Rahul,
Product quality can vary from run to run.... especially on new
hardware with lot's of new features.
an example of the press on issues is....
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2007/12/bad-news-for-ba/
I think there was a run or 2 after the initial test chips that had
early adopters scratching their heads, but it was cleaned up quickly.
Barcelona was the first AMD 4 Core processor package with integrated
caching across all 4 cores and the first with 4 Flops per core AMD
proc so they were making some giant leaps while trying to maintain
backward compatibility with the socket. Very ambitious, risky, and a
lot of "cool" factor features... The fact that it worked at all is
impressive in a certain way! It didn't come out in a timely fashion
and the "cool" features didn't really benefit my customer's codes....
but it certainly created opportunity for coders to revisit what they
would do with tightly coupled caches between cores.
I'm not a programmer, so I don't really know the short term value of
some of those features but goodness can only come from more options
when it comes to the challenge of parallelizing tasks.
Cheers!
Greg
On May 13, 2009, at 6:22 PM, Rahul Nabar wrote:
On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 7:05 PM, Greg Keller <g...@keller.net> wrote:
AMD Barcelona was the first 4 flops per cycle processor from AMD,
and it hit
the street with some problems right when the list was coming out in
end of
2007.
That's interesting. What kind of "problems"? Do CPU designers mess up
and leave bugs on too? I heard of an old Intel floating point error
but nothing else. Do later versions of CPUs get these bugfixes? Or are
CPU designs pretty static until they come out with a new proc number /
proc line?
It might change my perspective on the risks of going for a "brand
new" CPU.
--
Rahul
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