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http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multimedia/display/20 070316205754.html there will be a pci variant and a PCI Express x1 variant

No, Core2 has worse 64-bit performance.

Putting it in a 2.5" package is pretty cool, but there have been 15k rpm 3.5" drives since the early '90's, as far as I recall. My desktop Dell has one. Here's a review of three popular ones. And, for the record, the edge velocity on a 3.5" is considerably higher than a 2.5" for the same rpm.
Correct me if I'm wrong here: 3.5" x 3.14 = 11 cm circumference, *15,000 = 1.6E5 cm/min, /100 = 1.6E3 m/min, *60 = 98910 km/hour.

I'm not a big fan of Blu-Ray (lack of standards is going to play havoc on first gen adopters) but if this was a fight about capacity HD-DVD would have been dead before it ever began. Capacity is about the only aspect of the next gen formats where there is a clear winner and it is not HD.

TDK was showcasing 100GB blu-ray discs almost two years ago and has recently shown off 200GB blu-ray discs. The problem is people are slow to adopt the use of next gen optical drives for performing important back ups and at present the excess capacity is next to useless for the movie industry.

This does help HD-DVD in that the increased capacity does help them match Blu-Rays superiority in the important TV DVD market. Previous to this you could fit an entire high def season on one BR disc but would be forced to use 2 or 3 HD discs. Now they can both meet the single disc hurdle.

I just hope someone wins this battle quickly and we'll get one standard for both PCs and movies or if not at least drives/players capable of reading both.

More importantly, Intel will in all likelyhood be using draft 2.0 of the 802.11n spec, which is much closer to the final spec than today's crappy "pre-N" stuff (draft 1.0). Draft 2.0 equipment will even be tested and certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance for interoperability.

Draft 2.0 is due to be ratified in March 2007. Next-gen Centrino (Santa Rosa) is due in April 2007. In the unlikely event that draft 2.0 is not ratified, the Wi-Fi Alliance will put together de-facto standards, which will still be much better than today's current draft 1.0. Any respectable article would mention this very important information.

11/20/06

According to iSuppli's most recent analysis, the premium version of the Xbox 360 game machine equipped with hard disk drive has a manufacturing and materials total of $323.30, based on an updated estimate using costs in the fourth quarter of 2006. This total is $75.70 less than the $399 suggested retail price of the Xbox 360. Even though it is obvious that Microsoft still has to subtract freight, toll, retail partner's profit and other possible charges, it is highly likely that Microsoft has either managed to reduce its loss to minimal, or is making a tiny profit selling the $399 flavour of the Xbox 360.

Now for the keyboard they've dropped OLED, dropped the extra function keys and moved back to LCD meaning that you'll need an external power brick to power it.

Geforce 8800 GTX's are set to release on the 8th... There were a few places where breifly they were available early... Details on the g80 gpu

Intel doesn't seem to have really taken advantage of this

AMD is converting Fab 30 in Dresden from 90um and 200mm wafers to Fab 38, with 65nm and 300mm wafers. This should come on line in 2007. Longer term, AMD is building a new fab in upstate New York for 32nm features on 300mm wafers. That should come on line in 2010.

Meanwhile, AMD's main fab, Fab 36 in Dresden, is starting to produce 65nm features on 200mm wafers. AMD is also outsourcing some production to a 65nm fab in Singapore.

Down at the user level, this means that first shipments of AMD CPUs made with 65nm technology should appear in December of 2006. Coming soon to Dell Dimension desktops.

I think the 65 nm process is key here. It doesn't really surprise me that Intel can create faster and cooler CPUs on 65 nm than AMD can on 90 nm.

Not trade with Taiwan? Are you kidding me? Anybody who wants a laptop trades with Taiwan. http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/2005103 1145912.html

Now, diplomatic relations, those are another topic.

The rumours of yorkfield being eight core have largely fallen by the wayside. See here for more recent speculation. (The link you provided points to rumours from 2005-12, mine are from 2006-09.)

"It's in the domain of 4 megabytes of L2 compared to to the best AM2's 2 megs of L2. Of
COURSE it's going to be "faster"."

Uh no. L2 cache is not the only thing that makes one chip faster than the other. In fact a lot of people have been taking the lower end 2MB L2 cache Core 2 Duos and overclocking them to higher than 3GHz. Performance is excellent and better than Athlon FX.
As for the 64bit thing. Check out this article:

Conroe and EM64T: Is There a Problem?

While 64bit performance is nothing special, in most cases it isn't bad. In fact in most of the benchmarks the Core 2 Duo x6800 beats out the Athlon FX.

The true test for the Core 2 architecture will be in multi core / multi chip mother boards. Will servers with 8 or 16 cores (2 or 4 slot) total underperform because of the memory architecture? It's here that AMD really has the better design with Opteron and hypertransport. Right now for a desktop computer Core 2 Duo is the best.

"So their only real claim to fame is power use."

FWIW, at idle (where my machines spend most of their time), the new Intel chips still consume more power than a Athlon64, while the EE versions of the A64 are better both at idle and under load.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-e nergy-efficient_6.html

In fairness, the new Intel parts are the fastest consumer CPUs going around. Particularly when overclocked. Like you though, I have little motivation to upgrade my 3200+ (running at 1.1V).

---

P.S. Thanks for your great work for the BSDs, Matt.

The average performance improvement we have seen from Athlon 64 FX-62 equaled 16%, while Core 2 Extreme X6800 demonstrated only 10% average performance boost. This way, there is a certain difference: AMD K8 turns out 6% mode efficient in 64-bit mode than Intel Core. However, this difference cannot compensate for the 20% performance advantage of the Intel Core 2 Duo over the Athlon 64 X2 working at the same clock speed, which we have pointed out in our previous articles. Therefore, we will not change our conclusions about the performance of the new Intel processors even keeping in mind the upcoming launch of 64-bit Windows Vista OS family.

Why didn't the call it the "Bad Ass" motherboard? That's the sort of hip, ironic yet edgy brand image that Intel need to take back the gaming market from AMD.

They could publish "buttmark" synthetic benchmarks too.

Got to say for once, Intel have a superior product (if they're really lucky, it might be competive with the K8L, if not they have the resources for Core3) but their marketing sucks.

I think you were just being a dumbass, but in case you weren't... according to this article about the same announcement, IBM is recommending Fedora Core as the operating system to use. So yes, linux does run on it.
Regards,
Steve

I wasn't browsing low enough and I missed an AC post before mine giving a good link (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd- energy-efficient.html). There was also one after my post (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx ?i=2795&p=7).

Thanks for both of these. I've looked them over and will read them in detail later. The anandtech article covers power only on page 7 (the one linked) I think, and I was pretty disappointed to see the ratio of idle power to full power. More than 60% it seems. That doesn't bode well for my plans to have an HTPC that can stay on all the time. I'd like it to use 5% of the power when it isn't doing anything.

The xbitlabs story is longer and I couldn't find exact numbers I was looking for during a lunch break.

It appears labs compare processors by running a given program and comparing watts (which works for some things like decoding an HDTV stream), but I'd also like to see numbers from a given task and energy measurements (e.g. compressing a video) over the period of time needed. I'll try looking for that too.

Dara

Hello,

I read an article that shows that the AM2 SFF EE-processor (3800+ X2) has much better efficiency/watt than core duo, but I'll let you judge yourself:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-e nergy-efficient.html

Anyway, I wouldn't be so sure about the fact that Intel has the better efficiency/watt in comparasence to amd. The above article certainly concludes the opposite if you use the X2 3800+ EE SFF. I don't remember if it says anything about the other EE SFF-processors. I have an idea about it, but I let you decide for yourself.

Michel Brabants

Here is the conclusion from the xbitlabs-review:

Summing up I would like to admit that being economical is the major advantage of AMD Athlon 64 X2 Energy Efficient processors. They really consume less power and dissipate less heat than their standard counterparts. The CPUs with 65W TDP consume 25-30% less power under workload, while the CPUs with 35W TDP allow you to save about 55% of power. Of course, these features of the Energy Efficient make them ideal for small and quiet systems such as getting more and more popular home multimedia centers, entertainment centers and small form-factor PCs.

Unfortunately, Energy Efficient cannot boast anything else besides the lowered thermal and electrical characteristics. They do not differ in architecture from the "standard" Athlon 64 and hence perform absolutely identically. As for their overclocking potential, which might be of specific interest to hardware enthusiasts, we have to upset you. Despite the expectations, Energy Efficient AMD CPUs cannot boast higher overclocking potential. They may even overclock worse than their "standard" analogues. Although their lowered power consumption allows you to raise the core voltage much higher, it doesn't help to hit the extreme clock speeds.

Closing up our review I would like to add that from the heat dissipation and power consumption standpoints, the AMD Energy Efficient processors can easily compete with the new Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs based on Core microarchitecture, which offers extremely efficient performance-per-watt ratio. 65W Athlon 64 X2 consume less power under low workload than the Core 2 Duo units with the same performance level. As for AMD processors with 35W TDP, they turn out absolutely beyond any competition from the electrical and thermal prospective, although you should always keep in mind that at the same time they are not so fast as the competitor.

By the way, AMD processors with 35W TDP really impressed us with their thermal mode. The screenshot below was taken during our test session. The numbers speak for themselves:

All in all we are ready to voice our verdict: Energy Efficient AMD processors will be interesting only for those platforms where low power consumption and heat dissipation are critical. In all other cases they may not be the best choice keeping in mind their higher price.

Exactly. Although the biggest issue is their inability to realise this early on, and limit the damage, rather than carrying on regardless. Looking at the estimated components costs (from http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multimedia/display/20 060906013432.html ):

"According to Merrill Lynch research company, the most expensive component of the PlayStation 3 will be its Blu-ray disk drive, which will initially cost $350. The second most expensive part of the gaming machine will be the Cell processor which will cost Sony "at least" $230 per unit to make. Nvidia's RSX graphics processor will cost $70, while for 256MB of XDR memory as well as 256MB of GDDR3 memory Sony will have to pay $50, believes Merrily Lynch."

So... $350 for a drive whose only real advantage in gaming terms is you can squeeze more hours of HD footage on a system whose 3D graphics are going to be almost as good as pre-rendered? $230 for the CPU, which will be used for... physics? Are people really going to notice the difference between physics on the XBox 360 and PS3?

To me, it would have seemed better to forget about the Blu-Ray drive as it started becoming apparent that manufacturing would be an issue, and release it later as an add-on...

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-k 8l.html

but there are still big question marks, like what they actually intend to do with Java, and how they intend to operate in a world where Open Source is squeezing them in software,

They intend to open source it, they have even started working on it.

and commodity boxes are squeezing them in hardware.

They are one of the leading sellers of AMD64 boxes, plus they are still making some really cool hardware.

Apple hasn't even released a machine that can play HD-DVD or BluRay Content yet. But... really it is a moot point because when Apple does include one, they will require you to buy a new Mac to use it.

The quad-core Kentsfield is a subsitute for the previous anounced 3.20GHz Core 2 Extreme, which has been cancelled:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/200608171 24626.html

Intel "Third video force", yeah sure, actually they are the first video force:

Video Card Market Share, Q2 2006:
Intel: 40%
ATI: 27%
NVidia: 20%

Source xbitlabs

Intel's own tech documents state that their famous "Micro-Ops Fusion" does not work in 64-bit mode. This feature is one of the main features that make the Core2 architecture as fast as it is. Losing this knocks performance down around 5 to 6 percent, which puts Opteron just that much closer.

xbitlabs has some more details.

No one is trying to say that Woodcrest isn't a good 64-bit chip. We are just telling it like it is: woodcrest does not gain much from 32 -> 64-bit code (in some cases it is a bit slower), while the Opteron gains decently almost across the board.

To run a 7900GT alone requires a minimum of 21A on the 12v rail, and in SLI you'll need at least 28A on the 12v rail minimum (this is just to run the video card without having it auto clock down for lack of power).

I love it when people take RECOMENDATIONS out of context, and suddenly start calling them REQUIREMENTS.

"MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS" are nothing of the sort. They are not the minimum requirements for the device to work, they are simply a VERY general "minimum" value with lots of play built-in.

For example, Nvidia lists the "minimum" for a single 7900 GT as a 350w powersupply with 20A on the 12v line. This is a RECOMMENDATION.

Reality: The 7900 GT uses about 50w at full load, which is actually pretty low for the performance level (major reason I bought mine). That's around 4A load, 2A idle, if you were paying attention.

The fact of the matter is, Nvidia has to WAY overestimate your power needs because they have no fucking clue what the rest of your system eats up. In fact, even with these GENEROUS recommendations, it is possible to build a system that has so much crap in it that even a 350w powersupply can't power that plus a 7900 GT...but this is extremely rare.

Fact: midrange PCs, even with a (single) fancy video card, use around 150w or less at full load. The amount of power used can differe hugely from system-to-system, depending on how many drives you have, how many video cards and processors you have, and who makes them.

For example, my upper-midrange system: a 3800+ X2 and a 7900 GT, one hard disk and two optical drives, stll uses a little under 150w under full load, and uses a small fraction of that under idle. Don't be confused by the manufacturer's specs: they have to be written for the same stupid people who plug PCIe cards into AGP slots. Otherwise, Nvidia's partners would constantly get calls from people whose PCs wouldn't turn on after the card was installed. It doesn't mean you can't build a QUIET and POWERFUL PC.

The story that you are citing is from May 2005 based upon initial speculation about these CPUs back at that time. I would suggest the following would be more appropriate starting points for information. There are many more articles available, of course, but these are current, relevant, and informative.

From Anandtech:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2795 Intel's Core 2 Extreme & Core 2 Duo: The Empire Strikes Back
http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=280 0 Conroe vs. AM2: Memory & Performance
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2797 Conroe Buying Guide
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2793 Intel Woodcrest: the Birth of a New King
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2772 Intel Woodcrest, AMD's Opteron and Sun's UltraSparc T1: Server CPU Shoot-out

From XBit Labs:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2 duo-preview.html Getting Ready to Meet Intel Core 2 Duo: Core Microarchitecture Unleashed
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2 duo-e6300.html Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 + ASUS P5W DH Deluxe: Ideal Mainstream Platform?
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2 duo-shootout.html Contemporary Dual-Core
Desktop Processors Shootout
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2 duo-64bit.html Conroe and EM64T: Is There a
Problem?

From The Inquirer:
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32 842US government unit throws Intel out over RAID problems
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32 818Conroe shows dodgy RAID performance anomalies
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33 102Intel Merom to launch early
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33 229Intel 965GM is considerably hotter than its predecessor

The story that you are citing is from May 2005 based upon initial speculation about these CPUs back at that time. I would suggest the following would be more appropriate starting points for information. There are many more articles available, of course, but these are current, relevant, and informative.

From Anandtech:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2795 Intel's Core 2 Extreme & Core 2 Duo: The Empire Strikes Back
http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=280 0 Conroe vs. AM2: Memory & Performance
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2797 Conroe Buying Guide
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2793 Intel Woodcrest: the Birth of a New King
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2772 Intel Woodcrest, AMD's Opteron and Sun's UltraSparc T1: Server CPU Shoot-out

From XBit Labs:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2 duo-preview.html Getting Ready to Meet Intel Core 2 Duo: Core Microarchitecture Unleashed
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2 duo-e6300.html Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 + ASUS P5W DH Deluxe: Ideal Mainstream Platform?
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2 duo-shootout.html Contemporary Dual-Core
Desktop Processors Shootout
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2 duo-64bit.html Conroe and EM64T: Is There a
Problem?

From The Inquirer:
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32 842US government unit throws Intel out over RAID problems
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32 818Conroe shows dodgy RAID performance anomalies
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33 102Intel Merom to launch early
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33 229Intel 965GM is considerably hotter than its predecessor

The story that you are citing is from May 2005 based upon initial speculation about these CPUs back at that time. I would suggest the following would be more appropriate starting points for information. There are many more articles available, of course, but these are current, relevant, and informative.

From Anandtech:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2795 Intel's Core 2 Extreme & Core 2 Duo: The Empire Strikes Back
http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=280 0 Conroe vs. AM2: Memory & Performance
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2797 Conroe Buying Guide
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2793 Intel Woodcrest: the Birth of a New King
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2772 Intel Woodcrest, AMD's Opteron and Sun's UltraSparc T1: Server CPU Shoot-out

From XBit Labs:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2 duo-preview.html Getting Ready to Meet Intel Core 2 Duo: Core Microarchitecture Unleashed
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2 duo-e6300.html Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 + ASUS P5W DH Deluxe: Ideal Mainstream Platform?
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2 duo-shootout.html Contemporary Dual-Core
Desktop Processors Shootout
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2 duo-64bit.html Conroe and EM64T: Is There a
Problem?

From The Inquirer:
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32 842US government unit throws Intel out over RAID problems
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32 818Conroe shows dodgy RAID performance anomalies
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33 102Intel Merom to launch early
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33 229Intel 965GM is considerably hotter than its predecessor

The story that you are citing is from May 2005 based upon initial speculation about these CPUs back at that time. I would suggest the following would be more appropriate starting points for information. There are many more articles available, of course, but these are current, relevant, and informative.

From Anandtech:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2795 Intel's Core 2 Extreme & Core 2 Duo: The Empire Strikes Back
http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=280 0 Conroe vs. AM2: Memory & Performance
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2797 Conroe Buying Guide
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2793 Intel Woodcrest: the Birth of a New King
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2772 Intel Woodcrest, AMD's Opteron and Sun's UltraSparc T1: Server CPU Shoot-out

From XBit Labs:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2 duo-preview.html Getting Ready to Meet Intel Core 2 Duo: Core Microarchitecture Unleashed
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2 duo-e6300.html Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 + ASUS P5W DH Deluxe: Ideal Mainstream Platform?
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2 duo-shootout.html Contemporary Dual-Core
Desktop Processors Shootout
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2 duo-64bit.html Conroe and EM64T: Is There a
Problem?

From The Inquirer:
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32 842US government unit throws Intel out over RAID problems
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32 818Conroe shows dodgy RAID performance anomalies
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33 102Intel Merom to launch early
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33 229Intel 965GM is considerably hotter than its predecessor

http://www.hypertransport.org/products/productdeta il.cfm?RecordID=65
PathScale Infiniband card. Lowest latency infiniband neworking card in existance (1.5 microseconds).

http://www.supercomputingonline.com/article.php?si d=11429
Xilinx card

Articles about HTX and 4x4 (Torrenza) tie in:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/200606070 74412.html
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Weblets/0,,7832_8366_5730 ~109409,00.html
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/06/02/qanda_amd_vp_ran dy_allen/

There are many more, but this is a start.

DirectX 10 is hardware limited as well, it gives graphic cards the ability to use unified shaders meaning that if the game is wanting to make use of pixel shaders all of the graphics cards onboard shaders can be used for that purpose if required meaning that there's much better usage of the chip at any one time which will speed things up.

From ATI: DirectX 10 also allows new abilities for the developer such as morphing so expect to see monsters changing shape. Another new feature is the ability to get the graphics card to handle physics instead of the CPU, which can significantly allow more objects to be interacted with and making games more realistic. ATI showed off a demo a while ago which showed off an ocean where the wave physics were entirely done on the GPU rather than the CPU so expect more games to use this type of feature in the future.

Some Info

If you need more information, click me.

Elbrus may have "failed" because market leader Intel chose to buy them.

Bye egghat.

There is better and more balanced reviews here and here

Small selection:
- HardOCP
- X-Bit Labs
- HotHardware

up to date list here

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mobile/display/200603 27232038.html

Here is an article with an overclocked FX-60. It's hard to make direct comparisons between the articles but look at the quake results. In the Bit-Tech Core Duo article linked in the summary, Quake 4 1280x1024 high quality: FX60 gets 119.5 fps and overclocked T2600 gets 124.4.

In the article I linked to, quake 4 at 1024x768 high quality, base FX60=162 and when overclocked, 173.6. In other words, overclocking the FX60 gives 106.8% the performace over factory settings on this test.

Going back to the article cited in the summary, multiplying the FX60's score from the Bit-tech article by the overclocking boost from the overclocking article suggests that an overclocked FX60 could be expected to score 127.6 fps.

Obviously, it's not all so simple, but there is an obvious bias in an article that fails to compare overclocked chips to overclocked chips.

What capabilities does the Wii command that are unachievable on the GameCube today? I think nintendo is just releasing the obligatory new platform as a method to increase saturation of it's 'wiimote' controller. They should have just bundled the controller with whatever handful of games they plan to have it work with and called it a day. Consider:

Wii is hardly more powerful than gamecube. GC 1.5 indeed. Partial Wii Specs vs. GC Specs>

They are releasing AAA GC titles simultaneously with Wii anyway.

Wii has 4 GC controller ports and will accept GC discs as well as Wii ones.

What we really have here, just like GBA SP and DS Lite, is the GC Wii, with a pack-in wand controller and ethernet port.

Twenty-seven pages? Gimme a fucking break. Think they're milking it a touch?

They like to have a lot of pages so they .. ...NEXT PAGE...
can show a lot more ads and increase thir pageviews ...NEXT PAGE...
But the joke is on them really ...NEXT PAGE...
Because most of us block ads anyway

And apparently a two-page benchmark is good enough for a slashdot frontpage article?! Why don't you try REAL benchmark for the X1900 XTX, which also shows off two flavors of the X1800, and two other flavors of the NVidia GeForce 7800.

Misprediction penalties are part of the explanation.
It seems that the P4 microarchitecture suffered from other oddities as well.

See for example this x-bit-labs article about a feature called "Replay".
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/repla y.html

The 6600GT can be passively cooled (eg. Gigabyte sell one such model, which I have), but the heatsink is much bigger than the one the 7600GS has in the picture. The performance increase wouldn't be that big however, and the 7600GS actually sports a lower memory clock than the 6600GT. It would be nice to get a power consumption figure as well - the 6600GT uses about 50 W and the linked item lists the 7600GT at 67 W.

• 1024 Intel Xeon processors
• 2TBs (two terabytes) of memory
• 60TBs (terabytes) of disk space

1. 
   "Blurry"

   
   Most CRT's have circuitry that adjust for the aging process.
   
   "Hot"

   
   Most devices that generate work, generate heat. Including LCDs. Anyway I'm in front of a CRT and it doesn't generate as much heat as you think.
   
   "electricity-hungry"

   
   Not as much as you think when in a non-sleep mode. And even less sleeping.
   
   "large dangerous vacuum on your desk in front of your eyes"

   
   I can tell that you've never looked inside a modern CRT. One that vacuum is in a special glass envelope. Two most have a metal shield backing.
   
   "while sitting you right in the direction of an electron gun while firing x-rays out the back."

   
   Special glass, and metal shield. Plus soft X-rays aren't going to be coming out the back. (hint: look up how X-rays are generated). And last you get greater amounts of ionized radiaton from other sources.
   

I could take some pot-shots at LCDs.

Here you go.
Needless to say X-Bit Labs rocks! They actually asked the boothbabes to pose with the hardware. Great idea, because that is the reason they are there anyway.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/editorial/display /cebit2006-3_2.html

the Mac software market is at best flat.

That's an interesting way of looking at things, but the use of averages is misleading, as we all know Apple went through a horrible near-death "dip" several years ago. Take a look at the graph here: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/print/200506092 15358.html ... sales of Macs grew 40% last year, and the sales growth rate has been steadily increasing for a few years. Apple sold over a million computers in just the last quarter ... they will sell at least several million during 2006 and several million the year thereafter, so the Mac software market is anything but flat.

It might also be interesting to note that the E6700 has a TDP of less than 65 watts, whereas the tested Athlon64 has a TDP of 110 watts. Amazes me that such a thing isn't brought up in the article, it is one of the factors we have decently hard data on and a clear advantage for Intel, whereas the benchmarks themselves leave a lot of room for arguing.

While one can argue a lot about the validity of the benchmarks it is quite clear that Intel is ahead in pretty much every possible metric with the information we have as of yet. It will be interesting to see how things sort themselves out this fall.

So on this high-end (well, high mid-end for the Conroe since this is just the E series, there will be a higher clocked XE series as well) pricing looks to be in Intels favour at the moment. Things might shift a bit before the release, but it seems likely that the pricing will be very competitive.