Intel 45nm Processors Waiting to Clobber AMD's Barcelona?

DKC writes "Tech ARP's anonymous source claims that Intel is merely waiting for AMD to release their Barcelona processors before they clobber them with their 45nm die-shrinked processors. In fact, Intel is already producing these 45nm processors at one of their fabs in Arizona. AMD and Intel are in for a long and tough battle ahead. Should be an interesting one though."

So 45nm is not innovating?

[ion++]

So 45nm is not innovating? If it was so easy to do, then we would have been there a long time ago. And AMD would have 45nm as well.

I think slashdot choose the wrong Subject, it makes it sound like intel is doing it to be evil. It's much more possible that they are waiting with the release to make more money. Some might think making money is evil, but i dont. I like making money.

If intel has the fastest and lowest power consumption now, and AMD is not a threat, so why release a faster CPU, intel can still make lots of money selling the old. When AMD releases their new CPU, intel has a response ready, meaning intel will make more money.

Intel is in the world to make money, not particular to ruin AMD, how ever if making ruining AMD makes more money, intel will most likely try.

Re:Whatever...

[Gr8Apes]

AMD has been crushing Intel for many years (on the order of at least 15)

I'd say about 4, but hey, I like AMD.

and now that Intel slipped SLIGHTLY in the lead...I personally am a HUGE fan of AMD, and feel that their 64 bit technology is FAR superior to Intel's...

Their new technology clearly leads, by 10-20%. However, it is their new technology running against 2004 AMD tech, which should be quite interesting when Barcelona finally ships. As for 64 bittedness, how is AMD's superior to Intel's? I'll admit that AMD's overall CPU design is superior, but the 64 bit extensions?

Plus the fact that memory and core bandwidth is so limited in Intel really makes me wonder how much longer Intel will go before going on-die with their memory controller.

Intel will go to an on-board proprietary memory controller/architecture at the end of 2008/beginning of 2009, according to their roadmap.

Re:Whatever...

[Pojut]

I consider myself to be an AMD fanatic (haven't owned an intel-based system since my P166 with MMX) However, there is no way that you can deny both synthetic benchmarks and real-world gaming numbers: Intel's shit is vastly superior in performance.

I'm not saying their design is better or not better, I'm not saying they are doing things smarter or dumber, but the PERFORMANCE of their CPU's (at least in the desktop market...I don't really know anything about the server market) more or less decimates what AMD has to offer.

Re:So 45nm is not innovating?

[Xiph1980]

Don't confuse a technological advancement with innovation.

45nm process has nothing to do with innovation. It's just the same technology, the same process, on a different scale.


Innovation is seeing a ball rolling, and making a bearing out of it. the 45nm process opposed to the 60nm process is seeing a 30cm diameter ball, and making a 40cm diameter ball.

Re:Where are the new motherboards

[Celandine]

Barcelona is supposed to drop into your existing socket F motherboard with a BIOS update.

Re:AMD is in precarious condition

[Knara]

Actually if you really look close, cash flow for 3rd quarter was positive. They're not making money hand over fist (actually net profit is down, though down less than 2nd quarter), but they're not going anywhere any time soon (their assets exceed their liabilities by ~5billion dollars, and their cash/cash equivalents + short term investments are around 1.5billion dollars as of end of third quarter). Obviously they won't replace Intel anytime soon, but they're not in dire straits, either.

AMD still has hypertransport and build in ram con.

[Joe The Dragon]

AMD still has hyper transport and build in ram controller and in mulit cpu setups it is better intel haveing 1FSB per cpu is better then the past for them but is still not as good.

Also AMD has more and better chipsets for there mulit cpu system with more pci-e lanes and DDR2 or DDR2 ECC ram.

And on the desktop side you can get a High end Nforce 590 board for the same price as a lower end intel board that does not even have TCP/IP Acceleration like the 590 and few other lower end nforce chips do have.

Re:Nice

[TheRaven64]

Really, the lowest-end CPUs that either Intel or AMD are builing today are wildly overpowered for most people's needs

Intel and AMD aren't the only people making CPUs. PowerPC, SuperH and ARM chips aimed at embedded systems are powerful enough for most peoples use, and can be had for around $10 in bulk. Of course, they don't run Windows (well, they run Wince...)

Re:Whatever...

[UncleTogie]

The K6 debuted in the days of the ORIGINAL Pentium, ergo comparing it to the P4 would be akin to comparing the K6 to the 8086.

At this [wikipedia.org] link, you can check the debut date for the K6. Note at the top of the article that it quite clearly states that it was designed to compete with the original Pentiums.
At this [wikipedia.org] link, you can check the debut date for the P4. Note that the P4 debuted *3* years *after* the K6 series...

If you believe that AMD had the foresight, manpower, and devel skills to beat a processor not even OUT for 3 years thereafter, it's time to adjust the tin hat, sir/ma'am.

Re:If you like spending $250+ on a CPU, sure.

[Wavicle]

Right now on any web site, you can order a X2 CPU with full dedicated L2 cache per core for around $70. The cheapest Core 2 Duo is the E4300 at $150.

Newegg has the E4500 for $146. That comes with 2MB of shared L2 cache, which is twice the combined cache of the Brisbane. In a single-threaded game this means that most of the L2 is going to be used by one processor for the game giving the CPU access to almost 4x as much. Is the shared cache a problem?

That has a bottlenecked 800Mhz FSB, not a fancy 2.0Ghz hypertransport bus like the X2.

Let me start by saying that a dedicated cpu memory controller plus high-speed chip-to-chip interconnect is the way to go. Having said that, this comparison always annoys the hell out of me for a couple reasons:

1) FSB is wider than hypertransport.
2) Hypertransport data must be packetized

The fact that 800 < 2000 does not mean FSB < HT. There are other reasons, this one is naive and wrong.

Re:Right, AMD is not competitive.

[MojoStan]

A friend of mine and myself both upgraded our desktop PCs. They chose an Intel Core 2 Duo because "Intel wins in all the benchmarks." I bought AMD instead.

I knew right away, from your tone and your friend's quote, that you would buy for price/performance and your friend would buy for performance only. An unfair, biased comparison would follow. Did your friend know he or she was competing in a price/performance contest?

Their system is based around a E6600 ($270 at the time), mine is based around an X2 3600+ 65nm ($75 at the time).

"At the time" is not the "current lineup," which the GP [slashdot.org] was referring to. Way to go there, comparing a mid-range (at the time) Intel CPU to a low-end (at the time) AMD CPU. Don't mention that $270 currently gets you Intel's E6850 (3GHz, 1333MHz, 4MB) and almost gets you Intel's Quad Q6600 ($280). $75 currently gets you Intel's (Core 2 based) Pentium Dual-Core E2140.

Their system has 2gb of RAM, mine has 4gb of RAM.

RAM costs the same for both platforms.

My motherboard (with nVidia chipset) was $80 cheaper than their P5B Deluxe.

I'm sure "they" could have bought a significantly cheaper motherboard. Currently, an ASUS P5NSLI motherboard (with nForce 570 SLI Intel Edition chipset) is $45 cheaper (at Newegg) than your ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe (with nForce 570 SLI AMD Edition chipset).

Overall my system was $400 cheaper -- with double the RAM.

You bought a low-end CPU and a mid-range motherboard. Your friend bought a mid-range CPU and a high-end motherboard. You also bought at a time when AMD drastically slashed prices in response to Intel kicking their arse in the mid-range and high-end. At the time, AMD was only competitive in the low-end (where Intel still only offered Netburst CPUs).

I go into my Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe BIOS and change the clock rate of my CPU from 1.9Ghz to 2.4Ghz with no ill effects and get the same # of 3D Marks as them because I have the same kind of video card (8600 GTS PCI-E).

Yeah, that's a fair comparison. Overclock your low-end AMD CPU and compare it to a mid-range Intel CPU at stock speeds.

They're happy because they bought "performance" (as sold to them via Intel marketing), and I'm happy because I bought the same performance (as proved by benchmarks) for a lot less.

If they're happy, then they probably didn't know they were competing in a price/performance contest with you.

For my workstation use in Linux compiling and rendering and working with large images, 4gb of RAM that run at the same speed as L2 cache (thanks to AMD's integrated memory controller) beats the piss out of that Intel setup (which has much lower memory bw and also half the RAM). For gaming use, I get the same # of 3D Marks and similar performance because an Intel 2.4Ghz CPU and an AMD 2.4Ghz CPU happen to be within a few % of each other on the same video card (which is the true bottleneck; don't lie to yourself and say it's that CPU that's 14-18x faster than RAM).

Today, a $280 Quad Q6600 on a $130 ASUS P5N-E (nForce 650i SLI) beats the piss out of an equivalently priced AMD workstation in compiling, rendering, and large images. If you're willing to risk stability and reliability by overclocking (like you did), then a $90 Pentium Dual-Core E2160 can be overclocked to 3.4GHz (according to X-bit Labs [xbitlabs.com]) and beat the piss out of any Athlon 64 X2 system with the same RAM, GPU, and class of motherboard.

I got the same performance for $400, but with more RAM. My CPU was $190 cheaper. My motherboard was also cheaper.

Your friend did not need to spend so much on his/her motherboard. Your friend did not overclock. Today, a cheaper system built around an overclocked Pentium Dual-Core E2160 and an nForce 570 SLI moth

Re:So 45nm is not innovating?

[Technician]

Given the options I believe Intel is likely still working out some non-trivial (i.e. no microcode workaround) issues in the 45nM process before releasing.
Which sounds more plausible?

Much more plausable is they are getting the pipeline filled while the manufactures are finishing evaluating the engineerinng samples (the chips marked Intel Confidential) and building a product. In a new product launch, having a shortage of product is bad. Manufacturing has little surge capacity built-in. It looks like a normal product roll-out to me.They are either aiming for the back to school launch or the fall Christmas shopping season. This is less about hitting AMD and more about beating the January market downturn. Just because AMD is trying to hit the same fall release schedule is not an accurate indicater Intel is doing this to hit AMD. Intel would release this fall if possible regardless of whether AMD was there or not. Check their release cycles. The only times they miss a cycle is when they have problems. They aim for back to school or the Christmas buying season. Early spring launches are rare and are usually covered by press coverage of missed launch dates.

Re:If you like spending $250+ on a CPU, sure.

[MojoStan]

The Core 2 Duos that weren't crippled and had a proper amount of L2 cache started at $240. The AMD X2 systems with built-in memory controller and decent amounts of L2 cache started at $75.

If the "crippled" Core 2 Duos performa as well or better than "non-crippled" AMD X2 CPUs, then why would it matter if they had less L2 cache? Every performance review I've seen shows that Core 2 Duos with 2MB of shared L2 cache or even 1MB of L2 cache (Pentium Dual-Core E2xxx series) perform very well.

Right now on any web site, you can order a X2 CPU with full dedicated L2 cache per core for around $70. The cheapest Core 2 Duo is the E4300 at $150. That has a bottlenecked 800Mhz FSB, not a fancy 2.0Ghz hypertransport bus like the X2. To get a 1066Mhz FSB C2D requires you go up to $190 or so.

For $75, you can buy a Pentium Dual-Core E2140 which performs very well against the Athlon X2 3800+ according to X-bit Labs [xbitlabs.com] (they go back-and-forth). Sure, today you can get an X2 4200+ for around $75, but AMD slashed prices in response to the Pentium Dual-Core E2xxx series.

Intel motherboards seem to require a premium as well. nVidia can make AM2 chipsets with firewire, dual ethernet, onboard 7.1 audio, multiple SATA and eSATA connectors, etc, for roughly $100 less than then equivalent Intel chipset board...

...those SLI motherboards for AM2 are around $150 vs. the $220 + for Intel ones.

The ASUS P5N32-SLI Premium/WiFi-AP [asus.com] uses the nForce 590 SLI Intel Edition chipset. It's $125 at Newegg.