Xeon Woodcrest Preys On Opteron

pschmid

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Intel must have craved this day: The Xeon 5100 at 3.0 GHz and 4 MB L2 cache launches today to decapitate the AMD Opteron. Our look under the hood explains what the Core 2 microarchitecture is capable of.
 

Ycon

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1 mistake:
In page 9 you wrote "Digital Media Boost... Oder Doch SSE4?" but shouldnt that be in English rather than German?
 

prolfe

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I don't care for the new Table of Contents. I much preferred being able to scan all the page titles at a glance without a pull-down menu. I realize this may be off-topic but I wanted to get it out before all the fanboys on both sides crash the forum.
 

jkflipflop98

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I don't care for the new Table of Contents. I much preferred being able to scan all the page titles at a glance without a pull-down menu. I realize this may be off-topic but I wanted to get it out before all the fanboys on both sides crash the forum.

Agreed. Dropdown lists suck. Is my browser not loading the pages correctly? I see no benchmarks of an AMD system in that article at all.

Who wrote this crap?
 

prolfe

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Is my browser not loading the pages correctly? I see no benchmarks of an AMD system in that article at all.

Who wrote this crap?

Actually if you read the back page you will see that they are reserving the Intel vs. AMD benchies for another article, allegedly so that they can be more complete.

Also, when the article mentions the Advanced Memory Buffer, the writer refers to it as the "AMD" instead of "AMB". This could cause some confusion and should be addressed.

I do not want to be seen as nitpicking, but I have come to expect outstanding articles from the THG staff and I just feel that this article may not be up to their world-class standards.
 

jabliese

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First, I am not a fanboy.

That being said, I do not understand why Intel is making such a fuss about being better than a 2 year old processor, unless they know AMD is about to crush them, and they are making the best of a bad situation.

Seems like whenever Intel talks about it's new processors, it also talks about AMD, isn't that a marketing no-no?

In the old days, Intel would market it's chips based on what they could do. This is the first time I recall them marketing their chips based on what AMD could do.
 

1Tanker

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First, I am not a fanboy.

That being said, I do not understand why Intel is making such a fuss about being better than a 2 year old processor, unless they know AMD is about to crush them, and they are making the best of a bad situation.

Seems like whenever Intel talks about it's new processors, it also talks about AMD, isn't that a marketing no-no?

In the old days, Intel would market it's chips based on what they could do. This is the first time I recall them marketing their chips based on what AMD could do.

The company that has the performance touts said performance..... it has nothing to do with "how old" a chip is, when purchasing managers go out to make a buy they will not look at the performance, say I want the best, then dismiss it simply because it is beating a 2 year old chip.Look at the 1987 Mustang GT. It was a phenominal success, yet was based on the fox platform. It had Pinto rear drum brakes FFS, but every other car on the road was a Mustang. I bought an '88 GT Loaded. Best bang for the buck, but old designs, mixed in with some new. Total POS though, quality wise.
 

DrBlofeld

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Look at the 1987 Mustang GT. It was a phenominal success, yet was based on the fox platform. It had Pinto rear drum brakes FFS, but every other car on the road was a Mustang. I bought an '88 GT Loaded. Best bang for the buck, but old designs, mixed in with some new. Total POS though, quality wise.

:lol: :lol: :lol: LOL
 

gman01

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I don't care for the new Table of Contents. I much preferred being able to scan all the page titles at a glance without a pull-down menu. I realize this may be off-topic but I wanted to get it out before all the fanboys on both sides crash the forum.

Agreed. Dropdown lists suck. Is my browser not loading the pages correctly? I see no benchmarks of an AMD system in that article at all.

Who wrote this crap?

The only line in this article you need to read is the conclusion which says:

However, we do not see Woodcrest knocking out AMD, since the HyperTransport architecture remains the best choice for 4P solutions thanks to its point-to-point layout and dedicated memory controller per processor.
 

jabliese

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To clarify, Intel is setting up Woodcrest as THE Opteron beater. They are making sure everyone gets that message.

What happens to the message when Opteron is no longer around to beat?

To answer Ycon, AMD beating Intel for any length of time was news, as it had never happened before. Intel proclaiming itself as the AMD beater for whatever window they have until AMD releases a new chip (I believe the window should be counted in months) tells us that AMD did indeed whoop on Intel, in case there were any doubters, and also points out the tragedy of how far Intel fell.

In short, there is a big difference in how the #2 chip maker can and should market, and how the #1 chip maker can and should market.
 

clue69less

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The only line in this article you need to read is the conclusion which says:

However, we do not see Woodcrest knocking out AMD, since the HyperTransport architecture remains the best choice for 4P solutions thanks to its point-to-point layout and dedicated memory controller per processor.

That certainly caught my eye. More than anything, I think of '06 as a time of huge flux in the small computer market and it may take a while before this all shakes out. The roadmaps are so aggressive, I'll be amazed to see the waypoints tagged within 6 months of schedule for 45nm, for example.
 

Whizzard9992

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Excuse me? QUAD Channel DDR and it only can give 5700 MB/s??
This has something to do with buffering?? :?

It's serial. Regular DDR is parallel.

I'm interested to see the benches. Architecture can be argued all day, but I'd like to see how Woodcrest holds up under load.

_________________________________________________

TO THG: I know it's not a gaming system, but I'd rather have a woodcrest than conroe, even if I have to take a hit in gaming. I would like to know what kind of hit I'd take, though.

When you run the benches, can you please run some gaming benches? I just want to know that if I get a woodcrest, the FB-DIMM latency or something else won't murder my chance of decent gaming. I'm not looking for a Woodcrest/Opteron gaming-system shootout, but just some F.E.A.R. and 3dMark on an XTX or Dual GPU SLI card would be nice for reference against a Conroe.

Thanks.
_________________________________________________
 

Ycon

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Every company says theyre #1...
Plus, Woodcrest does beat Opteron at everything, thats the differnce.

However, just like you stated before, this is OT.
 

Whizzard9992

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Excuse me? QUAD Channel DDR and it only can give 5700 MB/s??
This has something to do with buffering?? :?


FB-DIMM technology offers scalability of 192 gigabytes — 6 channels, 8 DIMMs/channel, 2 ranks/DIMM, 1 gigabyte DRAMs and offers bandwidth of 6.7 gigabytes per second (GBps) sustained data throughput per channel.
Source
 

joex444

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1 mistake on page 1:
...has had to suffer from tremendous criticizm over the last 18 months.

2 mistakes on page 4:

...conventional DDR SDRAM due to repidly degrading signal strength.
...administrator to deploy four memory modules at once to polulate all four channels

1 mistake on page 5:
...featured PCI-X 133 bus that poweres two 64 bit slots.

2 mistakes on page 6:

...we are still sceptical concerning the efficiency...
...numerous FB-DIM modules...
 
Ditto. If the Woodcrest really did kill the Opteron, prove it. All I see is information about the woodcrest and test of its quad-channel FB-DIMM controller.

And about quad-channel-I know that the FB-DIMMS are serially linked, but I can see this moving to the desktop once quad-core chips start showing up unless RAM gets a LOT faster in a hurry. I think it's time to move to 128-bit-wide memory modules, personally.
 

enewmen

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Thanks for the reply. I checked the dictionary and Yankee really is a native inhabitant of the U.S. So the word Yank really is "technically" correct English. I personally think very highly of the UK and Ireland. Notice my avatar is Tom Baker? I think it also doesn't hurt to have better rock-bands, better actors, and a richer culture than the U.S.
Ok, I said enough. I didn't want this to turn into a thread.
 

Dante_Jose_Cuervo

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This is completely off topic but I'm going to agree with you completely. American culture as we know it is just a mix of everything that's been brought over. The only true culture we have is that of the native americans but how many of them are left? Even though I am an native-born american I don't always think fondly of our culture.