Who do you know that owns an AMD 4X4 system? The article clearly stated that the test was for single processor systems. Virtually no large OEM sells 4X4 systems so the average home user is going to have a hard time acquiring one... it's just not a viable system in terms of numbers. I felt the article clearly explained itself, its purpose and its limitations.
You are right but you can't buy this new intel core either. Plus comparing 2 generation old athlon with next generation intel is really fair...on the other hand intel cost $1000 whereas Athlon 6400 black ed. around $220 dig that....I was always a AMD man starting with AMD 486 DX 66MHz and 8Mb of Ram and 650MB HDD and VGA with 1MB RAM that was 13 years ago oh boy I miss that time when I had stocks of 5.25" floppy disks...anyway AMD has to push it to regain the top
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"Do not look down on anyone unless you helping one to get up!"
"Overclocking is like a drug addiction, the differance is we go broke improving our brain cells instead of destroying them"
San Diego 4000 @2.8 // XFX 7900GS @621/1702 // 2x512 DDR400@466
I was really ashamed to be a Tom's Hardware reader after I read this article. I know it's been said already but how is it good journalism to pit a brand new quad against an older dual and then say that AMD's performance is abysmal!??! Talk about your ultimate apples to oranges comparison. This article should have left AMD completely out and pitted intel against itself. Plain and simple. End of story.
I think if you read between the lines, you'll realize that AMD is so far behind the curve that it's pathetic. Do they have a quad desktop part to use? No. Do they have any computing solution that can even come close to competing with Penryn? No (they might have one soon, but there's no samples yet). So THG looked for the closest match they could find (that someone might actually purchase...really, who's going to buy a 4x4?) from the other company and threw it in there. Frankly, Intel competing against itself is BORING. The whole theorized reason why we're not seeing a 3.2 Ghz part right now is that AMD is so far back that there's no reason to release the faster Penryn part at this time. What Intel has done is pretty amazing, true, but the question for them becomes why continue innovating?
Phenom better be fantastic, or it's going to continue to be very dull and boring. I guess that even if it's not, Baron, the Mrs, Sharikou, AMDZone, the Inquirer, etc. will claim it's the best thing since sliced bread and we'll have some discussion anyway.
Wow, did all the AMD employees log on and complain about the comparison? The fact of the matter is, there is no comparison between the new Intel chip and anything close from AMD, especially for mainstream users.
This reminds me of when the Nvidia GTX was released and everyone complained about comparisons to ATI since the R600 wasn't released yet. When it did finally come out 6 months later, it still wasn't as good as the GTX, and now we have 8800 Ultra's with rumors of the 9800 series to be released soon.
The fact of the matter is, AMD is way behind the launch cycle of its competitors. You can either ignore it and rave that THG should not compare products to AMD, or you can accept it and move on. Personally, I think THG should point it out that AMD doesn't have anything to offer, in the hopes that AMD gets off their butts and produces some serious competition again, because if AMD goes away we're going to be back to overpaying for Intel/Nvidia products and the cycle of innovation will slow.
I'm not bashing AMD and I'm not an Intel/Nvidia fanboy. I just call it like I see it.
My only question is will the new Intel chips run on the rumored 780i Nvidia motherboards for SLI purposes? I hope so as I'm about to build a new computer and I'd like to put this CPU with the latest GPU releases in SLI mode.
Good review. Really enjoyed the read. I am shocked at the 3.8W idle consumption. That was very, very impressive to me. perhaps the best thing I read was the feasible idea of 4 dual cores combined to make an 8 core CPU.
I am amazed and appaled by the AMD posters. In the last few articles about Intel CPUs they would ask about why AMD wasn't included to see their performance differences. Now THG includes them and gets critisized that they compared a Quad to Dual core of 2 generations back. Yea its not right but the same could be said about when AMD released its A64 technology in comparison to the Netburst. New technology vs old.
I for one think the comparison is due to AMD not having a engineering sample ready for pretty much anyone and the CPUs are set to be released next month. Right now even Intel is beatting AMD where they are the top. Power usgae is one of the highest priorities now(well ever since the Prescott core) and untill we see what Phenom has to offer thats what it is.
Now this should really push AMD especially since Intel is hitting them where they do best. Plus you could get a 6400+ BE for 200 but for a little more you can futurproof yourself with a Q6600 or even one of the 2.66GHz Penryns that will run around the same price.
On a side note I have been reading that AMD is having trouble with leakage on higher frequencies than 2.6GHz(which is why I thought they were being delayed). So I wounder if by the time they get the CPU out it will have changed or if they are really having "Netburst" type issues. If so they might want to work on that fast since that won't be good news for them in the server arena. Most companies want a chip that has high performance, low power usage and less heat output and if they have the leakage problems it will spell bad for AMD.
Although I am sure that they can still tackle the lower end market and maybe keep it since their low end CPUs tend to do well in the lower segment. I never wish them to be destroyed or go out since they seem to make Intel want to make great CPUs.
I just think everyone should stop complaining. No matter what THG does it seems that someone thinks its unfair. I think once Phenom will come out everyone will be more accepting of the outcome. I'm just afraid that if Intel outperforms AMD there will be more anger in the results.
Do you understand the slightest technical aspects?
I think you fail to grasp that this chip is built using a smaller process and using new materials.
What is appropriate voltage for larger 90nm or 65nm may not be good for 45nm chips with it's different materials. Since they can operate with less power, supplying old levels may harm the chip.
Also, Water Cooling would have done very little to assist with an OverClock. The chip was hitting a Voltage limit, not a heat limit.
Increasing the voltage further would have simply further endangered the chip.
Your desire to bring AMD into the discussion shows the weakness of your arguments. The point of discussion was comparing the new Intel Chips to the old Intel Chips. To try and prove your point, you compared the new Intel chips to AMDs.
A classical philosophical fallacy employed by those who need to divert readers from the weakness of their arguments on a given topic by discussing a different one.
...
let me here present some figures which compares a Intel dual-core (E6850) with a quad-core (QX6850):
Cinema 4D = -100 %
3D Studio Max = -100 %
DivX 6.6.1 = -30 %
Mainconcept H.264 = -70 %
...
For credibility reasons:
"-100%"
Come on now Tjik, you can do better than this!
-100% of 100 is 0 not 50.
Did you mean the following..
Cinema 4D = 50% (dual-core is half the performance or quad-core is 2x dual-core)
3D Studio Max = 50%
... Sorry, can't be bothered to do the maths for the others, you made your point, I made mine. How critical are those four benchmarks (at the quad-core performance level) to typical home user ???
tygrus, 100 % doesn't always mean 100 % of a fixed amount, it can also stand for portion of increase or decrease. So what I did, was to use the same math as Tom's Hardware is using (all numbers are published and known). If you have an issue with this, it's a issue not with me but with the methodology of the published article, because my comments had to be consistent with it. If you forget the sarcasm, you might now see through these figures and realize what my main criticism was based on: journalistic quality.
Not all published figures are misleading, but as I said before it's a mishmash spiced with odd remarks making it difficult for the general public to distinguish relevant facts. As comments in this thread also proves, there's a lot of interesting and insightful information to be found in this, and others as well, article of Tom's Hardware.
I see that AMD vs. Intel usually stirs up a lot of unnecessary emotions, but my comments have nothing to do with this. Established tech-sites need as all other parts of journalism exercise self critique, evaluate the overall journalistic quality. Are the folks behind Tom's Hardware interested in this? I believe so.
I've made my point, and for clarity I did once more specify it. As for your last question about "typical home users", I would reply: non of all published figures actually apply to them. However an article about a 1 000 $ CPU won't interest the "typical home user" anyway, about which we agree I suppose. The whole concept of quad-cores will probably become mainstream, just as dual-cores have, but not because the "typical home user" decided he needs it, but simply because the market and technology are evolving. In this department smart marketing is what runs the business of both Intel and AMD (Intel being the smarter one usually).
The slight increase of performance Intel does present, after 18 months since C2D was released, is expected (some expected more). What's more impressive is how Intel has improved its power-consumption. When middle- or budget-offerings of Penry finally hit the market it'll be interesting to see whether first generation C2D users will upgrade or not. It's a fast and furious development, but still you need a buyer.
On a side note I have been reading that AMD is having trouble with leakage on higher frequencies than 2.6GHz(which is why I thought they were being delayed). So I wounder if by the time they get the CPU out it will have changed or if they are really having "Netburst" type issues. If so they might want to work on that fast since that won't be good news for them in the server arena. Most companies want a chip that has high performance, low power usage and less heat output and if they have the leakage problems it will spell bad for AMD.
This is a great point and further illustrates why Penryn is so important for the industry and for Intel. As you shrink parts, you have a tendency to increase leakage as there's literarly less material to keep the electrons that are flowing from spreading outside their specified routes. This increases heat and the amount of power you need to keep the chip running at the same frequencies as the previous generation. In Penryn, Intel drastically changed the fundamental build of the transistors and thus improved gate leakage while shrinking. That's pretty amazing. Now IBM supposidly has come up with a 45nm based High-K metal gate system like Intel, but we have no actual proof (and it's completely suspect - it may just be the "me too" situation). And as we know that IBM does most of AMD's research for them, anything IBM has will eventually trickle down to AMD. However, if High-K really doesn't exist in IBM's 45nm and must wait until 32, this means that the 45nm parts from AMD will most likely have a leakage problem. Even 65nm parts at high frequency (hello Phenom) may be suffering some leakage problems and that may be why we're waiting for samples. As enthusiasts know, extreme leakage will also put a huge cap on overclockability. Leakage is really one of the most challenging and important issues in chip design today (or rather in process technology design as the ones who design the chip pathways really don't care what the materials are made of). Maybe if AMD gets far enough behind, Intel will release details about the composition of the Hafnium based material that is powering their chips (for a price, of course).
OK, so everyone is going to jump on me for this. However, Tom's could have benchmarked this against the Opteron 2350 if they had wanted to. Different class processors, I'm sure you'll say. Personally, I think that would have been a much better comparison since the 2350 is much closer to what the Phenom will be. The 6400+ is yesterday's silicon. Just my $0.02
If AMD pulls things off, and, at present, it seems like a very big IF, we will probably have yet another Intel pushing high clock speeds when AMD has the same performance with significantly lower frequencies. The power situation could be a problem for AMD, too, but comparing this CPU to a Sempron, Tom's might as well have compared the cpu to a P4, or Core processor. I have a Sempron on which I'm running 64 bit Linux. I also run 64 bit Seti@Home, and it performs at almost the same benchmark speed as a 939 Single Core 3500+ running 32 bit software.
Unfortunately, there seems to be little in the way of 64 bit software, and AFAIK, there are no 64 bit benchmarks of these processors. I, personally, would be interested in seeing some.
Yes, I have been buying AMD for some time, but I have my eye on Intel for my next upgrade. We'll see. I don't think AMD is sleeping, but I could be wrong.
I don't think there was a comparable AMD system to put against the Penryn. Thus, I think the article is fine as is and showed the improvements of the 45nm over the Conroe, and anything AMD currently has.
Less heat, more efficient, faster, and room for possibly another 4 cores as is. I'll almost be sad to see Nehalem show up next year, as Penryn probably still won't be fully mature by then.
Message edited by dark41 on 11-01-2007 at 02:20:32 AM
