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Intel 6xx Series Reviewed and Benchmarked
sebFlyte writes "It's been a long time coming, but Intel's first 64-bit desktop chip (the 6xx series) is here now, and thanks to ZDNet it has been thoroughly tested. The article has the full specs of the new family, explains the benefits of the changes, and also the results of tests on the new chips to establish perfomance boosts for games, photo manipulation and video work, among other things."
Ha, like Microsoft will leave that called AMD64. Expect some diplomacy and a renaming. Not that anyone but techies care.
Why would they care? When Intel invented the i*86 line, everybody software manufacturer called any Intel-compatible CPU "i*86" somewhere or other, and neither AMD, Cyrix,... complained about it. Now the situation is reversed: AMD took the lead on that particular 64 bit design, and Intel is just a follower here. It sounds rather normal and deserved that any AMD64-compatible chip should generically called "AMD64" after all.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
This article also compares Intel's announced CPU's with AMD's CPU's that you can actually buy. This is just a fluff piece-- same as the "Extreme Edition" that would overheat and that no one could buy for around 6 months.
If you look at yesterdays news, you will see that AMD is releasing dual core chips soon. So when both of these new chips actually are available in quantity-- then lets do a review. Hyperthreading will not look so good then.
Hyper Threading is an engineering solution to try and fix the problem created by Intel's marketing department-- when the company let them design the Pentium 4 to scale on Megahertz and not on performance. After that fiasco, Intel got its butt handed to it on just about all benchmarks by the Athlon. Intel management then panicked, and Intel's engineers salvaged the long processor pipeline with "Hyper Threading".
Dual cores (SMP) are the better solution. When dual cores come out, hyper threading looses most of its advantage.