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Intel/AMD Battle Rages On
An anonymous reader writes "The battle between Intel and AMD has broken out of the cleanroom and literally into public view with AMD's public display CPU speed challenge to competitor Intel. Should the competition take place, the infamous chip makers will battle their best 2-way and 4-way configurations for the latest title as speed king." From the article: "AMD's proposed dual-core duel would be a live, public performance evaluation between server platforms based on the dual-core Opteron 800 Series or 200 Series processors and the corresponding Intel product. Should Intel accept AMD's challenge, the duel would take place at a public venue to be announced in the coming weeks, with testing conducted by a neutral, third-party testing lab. "
Here's the actual link to the challenge issued by AMD to Intel on AMD's own website.
/. link.
Much more information than the
AMD proposed, Intel declined.
What's next on the agenda?
- shazow
Here's a quote from Intel in this article
Separately Wednesday, Otellini addressed its smaller competitor, Advanced Micro Devices (nyse: AMD), which today took out full page ads in national newspapers to challenge Intel to a "dual core duel" to see whose chips are faster. Said Otellini, declining the opportunity to attack, "I think that companies and products are best judged in the marketplace."
Intel will argue that their compiler produces accurate x86 code, AMD will argue its inconsistancies.
AMD would love to have another reason to point out the way the Intel C compiler libraries test for the presence of certain features in such a way as to never detect them on AMD chips even if they're present.
AMD could actually lose this one
If Intel, for instance, chooses to pit a dual Itanium 2 system against the dual Opteron.
Not in x86 emulation mode, they won't.
AMD covered their butts on that one... The challenge specifically states x86, with "the corresponding Intel x86 server processors that are commercially available in volume."
That's awfully strange... I just ordered 44 Athlon 64 processors and 6 Opteron processors and had them all within a week. In fact, if I go to newegg.com, every current AMD processor is listed as in stock.
Don't believe everything you read. They might be falling short on a few select processors, but as a company, they are having no difficulties meeting most demands.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Wait... I stand corrected. AMD has approx. 80 processors at newegg.com and 3 are out of stock. Intel, on the other hand, has 62 processors listed, 8 of which are out of stock. Just how is AMD not meeting demand? Well, I guess if you want to plunk down $1350 for an Opteron 275, you'll just have to wait. That, or buy an Intel... um... wait... they don't have anything comparable. Never mind.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
"(When's the last time you saw an AMD ad on TV, hmm?)" The Tour De France
Never have so few words meant so little to so many people.
We have a bunch of 4-way Itanium systems running as servers, we tried out 4-way Opteron machines about 18 months ago and they were twice as fast on our app. We've bought a couple of hundred 4-way Opteron boxes since then and we're very happy with them.
Our code is branch intensive with low cache locality. Since Itanium can't handle out-of-order execution, memory stalls kill it, hence the need for a giant cache. Intel's compiler didn't help, we mucked with it for months. For Opteron we used gcc, compile and go, took about a day to move 500K lines of C++.
Intel could only win this on hand-coded floating point.
Alan.