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The Barcelona (aka "K10") microarchitecture is the latest design from AMD for both the server and desktop markets. The Phenom is the quad-core desktop variant, the Athlon X2 series includes the dual-core variant, and the 23xx and 83xx Opterons are the quad-core server varient.
The key changes over the previous line are covered in brief here and in greater detail here. Most of the interesting features require the use of an upgraded CPU socket denoted by a "+" (e.g. Socket AM2+ or Socket F+), though the CPU will work in non-plus sockets on current motherboards. Some of the "plus socket" features are:
• Separated voltage planes allow the CPU to have a different voltage/frequency for each core and the northbridge.
• HyperTransport 3.0, allowing greater bus bandwidth, including support for DDR2-1066.
In addition, the Barcelona introduces a shared L3 cache, which should have a major impact on HPC applications.
One major issue, however, is an L3 TLB bug present in the first generation of this architecture. This problem can be solved by disabling part of the L3 TLB system in the BIOS or via software (with a 10% performance penalty), or using a unique Linux patch to route around the problem with limited slowdown (but the patch is not intended for production use). See the Phenom wikipedia article for details.
In short, while Intel retains the upper hand in horsepower now, the AMD Barcelona design seems to sport many of the features predicted for future system design.
More information:
Wikipedia's Barcelona article covers the architecture in depth.
Anandtech benchmarking puts the chip through its paces.
To find a Barcelona-based chip, see Wikipedia:
• Phenom quad-cores
• Barcelona-based dual-core Athlons (scroll to "Phenom based")
• Barcelona-based quad-core Opterons (23xx and 83xx)
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This recent "Innovations" article highlights "utility computing", the idea that virtualization, shared storage, and other technologies will come together to commoditize business computing.
While I agree with the general idea, the author predicts that this will marginalize IT as a field, which seems counter-intuitive. While this kind of computing does allow fewer people to manage more systems, it does make that management that much more complicated. Further, IT has always been about helping users as much as maintaining infrastructure. So I don't see the general IT realm getting eaten by other fields, but rather splintering into specialists in networking, storage, (virtual) system administration, support, etc.
Finally, I found this quote pretty funny:
Teenagers entering higher education today are already skilled at building personal application spaces on Facebook using software modules. It’s a small step to apply those principles to business applications.
"A small step" to go from facebook to a crucial business application? Seems unlikely.
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The article explains the difference in detail. Now, I can understand why it's too difficult to run Java Web server on OpenVZ for evaluating TPCW benchmarks.
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There is some good information about adaptive power management at Berkeley. It appears to be a position statement/paper in construction arguing for power management in data centers.
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Ubuntu 7.10 was released today. You can get it from one of the official mirrors or from our unofficial mirror. Notable new features include:
- Improved support for multiple monitors, rotatable monitors, etc.
- Plug and play printer detection
- NTFS writing support out-of-box
- Kernel "dynamic ticks", meaning that the kernel doesn't have to wake up 1000 times per second any more, thus saving power.
- Full or partial hard disk encryption selectable at install time
Okay, this still isn't "research" news, but I like it.
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The EPA has issued its report on data center energy consumption.
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By way of Ars Technica, we find that Citrix (whose software provides virtual Windows desktop environments accessible anywhere, among other things) has purchased XenSource, the commercial arm of the Xen hypervisor virtualization project. Hopefully they'll make it less of a pain to use and deploy Xen.
Also, VMware went public last Tuesday with a successful IPO. Hopefully they'll keep putting out non-commercial freeware like VMware server and player. Maybe we'll some day seen a free (but likely crippled) version of ESX?
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By way of slashdot, we find that the Linux kernel (2.6.23 and up) now sports three virtualization techniques out-of-box: KVM, Xen (just merged), and Lguest (also recently merged).
Lguest in particular looks interesting, as it doesn't require virtualization hardware support (like KVM), but is as simple as a single modprobe (as opposed to the Xen behemoth). Performance isn't too great right now, though (-30%).
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This Ars Technica article spotlights the development of power-aware technologies at the chip, system, network, and data center levels. It analyzes recent developments in terms of granularity, i.e. the frequency of reaction. Overall, a well written article.
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