I would say all $800+ CPUs are waste. Mostly bragging rights are involved.
Mid-range CPUs are not far behind, cost a lot less, and can be overclocked to match/exceed the expensive ones.
Ditto --- the best cost effective price/performance CPU right now has the sweet spot at the E6600.
Jack
Hey Jack, do you have any prediction for the stock clock speed of the 65 nm process X2 3800+ (since it seems the first batch of 65 nm cpus will be shipping next month)? Do you think they'll take the opportunity to bump it up a bit, or will they keep it the same and offer lower power consumption? How will the overclocking performance be affected on this initial set of processors?
AMD model numbers their processors based on the K8 core by raw clock speed and cache size, thus a 2.0 GHz with 512x2 cache is a 3800+, a 2.2 GHz with 512x2 cache is a 4200+, and 2.4 GHz with 512x2 cache is 4600+
AMD did away with the 1 Meg x 2 processors early in July, so the only 1 Megx2 are FX series and athlon, though I believe the 5200+ may have 2x1 meg.
In any event, the roadmaps circulated shows the first 65 nm K8 shrink model number as 4600+ (and I do not know if they are official, they appear to be but I have not seen a "AMD showed this" clause before it).
This means the lead products are going to be 2.4 GHz, if they are getting higher clock speed they may be targeting that for Opty's only in the initial introduction, I am not sure.
People who 'I will wait for 65 nm' thinking they will be better than 90 nm chips do not really understand what a shrink is all about and have not seen the leaked roadmaps and process data to dated .... a 65 nm 2.4 GHz K8 dual core will perform exactly the same as a 2.4 GHz K8 dual core manufactured on 90 nm (you may already know this, but I state it for the benefit of others who may be reading). Now, the 65 nm K8 at 2.4 GHz may dissipate lower power, in fact, it probably will --- OCing though is a different story, it is also dependent upon if they got the transistors tweaked out properly to physically reach higher speed. Time will tell.
EDIT: Here is what I am suspecting (and this opinion may change): AMD is touting 4 stressors in their 65 nm process, and this is a lot of major work to incorporate such dramatic new methods. I suspect they will drop 1 or 2 stressors from the list for now, get 65 nm going and ramped to a certain point with healthy yields and then work to slowly fold in one or two more 'enabling' features at a time. AMD does this routinely, 130 nm did not start on SOI but SOI was folded in, 90 nm did not start on CDO but FSG and CDO was slowly phased in. The size/capacity/cost benefit is too great to wait on perfecting it to the utmost. It is better for them to start selling 65 nm 3800+, 4200+, and 4600+ now and work on performance later.
JackAlso the rare X2 4000+(1MB L2).
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