First Benchmarks of AMD Hammer Prototype

porciletto writes "As seen on Ace's Hardware, this article features Quake 3 benchmarks comparing an 800 MHz ClawHammer sample to Athlon MPs at 800 MHz and 1667 MHz, as well as a Willamette Pentium 4 (256 KB L2, 400 MHz FSB) at 800 MHz and 1600 MHz. The benchmark results indicate a 40% performance increase over an Athlon MP for the ClawHammer. Additionally, the 800 MHz ClawHammer manages to tie (actually outperform by 1 FPS) the 1667 MHz Willamette Pentium 4."

Comments

Intel has a Big Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been saying this for many months, and I'll say it again: By far the biggest problem on Intel's horizon is the AMD Hammer series of chips. In the IA64, Intel decided to make a clean break and go to a new architecture, incurring performance hit when running IA32 code. AMD instead blew out the IA32 architecture to 64 bits.

Expect a massive FUD attack from Intel in the coming months as they try to convince the world that their chips aren't really inferior to those from AMD.

Re:Intel has a Big Problem

[Jay Carlson]

Yeah. But IA64 made a lot of sense for Intel, given their market position when the effort started.

Think back to Rambus. (Back?) Intel got a lot of options on Rambus stock, provided that Intel could ship n percent of systems using Rambus memory. If Intel had no significant chipset competition, this would be easy. But it turned out there was enough competition to give people a choice of chipsets, and hence memory technologies.

Still, the P4 seems consciously designed to play to Rambus strengths. It chews memory bandwidth like candy through prefetching, which helps cover the higher Rambus latencies. I think Intel took a performance hit relative to AMD when the market preferred DDR SDRAM.

Anyway, it's a great story for Intel if they could control the future of PC technology. Rambus gets rich, Intel gets rich, you pay more. Three cheers for AMD for breaking this.

IA64 now looks similiar. If it wasn't for the aura of inevitability associated with the Itanic, nobody would be particularly thrilled with it. The initial SPECint numbers where it barely kept up with a SPARC were the first practical warning---if you don't count the schedule slips.

If IA64 was inevitable, everybody would have to pay up to transition to it. If it was the banner Win64 platform, a lot of places would be buying them regardless of relative price/performance. But because it looks like AMD will eat IA64 from the low end, and with POWER4 staring down from the high end, there's no longer an obvious niche where IA64 dominance is inevitable.

Four cheers for AMD.

arrg stop with the quake already

[tomstdenis]

Why is Quake the benchmark of a good processor? Maybe computers can do something other than cache intense graphics?

Gah.

Tom

Re:Benchmarks

[10Ghz]

"This is a server chip. Benchmark it using a database, a web server, number crunching, etc."

In case you don't know, Clawhammer is meant for desktops/workstations. Hell, there's even a mobile version of it in the pipeline! Then we have Clawhammer DP (dual-processor) and Sledgehammer that are meant for servers.

Please, get your facts straight before opening your mouth!

Sign...more of the same

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll start this by saying YES, I work for Intel. Hate me...whatever.

But its SOOOOO disheartening to see my fellow nerds and /.ers so ignorant on something like the computer scene. I'm talking about all the AMD LOVE and Intel hatred posts that always follows a news article about CPU's.

I can understand the love for Linux. A group of people programming for free, fighting a giant like Microsoft. But why should AMD garner the same sort of love and respect? AMD is a giant corporation itself, willing to screw you over. They'd charge you $2000 per processor if Intel wasn't around (and yes Intel would do the same).

Last week Intel dropped the prices of its processors. AMD was forced to follow suit, dropping their prices about 2 days later. Did the Slashdot community cheer Intel?

So along comes this news...AMD Opteron 800 MHz beats a Pentium 4 1.6 GHz by one frame pre second. I guess I fail to see why everyone is so excited?

I'll wager ANYTHING that when it ships, a 800MHz Opteron will sell for at LEAST twice the price of a Pentium 4 1.6Ghz.

Why do I even bother.