Do AMD cpus at least give a smoother desktop experience w/more cores?

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VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,452
10,120
126
From their results i5s are adequate for Integer + Intger tasks but not for intensive Integer + FP.

The Celeron and i3 are to be discarded even in INT + INT as they lack the necessary grunt, this can be witnessed in the Winrar + Witcher tests where they lose throughput on much bigger %ages than all other CPUs, and they have less throughput to begin with.
I still feel that this is purely L3 cache-size effects, which can be controlled by the dictionary size chosen for WinRAR.

And did they compare the FX-4300 against the i5-4670K? Because that is what would be fair, 4T versus 4T CPU. None of this "double the thread capability of the other guy", and of course, they show a throughput difference.

Edit: Also, when you speak of "not for intensive X", are you talking about throughput, or interactive latency while multi-tasking? And, if the WinRAR test was scripted, and run on the FX-8xxx as well as the Haswell i5, was the thread count fixed to 8, or higher? Or was the thread count different for the different CPUs? Because that would make a difference as far as throughput versus latency, as coercitiv's images showed for 7zip.
 
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Mar 10, 2006
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Can I get some context on this transconductance? I've seen it a few times before but I don't get the joke

Basically, there is a certain forum member who constantly claims that the "transconductance" -- basically a way to express the performance of a bipolar transistor -- of transistors from one manufacturer is superior than those from another.

The "joke" is that the user does not show his/her work and essentially uses "hand-wavey" arguments to prove his/her point. So whenever somebody makes an unsubstantiated and/or nonsensical claim, it may as well be attributed to "transconductance."
 

TheELF

Diamond Member
Dec 22, 2012
3,993
744
126
Their methodology is still adequate, actualy they must run winrar at 100% the time it take for CB to make the test, then they run CB several times consequently if necessary to check the compression time.
Where do they say that? Why would that even make sense?
They only say that they run CB for single and multi,for winrar they explicitly state that they compress the folder several times.

Of course the less cores you have the more % of the CPU is being used by a task like winrar.
 

Abwx

Lifer
Apr 2, 2011
11,172
3,869
136
Basically, there is a certain forum member who constantly claims that the "transconductance" -- basically a way to express the performance of a bipolar transistor -- of transistors from one manufacturer is superior than those from another.

For one transconductance is a caracteristics that relate an output current to an input voltage and has nothing to do with the transistor being bipolar or being a fet.

Indeed fets are commonly caracterised by their transconductance while bipolar are more often caracterised by the output current/input current, that is, by their current gain and not by their transconductance wich is way higher than the fet s..

Anyway the more you talk about those issues the more you are showing your incompetence in that matter, so it s no surprise that you are trying to ridicule what you know being out of your reach, the same as resorting to insults when there s no more valuable arguments to oppose, but i guess to each his own with his own capabilities and skills..
 

superstition

Platinum Member
Feb 2, 2008
2,219
221
101
And did they compare the FX-4300 against the i5-4670K? Because that is what would be fair, 4T versus 4T CPU.
Yes, so fair to compare a CPU with just two floating point units to one with four.

If you're doing pure integer testing then I suppose.
 

LPCTech

Senior member
Dec 11, 2013
680
93
86
For one transconductance is a caracteristics that relate an output current to an input voltage and has nothing to do with the transistor being bipolar or being a fet.

Indeed fets are commonly caracterised by their transconductance while bipolar are more often caracterised by the output current/input current, that is, by their current gain and not by their transconductance wich is way higher than the fet s..

Anyway the more you talk about those issues the more you are showing your incompetence in that matter, so it s no surprise that you are trying to ridicule what you know being out of your reach, the same as resorting to insults when there s no more valuable arguments to oppose, but i guess to each his own with his own capabilities and skills..

Since you spelled it the same way twice, Im assuming you thing characteristics and characterized is spelled "caracteristics" and "caracterised" but its not. This does not lend you credibility.

And may I say, that I have no idea what either of you are talking about and I wont pretend to.
 

TheELF

Diamond Member
Dec 22, 2012
3,993
744
126
What are you talking about? I thought that was a very common workload? I always fire up Winrar when I game.

It's not completely crazy to do some sort of very time consuming backup while you fire up a game to pass the time,but on the other hand that's why winrar has a "background" button and also that's why you have FPS limiters so you can decide on your own how much FPS you are willing to sacrifice in order for the background task to finish sooner.
 

Abwx

Lifer
Apr 2, 2011
11,172
3,869
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Where do they say that? Why would that even make sense?
They only say that they run CB for single and multi,for winrar they explicitly state that they compress the folder several times.

Of course the less cores you have the more % of the CPU is being used by a task like winrar.

It make sense to keep the CPU fully loaded with winrar to check the CB runtime, otherwise the test wouldnt make sense..

Likewise CB should be running all the time needed to compress the folder to see the influence on the compression time, otherwise it wouldnt make sense as well.

Or would your do otherwise..?..
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,452
10,120
126
Yes, so fair to compare a CPU with just two floating point units to one with four.

If you're doing pure integer testing then I suppose.

Yes, so fair to compare a CPU with just 4 integer threads to one with 8.

Then compare an FX-8xxx with an i5, while limiting the number of CPU logical cores on the FX to 4, that way you are comparing 4 modules / FPUs to 4 cores / FPUs on the i5.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,452
10,120
126
It make sense to keep the CPU fully loaded with winrar to check the CB runtime, otherwise the test wouldnt make sense..

Likewise CB should be running all the time needed to compress the folder to see the influence on the compression time, otherwise it wouldnt make sense as well.

Or would your do otherwise..?..

It shouldn't matter that much. One should be able to check the CPU time elapsed for the process, regardless of how much wall time it takes.
 

superstition

Platinum Member
Feb 2, 2008
2,219
221
101
Yes, so fair to compare a CPU with just 4 integer threads to one with 8.
Given the price difference and the Cinebench obsession it's a lot more fair.
Then compare an FX-8xxx with an i5, while limiting the number of CPU logical cores on the FX to 4
That's not an efficient scenario for the FX design. It was designed to have both integer cores in a module. How about comparing transistors per core?
 

superstition

Platinum Member
Feb 2, 2008
2,219
221
101
Vishera: 1.2B
Haswell GT2 4C: 1.4B

Haswell likely has quite a few more transistors per core, although it would be nice to know how much is eaten by iGPU.
 

escrow4

Diamond Member
Feb 4, 2013
3,339
122
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Xvid isn't even close for overall usage. x264 is to go-to codec for nearly every cell phone and tablet besides being incredibly common on desktops.

No. XviD is incredibly common still a decade later as an all rounder which x264 can't touch. If you are not on a stack of trackers don't comment.
 

AtenRa

Lifer
Feb 2, 2009
14,003
3,361
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Technically to compare throughput and be fair you need to compare the following.

Intel Dual Core no HT vs AMD Dual Module single core each.

Intel Dual Core + HT vs AMD Dual Module

Intel Quad Core no HT vs AMD Quad Module single core each

Intel Quad Core + HT vs AMD Quad Module.
 

The Stilt

Golden Member
Dec 5, 2015
1,709
3,057
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You should only compare NATIVE cores, not the SMT or CMT cores / threads at all. CMT on 15h designs produces 80-93% yield of a native core while SMT peaks at < 27%. I.E. on AMD 15h parts the non-BSC of the module should be disabled through down coring and on Intel the Hyperthreading should be disabled.
 

intangir

Member
Jun 13, 2005
113
0
76
From what I understand, Abwx implies that due to their OoOE design, cores end up executing instructions from a thread even when their time slice is done and the CPU is currently servicing another thread. I find that hard to believe, but I'm already near the limit of my CPU&OS understanding, in which a thread requires execution context in order to run.

I would really appreciate it if someone with better understanding of CPU internals could shed some light here.

You rang?

Sounds like y'all could benefit from reading up on the differences between multithreading approaches that a processor core could implement. Paul Demone wrote a good treatment in his RealWorldTech article on what was planned for the Alpha EV8 chip. Jon Stokes of ArsTechnica wrote a good hyperthreading primer too.

And no, a non-multithreaded core cannot schedule more than one thread at a time. Any multitasking execution on a non-multithreaded core is done through time-slicing separated by context switches, giving only the illusion of parallelism. In a given CPU cycle, only one thread is actually active at a time. When implementing SMT, a CPU core needs to replicate the instruction pointer register (IP, or PC aka program counter) for each hardware thread it supports. Each IP register represents one active thread of execution.

Edit: Thinking about it more, I feel strongly that there is at least SOME serialization going on in the core, when switching thread contexts, because otherwise, a few micro-ops from one (prior) thread, would get access to the page(s) of memory of the (newly-scheduled) thread, and that could present a security issue from the standpoint of the processor architecture.
Likewise, there would be two sets of registers for the memory access descriptors in the processor, one bank for each hyperthread. (This is my speculation.) Unless the AGUs and load/store units only deal with physical addresses somehow.

That's what the OS context switch code is for, doing any required saving of state and flushing of memory mappings when swapping a core to a different process/thread.

You might have heard of the 32-bit Linux kernel's 3GB/1GB user/kernel partition of virtual memory or the similar 2 GB memory limit per process in 32-bit Windows? It exists because every thread has to keep OS code mapped in a standard place in virtual memory across all threads, in case an interrupt happens and OS functions have to be executed. That reserves a certain portion of the 32-bit address space, so you can't actually have access to a full 4 GB of user memory as you might expect from having 2^32 memory addresses.

That being said, the data security considerations only go so far, or cache wouldn't be shared across cores. Researchers have demonstrated retrieval of AES keys across VMs in systems that share cache among cores. There's a certain tradeoff between security and performance.
 
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AtenRa

Lifer
Feb 2, 2009
14,003
3,361
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You should only compare NATIVE cores, not the SMT or CMT cores / threads at all. CMT on 15h designs produces 80-93% yield of a native core while SMT peaks at < 27%. I.E. on AMD 15h parts the non-BSC of the module should be disabled through down coring and on Intel the Hyperthreading should be disabled.

That is not fair comparison, BD single Core is a lot smaller than Intel Core. Comparing one Module vs one Intel Core + HT is the only technically sound action. At 32nm both AMD Module and Intel Core (+HT) almost has the same size.
That way both could use 100% of their resources and that will give you Throughput for each of them.
 

The Stilt

Golden Member
Dec 5, 2015
1,709
3,057
106
That is not fair comparison, BD single Core is a lot smaller than Intel Core. Comparing one Module vs one Intel Core + HT is the only technically sound action. At 32nm both AMD Module and Intel Core (+HT) almost has the same size.
That way both could use 100% of their resources and that will give you Throughput for each of them.

You said it, not fair. That's because the Intel SMT "core" is < 1/10 of the relative size of AMD CMT core :sneaky: On Excavator the hardware for the non-BSC core require around < 56% of the area of a BSC core. On Broadwell and Skylake the hardware required for SMT takes < 5% of the area of a native core.

EDIT: Broadwell & Skylake > 5% to < 5%.
 
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MiddleOfTheRoad

Golden Member
Aug 6, 2014
1,123
5
0
No. XviD is incredibly common still a decade later as an all rounder which x264 can't touch. If you are not on a stack of trackers don't comment.

Well, yeah -- it's fairly popular for pirates. People who actually pay for their content legally, not so much. x264 is the #1 most common codec used worldwide for HD content -- and it has been that way for nearly a decade. You see, facts are not based on your opinion. That's why they are facts.

Considering xVid can't even be used in many countries due to legal reasons / patent problems -- you really don't know what you're talking about. H.264 is way more common worldwide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xvid

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC
 
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coercitiv

Diamond Member
Jan 24, 2014
6,403
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Well, yeah -- it's fairly popular for pirates. People who actually pay for their content legally, not so much. x264 is the #1 most common codec used worldwide for HD content -- and it has been that way for nearly a decade. You see, facts are not based on your opinion. That's why they are facts.

Considering xVid can't even be used in many countries due to legal reasons / patent problems -- you really don't know what you're talking about. H.264 is way more common worldwide.
Most of the pirated content available through torrents where I live is x264. xVid is present as the second choice, but mainly for low resolution / low bitrate content.

Moreover, x264 usage can only go up as Netflix and other legal means of watching content are finally available as well.
 

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
20,378
145
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x264 is quickly being replaced by h265/vp9 tho.

And xvid doesnt have a legal issue after 1.0 release.
 
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