AMD One-Ups Intel With Cheap Desktop Chips 362
CWmike writes "Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday announced inexpensive desktop microprocessors with up to six cores to put pricing pressure on rival Intel. AMD's new chips include the fastest AMD Phenom II X6 1075T six-core processor, which is priced 'under $250' for 1,000 units, AMD said. AMD also introduced a range of dual-core and quad-core Athlon II and Phenom II desktop microprocessors priced between $76 and $185. By comparison, Intel's cheapest six-core processor is the Core i7-970 processor, which is priced at $885 per 1,000 units, according to a price list on Intel's website."
AMD One-Ups Intel? Another misleading Slash story. (Score:5, Informative)
Pricing error in this article (Score:4, Informative)
Their ULV processors are pretty impressive, too (Score:5, Interesting)
nothing new (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:nothing new (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean if you want something so fast that AMD doesn't even make it, only Intel does, go for it otherwise there's a darn good reason why AMD has been "losing" and isn't out of business yet. Their chips are better speed for the price in most cases!
Haven't AMD's recent profits come from a) ATI and b) Intel?
Their chips are lower priced for the same speed because that's the only way they can sell them. If AMD could make faster CPUs than Intel's, they'd be charging $1000+ as well.
Obviously that's good for us, because you can get a decent AMD system for less than Intel at the same performance level, but their low prices certainly aren't keeping them in business... I'm pretty sure that everyone at AMD wishes they could be selling their chips for twice as much.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
AMD's lower prices are because of Intel's brand, not because of actual performance. You said it yourself: lower prices at comparable performance levels. The same holds true in the high end.
Further, because of the market share of Intel, other the software giants don't do very much in the way of optimizing code to run on AMD, so they're always going to be compared on the subset of chip features that Intel also supports.
Multiple equal giants would be a better situation for the rest of us, because then they'd
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Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
search_results
+----------------+
good
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
Budget (Score:3, Interesting)
I like AMD because their processors are usually fast enough for me and are usually much cheaper than the processors that Intel sells. I really can't afford to pay nearly as much for the processor as I do every other part for the computer combined, so I go with AMD.
Technology (Score:2)
Looks like we're still adding cores and cache to the CPUs, but we're not really coming up with anything really revolutionary. Last really interesting idea was Transmeta's ill-fated effort. Come on, people, innovate!
That said, I think it might be time for me to upgrade my desktop. It's still got an AM2 CPU!
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next year AMD will be launching its "bulldozer" architecture, which from what i've seen takes a rather novel approach to cores/hyperthreading (two 'cores' which share some execution units. I'm not saying bulldozer will suddenly revolutionize anything, but it is an interesting take on multi-core
as for your am2 cpu, yeah man, if your board takes a am3 cpu, go for it, you can pick up a quad core (which will trounce whatever you have in single threaded performance too), for under $100, if you still have a singl
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Oh I've got a quad-core - when I built that desktop AMD had just released the AM3 CPUs which made the Phenom II X4 940 a LOT cheaper. And frankly I have zero performance issues with this machine, so I really have no plans on upgrading (;
As for the Bulldozer core, I mean, seriously the last REAL leap on x86 was, what, when Pentium went from pure CISC to a RISC/CISC hybrid kinda thing? We're still running the same basic architecture. Sure, we're 64-bit rather than 32, but you know.
Not saying the new CPUs aren
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ah right, when you said AM2 chip i assumed non-am2+, rulling out any phenom I/II based thing. enjoy that 940, it is a killer chip (my gf has one, i get by with my x2 7750)
and yeah, bulldozer wont be a leap like pentium>pentium pro, but it might take multi-core in an interesting direction
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Sharing FP units between cores is nothing new: T1 (Score:2)
The UltraSparc T1 shared his single floating point unit between its 8 cores and 32 threads
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1#Physical_characteristics [wikipedia.org]
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Well, IBM/Sony and others tried the Cell architecture thing, couple a few general purpose cores with vector processing units. It seemed to make a bit of an impact on the supercomputer scene for a while, though apparently games programmers don't much care for it.
I suspect that's because they have to target multiple architectures though, and Cell demands it's own attention.
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Yeah, whatever the Next Big Thing is, it'll have to emulate x86/x86_64 pretty darn well...
Legacy Implementation (Score:2, Insightful)
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4x PCI slots for legacy video capture equipment but fast processor for encoding
hmm, when I go on newegg the most PCI slots they sell on an AMD board or a current gen intel board is 3 while they have LGA775 boards up to 5 PCI slots.
Re:Legacy Implementation (Score:4, Informative)
Initial review... (Score:5, Informative)
Overclockers.com has a review of the Phenom II x6 1075T processor. Looks like it's got pretty good overclock potential and performs well against similarly priced Intel chips.
http://www.overclockers.com/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1075t-review/ [overclockers.com]
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In that benchmark an overclocked I7 beat an overclocked 1075T. I7s can be had pretty cheap these days so I don't see a compelling reason to get the 1075T. I think AMD is mainly selling to the mainstream folks who don't overclock or run very demanding software. I do like AMD and they are kicking ass in the GPU market, but they have yet to catch up to Intel, which shouldn't even be that hard since Intel has been moving forward at a snails pace for a while now. AMD has been getting lots of catch-up time and th
a tip on buying AMD processors (Score:4, Interesting)
Go for the X4 models with 6MB L3 cache, it will do wonders with your aging AM2 motherboard (check for compatibility first, of course).
Really, forget the 1 or 2MB L2-only models. Those are quite a disappointment for such tasks (to me? they're rubbish).
I was considering a full upgrade to a Intel i5 (processor, mobo & memory) because my annoying sluggish old AMD Athlon 64. Frankly, my previous bad experiences with AMD processors (K6-1, old Athlons) did not help to form a positive opinion about the brand. But, hey, that Phenon processor was so cheap that I thought "heck, why not" and I was quite surprised.
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If you're feeling more spendy you can get a multi-socket Opteron 2000 or 6000 series server motherboard from SuperMicro or TYAN. With lots of RAM and 12-16 cores, you can emulate a whole room full of computers.
Re:a tip on buying AMD processors (Score:4, Funny)
What tools are you using to determine that on-die cache is the bottleneck for your usage?
Vital missing info... (Score:2)
Article neglects to mention that the processor prices are xxx dollars "each" if ordered in quantities of 1000 units or more not xxx dollars for 1000 units... and summary merely repeats the mistake...
processor chips are not really this cheap...
CPU manufacturers and I have a history (Score:5, Interesting)
I think AMD really only One-upped Intel twice: When they were the first past the 1GHz mark and when they developed AMD64 while Intel was mucking around with Itanium.
I've owned many non-Intel machines, the full list goes like this: Intel 8086-4.77, NEC V20-8, Cyrix 286-20, AMD 386-40, Cyrix 486DX2-66, AMD DX4-120, Cyrix P166+, AMD K6-300, AMD Duron-700, AMD K7-1,400, Intel PIV-3,06 Intel PentiumM-1,7, AMD Athlon64 X2-2,0, AMD Phenom X6-3,2
I've never had any trouble with any of them, even though some had motherboard chipsets from SIS or VIA. The DX4-120, K6-300, K7-1,4 and all the newer ones are still running. (The DX4 is a stand-alone DOSbox for my dad to run some ancient software (on 360k floppies!), The K6 serves as a firewall somewhere, the K7 is used when my mom needs Windows (she's got 2 macbooks), the P4 is now in a laptop and now a media server, the PentiumM is in my current laptop, the Athlon64 is in my dads current computer and I run on the X6). :-D
Now I look at it, even though I left my parents over 15 years ago, they are still a kind of dumping ground for my old computers.
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I said it before Intel did it, jackass. I'm not a fanboy, BTW. I'll buy Intel when it makes sense. I just prefer AMD after about two decades of experience buying products of both companies.
The 486 had a DRAM controller on its die? I'm going to have to ask for a citation. I think you're thinking of either the on-die L1 cache or the MMU (memory management unit), neither of which is a system main memory controller. Here's a citation to the counter: List of Intel Chipsets at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. See how the chipset deter
Overclocked, Intel and AMD have similar price (Score:3, Funny)
Have built systems for quite a few years, and it seems like you can overclock the hell out of intel chips using just good air coolers while AMD pretty much are running at peak speed. Both regarding heat and not crashing.
Built a dual core core 2 Duo 1.83GHz. It is running stable at 3.5GHz.
Intels 32nm i5-650 3.2GHz easily overclocks to 4.7GHz (not sure if stable yet)
If you compare Intel with AMD after you take this headroom into account, intel is on par with if not more cost effective than AMD.
Will it require $50 activation like Intel? (Score:5, Informative)
Frankly if they don't do the cheesy-as-hell activation fee like Intel is proposing [thetechherald.com] I'm sold.
Re:That would be all nice and dandy if only... (Score:4, Interesting)
Then, of course, is the SUV-that-never-goes-offroad-computing crowd that throw down big bucks so they can have 3D accelerated, multicore/non-multithreaded MS Spider Solitaire. God bless them.
Re:That would be all nice and dandy if only... (Score:5, Funny)
Motorcycles, trucks... hmm, your analogy is nearly there, but there's something missing, I can't quite put my finger on it..
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Is it like he is standing in the garage, about to drive to work, when he realises that his keys are still in the hall?
Re:That would be all nice and dandy if only... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, so you've already got a hand on and benchmarked these new chips?
No, you haven't. We'll have to see.
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Re:That would be all nice and dandy if only... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not completely true, it depends on the application. In highly threaded tasks, AMD's 6-core will handily beat that i7 running at 2.4GHz (and even the higher clocked models without HT). Just check the latest benchmarks at Anandtech or Tom's hardware. In apps that are not heavily threaded, yes, Intel may win. But more and more apps are becoming multi-threaded and this will only increase in the future. AMD's current 6-cores are more future-proof than Intel's current platform. Not to mention that Intel loves to switch sockets every fucking generation, while AMD is able to keep sockets the same across many generations while staying competitive.
I use both AMD and Intel, so I am not terribly biased one way or the other, but AMD deserves a lot of credit for keeping the processor market competitive. Without AMD or another strong competitor, we would all be paying $1000 for our CPU's form Intel and we would still be stuck with Netburst.
Not really an apples to apples comparison. (Score:3, Informative)
The i7-860 costs a lot more than a the X6 1075T
Sure the chip is only $20 more $250 vs $270 however you need a motherboard. i7 MB are notoriously expensive.
One can find a decent crossfire/SLI capable AM3 motherboard for $80 - $100. Not so with i7. Prices start at $160 and tier 1 brands are more like $180 - $200.
When you consider the additional cost of the motherboard your i7 solution is running 30% higher than the X6 platform. 30% higher for maybe 10% more performance.
Performance per $ is what matters.
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How can you say they're slower when they've just announced them?! There is no possible way you have demoed these 6 core chips.
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The 1075T is a new chip, but the 1055T and 1090T have been out for months, same six cores, same cache, just a slightly lower/higher clock speed
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Re:cache difference (Score:5, Interesting)
The cache difference would not explain the price (or the transistor difference, 1.1bil vs 0.9bil), since we are talking about 3x+ the price. It is just that Intel enjoys a speed advantage so AMD has to pit its hexa-cores against Intel's quad-cores. And because, as it has always been, Intel is the more "recognized" brand, AMD makes sure that it gives you more performance for the price.
It has been the same deal since my first ever PC: I could get, for about the same price, either an intel 486@66 or an AMD 486@100. My next was an AMD-K6 @ 233 which cost as much as the Pentium MMX 200 (yeah, the K6 lagged behind a PII, but it was no match for the Pentium MMX). Then I went with some Athlons, you remember how those did vs P3 at first, and then, even easier against P4. I am not a fanboy, but on a budget so I did get a Core 2 E8400 at some point because that was the only time I was buying a PC and AMD did not have a performance advantage at my desired price point. Now I am mainly on a Phenom II X4.
But I digress, the point is that the Intel CPU's have traditionally been priced based on how much they can go for, not how much they cost. So right now they can get away with things like $1000 CPU's. If it wasn't for AMD, it would be like the 90's where they had mainstream cpu's at $1000, not just high end ones.
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AMD might try to give you more performance for the price now, and when they started they certain did, but remember that AMD are in the boat they are now largely because they used the advantage they gained from Intel's Itanium blunder to sell $400 mid range chips. Intel won their market back because AMD got greedy and Intel under cut them by about 50% with faster chips.
AMD have no high end, with no high end they cannot survive because today's high end is tomorrow's mid range. You need to be tooling up that p
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I would agree, 5 to 10 years ago. Alas, I don't anymore. We are at a performance plateau, where the user (normal, we're not talking special-case) can be perfectly happy with 5 year old machines (I'm a dumpster diver, good P-IV or AMD XP machines can be found there). Any machine in the 2.0GHz range (give or take) will cover the needs of users.
CPU makers are at the point where people who need more CP
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AMD is not done, in fact quite the opposite.
2011 will have some of AMDs most anticipated releases ever, Bulldozer and Bobcat. Also decent graphics are no longer a luxury, it is a necessity even in phones and tablets. Intel makes terrible graphics cards, while AMD makes the best performing ones available today. 2011 will see more widespread adoption of integrated CPU+GPU solutions (from both Intel and AMD), and guess who will hold the advantage there.
Re:cache difference (Score:5, Interesting)
AMD might try to give you more performance for the price now, and when they started they certain did, but remember that AMD are in the boat they are now largely because they used the advantage they gained from Intel's Itanium blunder to sell $400 mid range chips. Intel won their market back because AMD got greedy and Intel under cut them by about 50% with faster chips.
AMD have no high end, with no high end they cannot survive because today's high end is tomorrow's mid range. You need to be tooling up that process 6 - 12 months in advance to compete. As much as I love AMD(I bought AMD for years, until my most recent PC), they're done.
Not even close. Bulldozer architecture, merged with their rock solid GPGPU structure in OpenCL is a reality and a fundamental architecture design shift that Intel will work at copying.
Re:cache difference (Score:4, Interesting)
Only on Slashdot can Powerpoint slides of what AMD's chips will be doing in the second half of 2011 be called "rock solid" and get modded interesting in 2010.....
1. Bulldozer will NOT have GPGPU until 2012 at the earliest unless you think AMD is lying.
2. When it comes to GPGPU ATI is nowhere near NVIDIA. Oh don't get me wrong, when it comes to making a good graphics card that plays games (which is what 98+% of the market actually wants) ATI is definitely ahead of NVIDIA. When it comes to GPGPU that the HPC sector wants, NVIDIA is still way ahead not only on hardware but also on software. I know all about the hype around OpenCL, I also know people who do this stuff for a living and CUDA is simply better and while Fermi sucks for playing games, it shreds anything ATI has for GPGPU.
3. Note the "98%" figure I gave above about what the market cares about. For all the hype on Slashdot, the number of applications that can actually take advantage of GPGPU is vanishingly small and inside of that small subset the biggest niche that exists is for video transcoding. Guess what? Using 3 square millimeters of silicon Intel's Sandy Bridge (that will be out at least half a year before Bulldozer) already does this. Also when it comes to normal Floating point performance, an equivalently clocked Sandy Bridge with 4 cores will have TWICE the AVX computing power of an EIGHT core Bulldozer... yes you heard me right 4 cores Intel vs. 8 cores AMD, due to AMD only including 1 full AVX unit in each "module" that contains 2 "cores" in Bulldozer. This is true unless AMD is intentionally lying about Bulldozer to make it sound worse than what the actual architecture will be. Oh.. and before you say that nobody will ever use AVX just remember that you called openCL "rock solid" a few minutes ago. GCC is already able to emit AVX instructions that existing code can be tweaked for RIGHT NOW while OpenCL is stil a pipe dream in many ways.
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AMD have no high end
Ever heard of the Opteron, particularly the 6100 series [wikipedia.org] released in March? 12 cores from 1.9GHz to 2.2GHz with 115W TDP or you can go up to 137W TDP and 2.3GHz or drop to 1.7GHz and closer to 65W TDP.
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AMD's chips perform threaded tasks faster than Intel's - if you want to talk about tomorrow's chips you should also look at tomorrow's software, where heavy threading is going to be the norm. From that perspective, the value of the AMD chips easily doubles.
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AMD's chips perform threaded tasks faster than Intel's
Please provide one shred of evidence that supports this claim.. and I don't mean a comparison of a 6 core AMD CPU to 2 core Intel chip from 2007.
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I'd also like to see the evidence that heavy threading is going to become the norm any time soon in most applications. It's had the better part of a decade to get there and still substantially less than half of all software supports multi-threading and most of that is lucky to support 2 cores.
People don't seem to realize how much more difficult writing properly multi-threaded software is, or that not all software lends itself to multi-threading.
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No, the difference in performance is all it takes to explain it. The 1075T is roughly as fast as a Core i5 760, which is about $40 cheeper than it.
Re:And 3 hours after reading this... (Score:5, Interesting)
I love AMD ( and buy them ) as they are good enough for what I do and have really been the ones driving x86 innovation for the last 10 years. They've made Intel a better Intel by forcing them to keep up and cutting cost. Things would be even better for the consumer if AMD were closer to Intel in fabrication prowess - Andy Grove's company isn't called
Chipzilla for nothing
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Paying of OEMs is not their only trick.. (Score:5, Informative)
For many years, the Intel C++ compiler has discriminated against non-Intel chips by detecting their manufacturer using CPUID and redirecting all chips not manufactured by 'GenuineIntel' to a slower code path. (And that manufacturer ID is their trademark so other manufacturers may not use it). C++ libraries available from Intel (such as their math libraries) also contain the same discriminatory code checks. This artificially decreases their performance on AMD's chips.
It makes Intel chips look better, by slowing down the program on all of their competitor's chips. So the safest thing is NOT to use Intel's compiler for anything (most especially benchmarking). This is a problem because it has a reputation of producing larger, but faster, code. (Faster on Intel processors at least!).
The code it produces is actually quite decent on AMD chips too, as long as you patch out the generated version checks to un-cripple the performance on AMD chips. You can do it as a post-build step after compiling. It's a hassle that most software vendors don't bother with -- in most cases they aren't even aware that Intel's compiler generates the manufacturer-checks and redirects their program through slower code paths on AMD chips.
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The fact that AMD's could run unoptimized code faster than the netburst optimized code is only testimonial to how crappy the netburst design was.
FACT: Intel's compiler is more than happy to selectively test for each of SSE, SSE2, and SSE3 at runtime and will use the best path it can, if and only if the vendor ID is "GenuineIntel." If it is not "GenuineIntel", then it runs a 80386 codepath intead. Thats right.. you heard me.. it runs a codepath for 25 year old CPU's.
Stop making excuses for the
Re:Paying of OEMs is not their only trick.. (Score:4, Informative)
That's not the whole story - there was a deliberate attempt to not use optimized instructions.
See a long discussion at http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49 [agner.org]
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EXCEPT:
The intel motherboard for those less expensive CPUs has zero forward-looking value. They are already obsoltete when you buy them now. Additionally, the memory on the board will be obsolete DDR2. Furthermore, there will be no USB3/SATA3 option.
The AMD board will be closer to current, can have DDR3 should you choose it, and will support AMDs newest quad core/six core processors currently out.
This is like me pointing out that a prius makes a hella good race car, because it can get over 15 laps out of
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Intel could compete on price... but..
Someone has to pay for intels retarded quasi-futuristic commercials playing on tv all day long.
And it won't be me.
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That's for sure.
From TFA:
Somebody is marking those things way up by the time they get to my local store.
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That's for sure.
From TFA:
Somebody is marking those things way up by the time they get to my local store.
$899.99 through newegg.
With a free piece of shit game no one cares about.
$15 / $885 = 1.7%.
So it's pretty obvious - INTEL is the one marking up these prices. No major shop pays anywhere close to that $885 figure. And no smaller shop has to either if they "just sign here" and agree to flog only Intel chips.
My last few purchases have been Intel chips, because of the whole "Core 2 Duo > Anything AMD has" thing. But the prices have been jacked up sky fucking high, the sockets have changed way too often wi
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Re:And 3 hours after reading this... (Score:4, Interesting)
for the price segments where both AMD and intel are active in (so, that is the below $250 segment), $/performance is roughly equal, with AMD stealing some leads (and in some cases, very significant leads, in some segments intel only offers some insanely slow old celeron, where amd offers a x3 or so). AMD mostly wins because they are offering more cores/$. In single threaded performance, a c2d chip might just beat that athlon II x3, but as soon as threading comes into play, the 3rd core wins the battle for AMD
Taking all things into account (cpu/mobo), a performance equivalent AMD system will be somewhat cheaper then a comparable intel build
Personally i prefer AMD for that reason (not to mention i got into PC building in the amd 64 days, which might have contributed to my AMD preference)
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Personally i prefer AMD for that reason (not to mention i got into PC building in the amd 64 days, which might have contributed to my AMD preference)
Ah yes, the very same reason I like Lotus for office productivity software and FoxPro for databases; once a computing great, always a computing great, and you've got to stay loyal of course.
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considering you say you like lotus, i guess my sarcasm detector must be on the fritz...
anyway, i prefer AMD, but that is not to say i will ONLY buy AMD, that wouldnt make sense anyway (in fact, my file server is a core 2 Duo, my small experimentel webserver is a dothan based celeron)
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Have there been any real innovations in word processing software in the last ten years?
I mean sure they've gotten shinier and bloatier, but I haven't seen any real groundbreaking features.
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The features are small, but often quite worthwhile.
For example, in Word 2010, you can choose based on the program you're copying from how you want styles to be handled, whether to use the original style, local style, or paste as plain text. That saves me tons of time I would have spent messing with manually choosing paste type before.
2010 also has built in "dataleakage" detection, warning you about metadata you might be sending on accident.
The last version of Word I used was 2003, then switched to Open Off
? Do you really think Intels are 4x faster (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel provides currently the highest buyable performance. But AMD provides the best performance for value. If you buy a 200euro amd you get the best bang for your buck. If you buy a 800 euro Intel you get more bang but pay more bucks per bang.
Intel offers no chip that provides the same bang for buck ratio as AMD. Hasn't done so in a long time.
That is why AMD is the choice for price concious buyers who want high performance on a budget and Intel for the rich people who simply want the most powerful CPU.
There are plenty of reviews comparing AMD vs Intel, Intel comes out ahead often but only by a small margin and for a HUGE price difference. Your choice wether you pay top money for minor gains.
Just as a super car costing 10x as much as a regular one isn't going to go ten times as fast. By that logic the Shuttle would have to break the speed of light.
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Yeah, I have been building a TON of PCs of late with the Athelon II 635 in them, so much horsepower for so little cash, and you can throw 8G of ram at it and it will be a missile of a rig :)
Re:? Do you really think Intels are 4x faster (Score:5, Funny)
If you buy a 200euro amd you get the best bang for your buck. If you buy a 800 euro Intel you get more bang but pay more bucks per bang.
That's all very well, but how many bangs could a bangbuck buck if a bangbuck could bang bucks?
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I'd actually gone a less conventional route to start, then tried to fit it more in with the scheme. However, I find banging things to be a more entertaining image than bucking them, so I'm happy with my choice.
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But AMD provides the best performance for value. If you buy a 200euro amd you get the best bang for your buck. If you buy a 800 euro Intel you get more bang but pay more bucks per bang.
The Core i7-860 spanks everything AMD has at $280 @ newegg, there's only a few odd benchmarks AMDs $300 top six-core CPU wins. Then entire market from $250+ and up is Intel, Intel, Intel. The $100 market AMD wins, but their value gets worse the closer you come to the high end. You make it sounds like Intel only owns the Ferrari market, when in reality they own the whole $50,000+ car market.
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You should also consider the price of the motherboard. Core i7 motherboards are very expensive.
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Re:? Do you really think Intels are 4x faster (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that:
1- The top AMD six core is actually $275, not $300.
2- The AMD motherboards are cheaper, you can easily save at least $100 on that.
3- The AMD motherboards are more likely to work with future CPUs (Intel has already changed sockets between Nehalem and Sandy Bridge... again).
3- A 6 core CPU is probably more future proof than a 4 core one (even if those Intel cores are more powerful individually than the AMD ones, not arguing that).
I agree with you that the AMD advantage is smaller at this price point than at the $100-$200 one, but the advantage is still real.
THAT'S BECAUSE INTEL CHEATS! (Score:4, Informative)
Some of the benchmark programs are compiled with Intel's C++ compiler, which generates CPUID checks for the manufacturer string 'GenuineIntel' and redirects all other manufacturer's CPUs to the slowest code path. So if you can't compile the benchmark yourself with a trusted compiler, its not worth the paper its printed on.
Intel also releases several libraries that other software vendors use in their products; these libraries contain the same manufacturer check [agner.org] which cripples their performance on chips by AMD, Via, etc. Commercial software products such as Matlab have unintentionally or intentionally shipped with these checks, with the result that they run slower than necessary on AMD CPUs. When the manufacturer test is patched out of the program, it is un-crippled and runs as fast or faster than a comparable Intel chip.
Intel settled out of court with AMD over this, and are in the process of also settling with the FTC, but have not actually stopped the practice. [agner.org]
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Maybe I just hit a good patch, but the Core i5s didn't seem as bad as they used to be. I recently gutted my computer, upgraded the processor (i5), mobo (can't remember) and memory (4GB), and it was ~£300. Yeah, it's not in everyone's price range for normal desktop use, but that seemed good for a development machine and with better performance than I'd have got from an AMD. I guess these new chips might shake that up a little, though.
That said, I probably would upgrade the mother-in-law's computer to a
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Intel already does have chips that compete with at the same price. The i5 760 will beat these in pretty much any task, and costs $208. So it doesn't have 6 cores, but it is sufficiently faster on a per-core basis that it doesn't matter.
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Yup [anandtech.com]
and
Yup [anandtech.com]
and
Yup [anandtech.com]
So basically, the i5 760 will beat it handily at pretty much everything except for one embarassingly parallel task.
Good game though.
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You know "parallel" when you're not running a just a benchmark and you're not running a big server or HPC load means "desktop", right? How often do you only have one application running? Multiple processes go to multiple cores just like multiple threads do.
Re:And 3 hours after reading this... (Score:5, Insightful)
how often do you really load up *all* cores at once running multiple desktop applications.
Lets see:
I've got three Java background apps running and unlike the Folding Client, they do not back off when I want to do something else. This means Firefox, Word, Outlook, One Note, XMPlay all have to fight them for any ticks on the CPU though I rarely see more then 50-75 avg. cpu loading. That's on an E6300 (1.8GHz) Core 2 running Win7-64 on 8GB and this is a typical situation for my system.
My system is 3 years old and I've just started looking at upgrading but I have a problem. There are no CPU's now available from Intel that are compatible with my board and no a Bios update wont solve the problem. They changed the damn socket 6 months after I built it. Intel has a habit of changing things ever 6 months so you can't upgrade you CPU to gain the performance boost needed when the time comes. In my case, the only option if I could find one is a Q6600, which has already been discontinued (18 months ago) so I'm now forced to look at building a new system.
Due to Intel's policy, I'm looking at AMD for my next system because they don't obsolete Sockets and Chips 6 months after you build the system, forcing you to buy the most chip you can afford and then replacing the entire system in two or three years when it can't keep up with demands. That's right. It's Intel that drives the business upgrade cycle because they can get more money from companies selling all new chips such as north/southbridge, nics and everything in between unlike AMD who prefers to see you buy more CPU's and gives us a gradual upgrade path by simply ensuring their new chips can run in at least the "+" series of sockets even though you may not have access to all features.
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That is just complete bullshit, Bulldozer will use AM3+ and probably be compatible with AM3 (just as the AM2+ CPUs were compatible with AM2 motherboards).
Re:And 3 hours after reading this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel will have an offering which provides equal performance for approximately the same price.
You're joking aren't you? Intel currently owns the highest performance segment of the Desktop chip market. AMD doesn't produce any Desktop chips that can match Intel's best in any impartial benchmarking. But AMD has been confidently out competing Intel on "bang for buck" for some time now. I doubt Intel will suddenly lower prices to AMD's levels. If Intel are going to lower prices to compete, they've had just as much reason to do so for some time already. And don't forget motherboard support. AMD has traditionally been friendlier to separate motherboard and CPU upgrading than Intel which is a hidden cost.
Re:And 3 hours after reading this... (Score:5, Insightful)
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They have nothing that touches Intel's 6 core line.
I'm pretty sure the AMD 12 core CPUs will "touch" Intel's 6 core CPUs quite nicely (locally they are both about $1200 retail from the store).
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"performance" by itself doesn't mean anything. You have to refer to "performance per dollar" or "performance per watt" or ... that's why you don't see everyone buying the top of the line CPU... There's a bunch of stuff that offers the highest performance, and that doesn't really sell much, if at all: fighter jets, formula 1 cars, thoroughbreds... We might feel all sexy at the idea of owning one of those, but the bare fact is, we can't afford it, and, when push comes to shove, we would be stupid to, anyway.
t
Re:The thing I think you miss (Score:4, Interesting)
Price/performance is not the criterion here. There are applications where this is important, but an average desktop user is not one of them.
These systems are all quite bloody fast enough for "normal" desktops. The question is :how much does it cost? and AMD will get you a much better price for this class of machine.
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Yes, the best AMD CPU is slower than the best Intel CPU, and probably slower than the second best Intel CPU too. However, AMD usually has better price/performance ratio, so if I do not want the fastest CPU there is, I should probably buy an AMD product.
Same thing was when I was looking for a video card ~3 years ago. The new ATI HD2900XT was slower than the best nVidia card, but the nVidia card was much more expensive. HD2900XT was faster than the nVidia card that had a similar price.
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Sounds like you might have a job for a GPU. GPUs absolutely rock at FFTs and if your single-process jobs are simple enough you may be able to run hundreds of them simultaneously on each GPU. Current generation GPUs support double-precision floating point if you need it and also ECC memory to guard against random bit errors corrupting your calculations. ECC is definitely the way to go if you need reliable results, whether it be GPU or CPU.
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I have had problems with AMDs in the past, but it wasn't the CPUs. The CPUs have always been fine, but often to support them you need to go to some busted-arse chipset from VIA, SLI or Nvidia.
Admittedly it has been some time now since I've had a non-intel box (because of previous bad experiences with non-intel machines), but the most overlooked aspect of building a box is, imho the chipset.
Now AMD appear to be building a lot more of the chipset either into the CPU or GPU (now they've purchased ATI) i
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ALI (Acer Labs, which eventually got spun off from Acer, I believe). There was also SIS (Silicon Integrated Systems) and OPTi.
But, yeah, the chipsets were usually the problem. I never had a problem with Nvidia's chipsets, personally, but I hear other people have. I'm not sure what kind of wonky add-in cards they were using, but I loaded my systems with lots of stuff, with no issue. There was that one Nvidia chipset that caused hard drive corruption when you used it with a Sound Blaster, but I skipped th
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Yeah thats the problem nvidia chipset i was talking about.
Its a damn shame, because AMD have had some fine CPUs in the past - but typically the motherboard selection was pretty bad. I lost count of the number of broken VIA chipset problems I dealt with and just got sick of it.
Went to an intel BX chipset P2-350 (back in the day) and never looked back.
Its not just AMD affected though i might add - other motherboards for intel i have had wierd buggy shit on. Ended up just going for intel desktop board
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Frankly, there was a time when motherboard reviews from Anandtech presented the number of times the board crashed during testing. It then went lower and lower, then they only crashed when using interleaved memory banks, then they didn't crash at all during normal use.
Or maybe the crashes weren't reported any longer.
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Try an AMD 790 or newer chipset board. DFI, ECS, Asus, Gigabyte, and Foxconn all make them. You should be able to find a decent board from one of those companies. MSI, AsRock, MSI, Biostar, Jetway, and even more companies also make them.
AMD's chipset takes take of the northbridge and soutbridge, the USB, SATA, PCI and PCI-E, etc. Any other chips on the board will be sound or Ethernet unless it's a board with something somewhat unusual like more than one onboard Ethernet or more than half a dozen or so SATA
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ALI/ULI
They were bought out by nvidia i think, after they did a last hura for the amd 64, with a chipset which had both PCI-e and native AGP, asrock built some very good boards with their chips.
anyway, as long as you stick to the pick of the day, AMD has some good chips, in the athlon days, VIA KT266/333, Athlon XP > Nforce 2, amd 64 > Nforce 3/4, after that ATI picked up the gauntlet, and these days you just want an AMD/ATI chipset, excellent integrated graphics and performance.
Just keep in mind that
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AMD and NVidia are really the only players in AMD board chipsets these days, and AMD chipsets are on all the really well-performing boards anyway. The tight memory timings you can get with the recent AMD chipsets are great. Now, if only they'd leapfrog Intel's triple-channel and go quad-channel for memory modules, you'd see some really nice performance.
I know some Intel chips outrun AMD chips, but after the whole Randal Schwartz fiasco, Intel refusing to do 64-bit extensions to ia32 because they were counti
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DANG IT! That's what I get for getting on Slashdot at 6:30 in the morning. Meant Intels are FASTER, not cheaper!
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
i5 starts at $180. So IF (big IF) you want to spend $180+ on CPU then yeah you really can't go wrong with Intel i5-xxx series.
However for many users they aren't CPU limited. CPU power makes very little difference in game performance once you get past dual core 2.5Ghz. It makes a difference but not as much as a GPU.
In the $100 to $200 segment is where AMD really shines.
From tomshardware.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gaming-cpu-core-i5-760-core-i7-970,2698.html [tomshardware.com]
Best Gaming CPU for ~$70 - Athlon