Istanbul Demoed, Let's Drink Soda

[informal]

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/16448

HT assist seems to be something nifty. Plus HT3.0 will suffice for 12 cores and help 24 thread scaling.

For a drop-in upgrade to Socket F it seems wicked nice. It won't win SAP SD benchmarks because it's not quad-channel DDR3 at work yet, but for HPC and Virtualization it should definitely give some sense to a certain CPU called Gainestown.


(And no, Gulftown was not on demo at IDF. It should not catch Q3 or Q4 of 2009, probably Q2 2010 for servers. Magny probably comes 1 quarter later with QC DDR3.)

Wicked demo,thanks for posting the news Macadamia .

24 cores in task manager

What is more interesting is the perf. scaling. 1.68x more performance in Stream benchmark for 1.5x more cores that all the chances are were working at lower clocks in Istanbul's case.
Probable reason: "HT Assist"

Part of the answer, it seems, may be a feature new to Istanbul that AMD calls HT assist (presumably for HyperTransport assist). This feature is what the company calls a probe filter (and may more commonly be called a snoop filter) that functions to reduce traffic on socket-to-socket HyperTransport links by storing an index of all caches and preventing unnecessary coherency synchronization requests. Current Opteron systems use a broadcast-based probe protocol, sending probe requests to all sockets. Istanbul, instead, either knows that no probes are required or is able to do a directed probe to a single socket. (Although it may still use broadcasts in certain, specific situations.) Istanbul's probe filter stores its data in the processor's L3 cache. The amount of cache space dedicated to probe filter storage, AMD says, will be configurable in the BIOS, and the more space dedicated to probe filter storage, the more granular its operation will be.

Comment on validation of six core parts:

Beyond that, AMD expects system vendors to treat Istanbul very much like any other new Opteron speed grade, with a much easier qualification path than an all-new product. That should mean fairly quick and widespread adoption of six-core Opterons among vendors shipping Shanghai-based systems today, if all goes as planned.

The Istanbul core obviously taped out some time ago,probably Q3 2008.Being souped-up and upgraded Shanghai,AMD should have no problems launching the parts in Q3.

[Chad Boga]

The Istanbul core obviously taped out some time ago,probably Q3 2008.Being souped-up and upgraded Shanghai,AMD should have no problems launching the parts in Q3.

Don't these sorts of products tend to show up 9 to 12 months after a demo like this?

[informal]

Don't these sorts of products tend to show up 9 to 12 months after a demo like this?

Nope,12 months after the tape out(provided the health of the stepping/revision is good-which in case of Istanbul should be no problem due to the "nature" of the chip and it being based on already proven Shanghai core)

[Macadamia]

Don't these sorts of products tend to show up 9 to 12 months after a demo like this?

Timeline:

45nm Shanghai first demo (just working CPUs, I don't think even load testing was involved): March 2008

Shanghai availability: Oct-Nov 2008 (We'll say Nov for convenience's sake)

Istanbul first demo, with load tests: Late Feb 09

Istanbul availability: At worst Q4 09, BUT this time AMD doesn't need to deal with a pesky process transition. Still I'm putting availability at early Q4, which is same as Shanghai.

[Chad Boga]

Timeline:

45nm Shanghai first demo (just working CPUs, I don't think even load testing was involved): March 2008

Shanghai availability: Oct-Nov 2008 (We'll say Nov for convenience's sake)

Istanbul first demo, with load tests: Late Feb 09

Istanbul availability: At worst Q4 09, BUT this time AMD doesn't need to deal with a pesky process transition. Still I'm putting availability at early Q4, which is same as Shanghai.

Okay, I'm too lazy to look, but is Istanbul then likely to be out before the 8 core Nehalem variant?

[Macadamia]

Okay, I'm too lazy to look, but is Istanbul then likely to be out before the 8 core Nehalem variant?

Maybe. But they're not exactly going to be competition.

Nehalem EX is 4+ CPU Sockets, each likely starting to sell at $2.5k USD and above. AMDs chance of competing with it will be its MCM (Hypertransport, not FSB) Istanbul (Magny-Cours) products with quad channel buffered DDR3 support.

The MCM Istanbul is perhaps more interesting than Nehalem EX, mostly because it can be implemented in 2P configurations too, at the cheaper rate AMD is charging now (<1.5k USD). It's going against Gulftown at 2P configs.

[m^2]

Maybe. But they're not exactly going to be competition.

Nehalem EX is 4+ CPU Sockets, each likely starting to sell at $2.5k USD and above. AMDs chance of competing with it will be its MCM (Hypertransport, not FSB) Istanbul (Magny-Cours) products with quad channel buffered DDR3 support.

The MCM Istanbul is perhaps more interesting than Nehalem EX, mostly because it can be implemented in 2P configurations too, at the cheaper rate AMD is charging now (<1.5k USD). It's going against Gulftown at 2P configs.

They surely are a competition. Istanbul scales to 48 cores. Nehalem to 32 with 64 threads (some say that double as much). Fight!

[savantu]

They surely are a competition. Istanbul scales to 48 cores. Nehalem to 32 with 64 threads (some say that double as much). Fight!

??

IBM xSeries scale to 16 sockets for Xeon ( older variants could do 32 sockets, not sure if this is still true ) .That is 96 cores.
If Nehalem EX based XSeries sticks to the same line , there would be 128 cores with 256 threads.Unisys offers a similar box with Dunnington, 16 sockets for a total of 96 cores.

From the looks of it , SGI will build a large Altix based Xeon, imagine 512 sockets with 8 cores/16 threads per socket.Problem is if they will be around when Beckton launches.