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AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core Chips Released
HaloPhreak writes "InformationWeek reports today that AMD has released the Athlon 64 X2 for the high end desktop. Intel and AMD have been competing to get these out as soon as possible, but I think it will be interesting to see what AMD will do with the mobile version of this processor, due out in 2006." From the article: "Both companies have been in a tight race to deliver the processors since engineers realized that simply ratcheting up the clock speed of single-core chips was creating too much heat and not producing the same improvements seen in previous models."
Apparantly so, but geek.com says:
"AMD could be positioning itself as the "good guy" in this whole scenario by allowing users to optionally disregard DRM. I would suspect this would be something like Intel's serial number scheme, except that AMD will most likely leave it off by default and would require enabling it via the motherboard BIOS setup or something similar."
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The problem is that you are comparing a 2.8Ghz P4 to a 2.2Ghz Athlon64... which is completely off.
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Note the graphs over here: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx
See how the 3200+ running at "just" 2Ghz is outperforming even a 3.4Ghz P4 and sometimes even a 3.5 or 3.6Ghz P4.
Also look at how a 2.8Ghz P4 isn't even on the charts... use your brain and extrapolate from the P4's what the 2.8Ghz P4 would be posting and you can see that it is WAY slower than even a 2Ghz Athlon64.
Now let's talk about what was in this article.
They told us that the lowest end Athlon64X2 is clocked at 2.2Ghz (the same as a 3500+ and faster than the 2Ghz chip in my above examples) and comes in at $537. The lowest end PentiumD is clocked at 2.8Ghz and comes in at $241.
At first glance it looks like the A64X2 is double the price... but then look at the highest end PentiumD at 3.2Ghz it's priced at $530.
Ok... use your brain again and realize that the 2Ghz A64 was outperforming a 3.4Ghz P4 and it's easy to see that the A64X2 at 2.2Ghz priced the SAME as a 3.2Ghz PD means that the A64 is actually the LOWER priced part.
The difference here is that AMD chose to focus on the high end. They didn't play "low-ball" with Intel because they don't have to. Their cheap single core chips will wipe the plate with the low-ball PD and will be cheaper as well... while their A64X2 is there AT THE SAME PRICE POINT to compete with the high end PD.
In summary... they are priced competitively.
I hope all that made sense.
Friedmud