AMD's Barcelona to Outpace Intel by 50% 199
Gr8Apes writes "AMD is upping the performance numbers for Barcelona by stating that "Barcelona will have a 50% advantage over Clovertown in floating point applications and 20% in integer performance 'over the competition's highest-performing quad-core processor at the same frequency'". AMD also claims that the new 3.0 GHz Opterons beat comparable Intel Xeon 5100 series processors in three server-specific benchmarks (SPECint_rate_2006, SPECint_rate2006, SPECompM2001) by up to 24%."
Re:Nice attempt, AMD. (Score:5, Informative)
In any case, what matters is what Barcelona will ship at, which has not yet been specified. In any case, if Barcelona lives up to AMD's stated expectations on performance, it will be a killer CPU. Your statement about Intel's potential improvement leaps are spot on, and fall into Inforworld's Tom Yager's statements about Intel which are essentially phrased as "Core 2 is Intel's last hurrah". Why? Because Intel is essentially running on 10 year old technology and is rushing to catch up, despite some of the nifty architectural things they did recently to speed up C2D (integrated L2 cache for example).
I also believe that Intel is now following AMD's lead by leaving extra headroom for those that prefer to OC their CPUs and concentrating more on TDP and stability. I've noticed that Intel's chips since P4 are certainly more stable, while my rather severely OC'd AMD CPU occassionally (twice this year) shuts down, most likely due to heat or a RAM instability (since the shutdowns happen during low usage periods at night, I'll bet the 20% OC'd RAM is probably to blame).
Basically, right now Intel owns the crown, but they own it while comparing to AMD's last gen CPUs which are 3+ years old.
Re:Why casual users can't be bothered (Score:2, Informative)
Seriously though, Intel's got the performance lead for now, but AMD's got the better tech and their release schedule "lags" Intel's a little. So Intel got the "jump" on AMD release cycle wise, and now you've got the situation where Intel has a brand spanking new product out that beats AMD's old offering by about 10-20%, at best at stock speeds.
I personally am waiting for AMD's release and benchmarks before making a final decision, but the fact that I'm doing so already says which way I'm leaning. I should also mention I recently bought both a C2D and an X2 system, so I'm not exactly a fanboi in either direction. The C2D is in a laptop and rocks. The X2 is in a desktop and OC'd and for the money an Intel C2D system couldn't touch it. I had 2GB of DDR RAM sitting on my desk, so that's essentially free and a $40 high end motherboard didn't hurt things either.
Re:Fly me... (Score:3, Informative)
SSE4? I'm not buyin' either AMD or Intel until they're at least at SSE256. What's that? It'll take a while? That's OK, I don't have the monies to get them now anyway.
<sarcasm/>
For my type of workloads, straight SSE2 is still just fine. I'll take an improvement on that now instead of, say, waiting for the x86 world to match AltiVec instruction-per-instruction. But i would go for a wider ISA - give me 4x64bit registers with the ability to do 2x128 long double calculations in parallel and I'll be all over it. Heck, even long double on the current 128bit SSE registers would be a treat. SSE4? Fits some folks' needs, but it's mostly meh! for me.
To each his/her own, I guess.
CPU Speed? Who cares?! (Score:2, Informative)
Truthfully, I have not seen a significant benefit to higher CPU speeds since circa 300MHz days. Except for gaming, things seem to always work about the same speed. The rate at which I can type this message is limited not by CPU, but by my fingers; the speed with which I browse the web is limited not by CPU, but by my ability to skim for content; the speed with which I get real paying work done remains about the same.
And even for intensive processing, CPU speed is often less limiting than GPU, HD, or RAM. Doubling my laptop's memory more than doubled its speed; doubling the CPU speed would accomplish bugger-all.
(I lied: one thing that did improve with CPU speed is the performance of Natural Painter. That little puppy loves the CPU cycles!)
Re:"at the same frequency" is pointless (Score:2, Informative)
1) only the 3800 is an EE chip.
2) they're running on one of the most power hungry motherboard chipsets made for AMD: the nVidia 590 SLI
3) only the X2 5000+ is a 65 nm CPU
So basically, let's stack the deck as much as possible against AMD in this test without showing a best case scenario, while postulating that they're showing a "worst-case scenario" with a "bad E6300 sample".
I like Anandtech usually, but this article could almost have been sponsored by Intel and is far from Anand's usual quality and attention to detail. It almost reads like a Tom's Hardware piece. Lines like the below from the Conclusion just cement that feeling. So equal prices and equal performance? (Remember, AMD's tech is 3 years old...) Oh, and AMD is faster in "outlier cases". Intel should have totally rocked these tests. That they don't indicate something else. Lastly, let's note that Intel has already stated a large price cut for the fall, around when AMD is set to ship. I wonder if they got hold of a pre-prod Barcelona or two and had to change their undershorts?
Overall, the performance advantage still goes to Intel's Core 2 lineup but there are a few situations where the performance between the two families is close enough to be considered a tie. There are also the outlier cases where the Athlon 64 X2 actually ends up faster than the Core 2, but we suspect that they are more isolated incidents than indications of the norm.
Re:Nice attempt, AMD. (Score:2, Informative)
I don't think that anyone that's truly interested in the technical aspects of CPUs thinks Intel is a leader in this decade. Since the AMD-64 and Itanium launches, that position has been firmly held by AMD which continues to extend that lead from everything I'm seeing. (For you Intel fanbois, that's even despite the C2D, which really is irrelevant in the world of servers). AMD's technical lead is pretty much cemented in the server world, and I wouldn't be surprised if Barcelona puts that market firmly out of Intel's reach. The current Opterons match Intel's best in equivalent configurations, but scale far beyond what Intel is capable of, and apparently Intel won't have an answer for at least another 12 months.
Intel has a PTP alternative to HT in the works, but it won't be ready until late 2008 (Nehalem) supposedly. By then, Barcelona will have been out for at least a year.