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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. "
Looks like AMD is going to really Stick It To The Man for this one. K8 has done a lot for them on all fronts, and thankfully they're not squandering what they've gained from it. If only they'd get a marketing department that wasn't completely incompetent. (When's the last time you saw an AMD ad on TV, hmm?)
I wonder though, it's interesting that this happens the same day that Intel announces the first details about their new line up. It's like they crash into each other every so often and both fire volleys of whatever they can get.
...that this competition will be measured in FLOPS and not in MHz.
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
AMD has scored some points with this challenge but IMHO missed a huge opportunity. They should have started an ad campaign pointing out that all the P4 class products that Intel has dumped on the world were sub-par to their own.
Intel presentations today were full of hyping a per watt performance. I would have immediately launched an ad campaign that showed exactly where Intel stood with it's current desktop and server offerings in a per watt basis.
It really pisses me off how a company can talk up its products and convince a ton of people to buy them, then turn around and say that they really sucked and they just managed to sucker people in with marketing and brand name recognition.
"Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
Right now they have 2 objectives:
1) Ensure that the hundreds of millions spent on their new German production plant (set to open soon) was worth it by creating a media frenzy & consumer demand.
2) Cast a spotlight on Intel's unfair marketshare by once again proving that Intel's products are inferior and not capable of maintaining their position in the marketplace without unfair practices.
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Keep in mind that server applications are a totally different beast from desktop/gaming apps/multimedia apps (things that most people here on slashdot are accustomed to). While a media application has a very high instruction throughput (say, 2 instructions retired per cycle, or more if you consider the SIMD part), server applications can be as slow as 1 instruction retired every 10 cycles. This is because they have poor cache locality, and they block on data from the main memory. In any case, for a server app you generally want as much cache as possible.
The Raven
>580 vs 585 latest generation - its not even close -
;)
>the 585 (amd opteron) just flat smokes the intel 4 way zeon -
>top of the line for everything, SAN backend.
Wow, for someone who cannot even spell Xeon you seem to be pretty clued up!
BTW everyone, the primary reason AMD is doing this now is because Intel entered the market with low-end dualcore at affordable prices, AMD entered with above-top end maximum performance chips, and they want to try and make a point before intel releases their server-class expensive dual-cores.
Remember, the CHEAPEST Opteron dual-core costs about 50% more than the MOST EXPENSIVE intel dual-core at present, and AMD specified Opteron (not Athlon X2) for this test...
Sigh, Marketing.
Our old box was a dual 2.4 (or was it 2.8) ghz xeon.
The new box is a quad operton 950 with 16 gigs of ram.
Both ran as web servers. To give you an idea of how much faster the opteron is (Yes, I'm aware it's 2 cpu vs 4), the xeon box with Zend's php caching is twice as slow as the opteron box without any php caching on a php application with 250,000 lines of code.
No contest at all. Even if we pulled two of the cpus, I'd be willing to bet similar performance.
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I would not be surprised if somebody in Intel says the M$ magic word 'Total Cost of Ownership' next. Isnt that what M$ said after trying to run benchmarks against Linux.
I know this sounds like apples and oranges, but all they have to say is Intel processors have lesser TCO than AMD.
Its one of those things that nobody can substantiate or refute.
Most of the big computer makers are Intel-only. Most stores selling PCs are selling mostly 'Intel-Inside' machines. Most corporate PCs and servers are Intel. AMD's server share just went up to 11 percent and AMD was ecstatic about it. Seems like Intel has the business pretty well locked up so what reason do they have to respond to AMD's challenge? I predict they will just ignore it.
You know you may actually have something. Set up a major gaming contest with various suppliers of machines. Don't benchmark, but rotate the players around the machines (keep all ui hardware identical) and use statistics to see which supplier won.
Secondly you could do a rerun of the recent assisted chess competition (afair you couldn't cheat unless you managed to get away with an illegal move) except simply make it a software assisted competition. Bring whatever code you want, but you have to run it on the supplied machines. Again comparitive performance on different platforms amongst all the competitors should yield real results.
Basically set repeatable (but unique so it's a "special" definition of repeatable) challenges which require computer assistence, and see which machine/platform/vendor/os/whatever gives it's users the biggest competitive advantage.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I was at Quakecon, which was sponsored by Intel. Saturday (i think it was, it's all a haze) an AMD guy came and in front of the center was passing out AMD shirts and tattoos. By the time he was out of shirts one of the Quakecon organizers came over and started yelling at him that he "couldn't be there", and AMD wouldn't be a future sponsor if he stayed. They went off to the side and yelled for a while. I went and got something to eat.
On the way back I see the AMD guy walking away from the center, with a huge stack of temp tattoos in his hand. I ask for one, he gives me THE WHOLE STACK and says "don't let them see these or theyll take your badge and kick you out".
Later that day I saw him and his coworker as they were leaving, they gave me about 10 more shirts, which I gave to all my friends. I personally put an AMD tattoo on my forehead and wore the shirt...my friend went and started passing tattoos out in front of the Intel booth and a guy literally ran up, pushed him, and started yelling "what the fuck are you doing, you're not allowed over here anymore!"
Good times.
I can be as unbiased as it gets. ..." ..."
Especially if both companies give me an equal-valued check.
Send me sealed machines, externally similar cases, preferently ship both together (one company's courier meets the other in UPS's office, they wrap the computers in unmarked boxes). Make only one distinctive mark with a Sharpie pen in one of the cases, give me a week and I'll give you the result, posted in a website:
"The marked machine performed
"I put the unmarked machine in such and such situation and
"Final result and conclusion: the unmarked machine wins."
Someone else can open the sealed envelop and tell the world who is who. I don't care.
(I get to keep both computers.)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048