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AMD Launches Counterstrike Against Core 2 Duo
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Jul 14, 2006 02:42 PM
from the back-and-forth dept.
from the back-and-forth dept.
DigitalDame2 writes to mention a PC Magazine article about the AMD 4x4 enthusiast platform, which is meant to counter Core 2 Duo. The article observes that AMD is now facing many of the same business practices it used in its war against Intel. From the article: "While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, improvement can often be a slap in the face. Intel's C2D was designed with both low power and performance per watt in mind, two key design metrics that helped AMD cut into Intel's market share with the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 X2. And, as preliminary numbers have indicated and final performance reviews now show, the C2D has learned its lesson well: its performance now tops AMD's Athlon 64 architecture by a substantial margin."
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Intel's Core 2 Desktop Processors Tested 335 comments
Steve Kerrison writes "It's early morning here in the UK, but that doesn't stop us from being around to see the launch of Conroe and friends, Intel's newest desktop chips. Even a $180 Intel CPU can beat an Athlon FX-62 in a number of tests. Now that's bound to get the fanboy blood pumping, right? We've also taken a look at a pre-built system that's powered by the Extreme X6800 CPU, along with an nForce 4 SLI chipset. As you'd expect, it's quick."
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4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else (Score:5, Interesting)
Why?
Consider the cost of Athlon X2 processors:
http://www.pricewatch.com/cpu/442067-1.htm [pricewatch.com]
The least expensive Athlon X2 costs a cool 300 bucks, while the mid-range Core 2 Duo (Conroe) E6600 costs $315 (projected wholesale price).
Now factor in a more expensive (because of 2 processor sockets) 4X4 motherboard, two Athlon X2 chips at $300, and you wind up with a $350 to $400 surcharge for being an AMD fanboy.
The situation gets worse if you want a high-end system:
Two FX-62 will set you back $1045 + $1045 = $2090
http://www.pricewatch.com/cpu/992212-1.htm [pricewatch.com]
and while this combination is expected to outperform a single Core 2 Duo at $1057
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=E6800&btnG=Se
factoring in the more expensive two-socket motherboard expect to pay a cool $1100 more than for the E6800 system.
Personally, I'll probably buy an E6600 ($315) or an E6400 ($240) as soon as they become available.
Re:4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else (Score:5, Informative)
Wake me up when it's really a 4x4. (Score:5, Insightful)
Two cores per processor times two processors ought to be called a 2x2, and a 4x4 ought to mean a four-socket mobo with four quad-core processors, for a total of 16 cores. Similarly, what they're calling an "8x8" ought to be called a 2x4, or maybe a 4x2, since it's four processors times two processors per core.
For an 'enthusiast' product -- which they're apparently hoping to sell to people who have a clue -- that's a stupid way to name it. Plus, as multi-processor, multi-core systems become more prevalent in the future, it would be nice to have some clear nomenclature to describe them. AMD is just starting everyone off on the wrong foot by calling their dual-core/two-way systems "4-by-anythings".
Re:4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else (Score:4, Informative)
The article says otherwise.
Re:You are Right: AMD may Die (Score:5, Insightful)
Their server chips will continue to sell well. Opteron is still very competitive in multiprocessor systems.
There will still be people buying AMD processors based on price and past performance. If you've got some market share people will come back to you for upgrades.
AMD has other sources of income than just CPUs. Their flash memory is the most obvious one.
AMD made a name for itself as being a low cost alternative to Intel years ago. This trip into the high end is a new thing and it made them a nice pile of money to invest in the next generation due out next year.
All of that being said, I'm still going to be buying a Conroe. But your predition of the company going under is a major exaggeration. They will most likely be back and strong around a year to a year and a half from now.
Re:4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a software engineer working at The Internet Archive, and I write parallel software every day (sometimes with PVM for "real" applications, but more often as throwaway perl slammed out on the command line, using open3() to open several simultaneous subprocesses, sometimes fed data by the parent but more often each reading from a different data file). Much of what I do is "trivially parallelizable", meaning it's pretty easy to make scale across multiple processors or machines. It is my impression that most real-life problems seen by most businesses are trivially parallelizable, with the rare exceptions hogging all the attention by dint of being more interesting.
My workstation is a single-processor machine, but I have at my exclusive disposal a dual-xeon machine and two AMD dual-core machines. I'm always scp'ing my work up to them from my workstation so I can take advantage of their multi-process goodness. (Developing while ssh'd into those machines is usually not a good idea, since the network likes to go down or slow down a lot between Archive HQ and our datacenters, and our HQ firewall blocks PVM so I can't just make my workstation the PVM master node with the other three machines slaves.)
When I read this article, my initial reaction was "Enthusiasts, hell! I want as many of these as I can get for servers!" (assuming this 4x4 product is significantly cheaper than current dual-opteron products -- we're a non-profit, without a lot to spend on hardware, and we're always running on the edge of starvation. But maybe that's a bad assumption and these will be prohibitively pricey).
If someone offered me a 4x4 or 8x8 for my desktop, though, I'd accept it gladly, and make good use of it, parsing/analyzing Archive metadata, processing multiple simultaneous http streams (we use a lot of http-rpc here, and xml data representation which means each http-rpc stream can suck down a lot of processing power), md5'ing multiple files in parallel, and the like. I'd probably also make more extensive use of bzip2 than I do currently :-)
My datasets commonly consist of hundreds or thousands of files, each of which can be processed in parallel, so I can keep throwing cores at the problem with near-linear scalability until I grind against disk or bus bandwidth limits (at which point the data needs to start out distributed in order to keep scaling).
Just my $0.02
-- TTK
umm? comparison to Intel please... (Score:4, Interesting)
Counterstrike (Score:4, Funny)
Performance improvement? (Score:4, Interesting)
It was all GPU (Score:4, Insightful)
Performance number? (Score:4, Interesting)
Doesn't AMD already label their processors with a relatively meaningless number designed to... say... redefine how consumers think about processor speed?
Was that a highly effective marketing technique? I mean, I guess it did get people to think about speed, and it helped convince many people that GHz isn't the be-all and end-all of processor comparison. But at some point won't people just be annoyed by the mess of pretend numbers AMD is throwing around to "make us think?"
Fanboyism... (Score:4, Insightful)
"well.. my dad can beat up your dad!" (Score:5, Insightful)
So we'll have to buy TWO processors to compete with what Intel is doing with one? If they're aiming for the Enthusiast market they have to remember that "enthusiasts" have price constraints (usually referred to as "wife")
I could be wrong. But I really don't think I am.
Forget the small details... (Score:5, Insightful)
What matters is that AMD has captured sufficient marketshare over the last years to become a real competitor to Intel. Opterons have become the CPU of choice for large servers, the niche that Itanium was meant to capture.
Now Intel's comeback means we're seeing the start of a new growth of CPU power, this time into multi-core land, a nice solid metric on which to compete. You can fudge the Ghz but you can't really fudge the number of cores. This means we have the perfect conditions for an explosion of growth, until the numbers get into meaningless territory. Within 3-4 years, common desktops will have 8 to 16 cores, and high-end workstations will have 128 or more.
I'm just very glad my company made the move to writing multithreaded code so we can get the best from this new landscape.
And in other news (Score:5, Funny)
Intel leading with heat and watts (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been a few benchmarks (I believe one was on Anandtech's site) that have shown Intel Xeons running in 64bit mode performed slower than the same processor running in 32bit mode. Now, I know, we're talking about copying larger data segments around, because the address space is larger, so a bit of a slowdown in some areas are expected. But when they're talking 5% slower, thats a bit.
We replaced 3 Dual Intel Xeon servers (2.8GHz Xeons) with 4G of RAM each, with a single AMD Dual Opteron server, running in 64bit mode for MySQL. This system is immensely faster than the old Xeon systems. MySQL shows upto 23% performance increases in SELECT commands on 64bit vs 32bit on the AMD. On the Intel, it was a performance loss.
As far as heat output, the air coming out the back of this server feels cooler, not to mention that it replaced 3 servers with one.
People need to focus on the server market, and not the desktop market to see the real king in the (x86) CPU wars. Lets not forget hypertransport, and seperate data paths for memory and IO, whereas the Xeon has a shared 800MHz FSB (now 1066 with the newer rendition).
Re:Intel leading with heat and watts (Score:4, Interesting)
We had (2) IBM servers (Dual AMD 64-bit Opteron) with 12GB ram each running 32-bit RHEL3 and Oracle 10g. Because it was 32-bit RH it was only using 4GB in each server. We upgraded the RHEL3-64 and Oracle 10g 64-bit (using all 12GB of memory in each box) and we got about 140% improvement on the same hardware.
What was the difference? 8 more GB of ram each. The fact that a single server has 12GB of ram and all queries happen on a single server makes a HUGE difference than have (3) servers with only 4GB of ram as the database can cache more data in memory.
While I don't know your *true* setup, I can say that a single server with a TON of ram will kill many servers with only a little bit of ram on simple select statements. CPU doesn't do a whole lot on select statements compared to what it will do on say stored procs or all kinds of subselects/joins/aggregate functions in your select statements.
This is just dual dual-core (Score:4, Insightful)
FINALLY! (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD CEO to Marketing: "Attention marketing team: Full Steam Ahead with the scrambling and spinning in place!"
I'm going to take a few moments to enjoy AMD's panic. Because: a) its been a long time, and b) it probably won't last long.
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
*ducks*
Misleading title... (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone not getting it (Score:5, Interesting)
There are already Xilinx cards available because this has been used in Cray supercomputers for a while (the Opteron ones anyways). This means AMD can counter ANYTHING Intel puts out because you can just slap a $20 speciality DSP on the mobo which could easily be 100x faster than that Intel chip at whatever small set of functions it needs. Video cards are already in the works for this along with all kinds of audio and video stuff. I seem to remember one manufacturer has a RAID processor. The possibilities are endless.
Re:Part of the vicious cycle in Tech (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Part of the vicious cycle in Tech (Score:5, Interesting)
At home, I keep a $640 check I wrote back in 1990 for a 486 CPU.
It's framed and visible on top of a bookcase to serve as a reminder.
At the time, I thought it was a great deal; screaming processors were
never going to get much cheaper than that!
These days, last years tech (or even two years ago tech) is usually
MORE than sufficient. Except for games, which always seem to
need NEXT years processor in order to be playable...
Re:I for one... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the two most demanding uses for a computer.
The rest is futile.