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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (257474)	12/20/2008 11:01:59 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Intel's current hardware virtualization is pretty lame, but they're trying to fix it on Nehalem. Virtualization on current Intel products is like Vista on VIA CPUs - you can do it, but you wouldn't want to. :-) Here's an article quoting a VMware engineer: VMware engineer praises AMD's Nested Page Tables By Bridget Botelho, News Writer 21 Jul 2008 \| SearchServerVirtualization.com The Nested Page Table (NPT) technology in Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s quad-core processor Barcelona may be the answer to virtualizing large workloads, said a prominent VMware Inc. engineer. Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI), a feature of AMD's third-generation Opteron, includes NPT, which help reduce the performance overhead of virtualizing large applications such as databases. Richard McDougall, a principal engineer and the chief performance architect in the Office of the CTO at VMware Inc., gave a session at the June Usenix conference in Boston in which he gave the technology high praise. "With AMD NPT, we have come to a turning point. It looks like exactly the right answer going forward … and there is less memory overhead -- less than 5%," McDougall told session attendees. According to AMD's director of commercial solutions and software strategy, Margaret Lewis, "Large applications that users don't want to virtualize because of the possible performance overhead will benefit from RVI. It is the next step in hardware-assisted virtualization." How NPT works OSes use processor paging to isolate these processes' addresses and use memory. Paging is the process of translating a process-specific address to a system's physical address. But when virtualization is thrown into the mix, address translation becomes a challenge because virtual machines (VMs) don't have native direct access to the host server memory, according to an AMD white paper on NPT. As a result, a hypervisor ends up virtualizing a "read only" layer of memory between physical memory and the page tables in the guest OS, which is known as shadow paging. Unfortunately, creating shadow pages requires CPU and memory, and this adds extra performance overhead, said Tim Mueting, AMD's manager of virtualization solutions. "With shadow paging, the guest OS and the hypervisor have duplicates, so double the work is being done," Mueting said. To solve this problem, AMD introduced hardware support for a second or nested level of address translation, now used in Barcelona processors with RVI. With nested paging, a page table in the hardware takes care of the translation between the guest address of a VM and the physical address, reducing overhead, Mueting said. Intel Corp. has announced a similar technology that it calls Extended Page Tables (EPT) , which will be available in its next-generation eight-core microarchitecture, code-named "Nehalem," slated for production later this year. NPT: The bigger the workload, the better With nested paging, the benefits of AMD-V technology becomes more apparent as workload size increases, Mueting said. "Because of the nature of Nested Page Tables, we see better results with larger workloads when looking at virtualization without NPT," he said. "If I am running Xen or VMware workloads against a database server, I will see an improvement, because it requires lots of memory and a lot of translating goes on. We have also seen performance increases in Web servers. We also see improvements across the board with 64-bit applications." Still, if a user consolidates a small handful of 32-bit file servers with VMware and running them on AMD Barcelona with virtualization-assist technology, he won't see a huge performance increase, because the workload is relatively small, Lewis said. " File servers don't offer the type of workload that [nested paging] can really improve on. But if you give it a large database environment, NPT in RVI really becomes a benefit," Lewis said. AMD-V technology with NPT works with all VMware software since the 3.5.1 release and all versions of Xen since Xen 3.2. It does not work with Microsoft's current version of Hyper-V, but Mueting expects that future releases will. searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com

To: combjelly who wrote (257474)	12/21/2008 2:44:29 AM
From: wbmw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

CJ, you're welcome to argue micro-architecture with someone who understands the subject enough to get into the nitty gritty details: siliconinvestor.com Otherwise, most of this conversation is past the point where I can have a two way conversation with you. Re: At 65nm, the processor core for A8 occupies about 9mm^2. Are you claiming that the processor core of an Atom is smaller than that? 9mm2 under which configuration? There are lots of ARM implementations, and many checklist features which can be included or excluded to save space and/or power, such as L1 cache, L2 cache, media instructions, and other features. ARM has done a fantastic job with modularity, but raw size is really meaningless in the first place. Performance per area is much more relevant, and if you want to present me with a quantitative comparison - with links - that proves your point, I will be happy to see your data. However, most of your arguments seem like apples to oranges, and without providing the details, I think it's pointless to continue. Re: "Why wouldn't the average end user prefer Windows?" >> Because to include and support it, the costs are pushed up to about what a regular laptop would cost. Complete bull. Here's a 10" Atom and Windows XP based Eee PC for $349.99 after rebate ($389.99 before), and it includes 1GB of memory and a 160GB drive. Also claims 7 hours of battery, but even 5 "real" hours would be great for consumers. Show me an ARM and Linux based Netbook with greater value. newegg.com

To: combjelly who wrote (257474)	12/21/2008 3:02:36 AM
From: wbmw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

CJ, is this an example of a good ARM based consumer device? umpcportal.com just got an archos7/320 a few days ago and updated to latest firmware 1.2.05. the software of this unit is unbelievably bad! it crashes so often that it is definitely not fun to work with. the principal design of the unit is fine. also, the user interface is not bad at all. but the software just isn't stable. i have been web browsing mostly and the damn browser crashes every half hour or so. the unit freezes completely and only a full reset will re-awake it. and i am not doing anything esoteric. just normal browsing. also, websites above a certain size will simply not display correctly. don't know what the size limit is exactly. something around 400KB or so, which really isn't much. how can anybody sell such a piece of crap software!? i am a software designer for 30 years and i have seen some crappy software in my time but this one is just unbelievably bad. at this point i absolutely CAN NOT RECOMMEND this unit. other bad points: 1. wifi range is VERY short. 2. touch screen is VERY imprecise! if you're in the browser and want to click on a link do not click on the link! yes, that's right. would be way to easy now, wouldn't it? you actually have to click above the link and slightly to the right. i don't think i am the only one with the touch screen problem. i have seen it in a review video (i believe it was an archos 5) on the internet. i think it was on youtube. reviewer had the same problem. folks, DO NOT BUY THIS UNIT. software is crap and needs MUCH work before this unit is usable. also, price is VERY high and you don't even get all the codecs you need. you have to BUY codecs you will certainly need. also, support is totally useless. i asked very precise questions and all i get is pre-fabricated responses, probably from some folks in india who have never seen a unit in their lives. if i don't see improvements VERY SOON i will return my unit and post whereever i can and tell people NOT TO BUY this thing. i hope some archos folks are reading this. you got yourselves a VERY unhappy customer. cheers, h