I can run 2x VMs (2 cores each) folding and still have 2 cores to run the system/game on.

 
my thoughts exactlt Dan, i am about to deploy an exchange server, an SVN server for my coder, a new HTTP server, some tweaks to our domain controller and i would prefer to test it first on my own rig before going production


more then 2 cores i would say is a niche market, but it cover many at that and to say that "most" wont use it, you must be FAR FAR more specific to those "most" as to what they are...

are we talking joe blow? or not as we all know joe blow would be happy with a P4 or AMDx64 single core.....
 
Should be a good upgrade for my newly-bought X3 system a good 1.5 years from now.
 
Sad thing is - multiple cores for server environments is greap...it's also great for people using distributed networking stuff to get more blocks of data processed.

However, I've yet to come across many games, etc, that take advantage of multiple cores as one would hope, so why would even an enthusiast want something like this, which will obviously cost more than a quad core chip from either side, for no gain?
 
There are two new sockets arriving ~March for the server market. Thuban is for AM3 though and is a desktop implementation of the Opteron Istanbul part. AM3 is not reaching end of life anytime soon. I expect to at least see 32nm parts for it before a new socket becomes necessary. AM3 still has a lot of headroom because none of the chips so far have been released at the 5600 MT/s specification of Hypertransport 3.0. Sure, you can overclock some of the better current chips to 2800MHz on the NB with extra voltage but then again whatever the future holds that comes at 2800MHz stock should overclock beyond 3GHz easily... Even then we're only talking about the NB speed because that has actual performance improvements with the L3 cache and IMC. Raising the HT Link speed above 2GHz has shown no benefits so far and thus we can conclude with a single socket system, HT 3.0 is enough for at least another generation of parts.
 
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