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. "

Comments

Why should they accept?

[weedenbc]

Accepting would only hurt Intel so there is absolutely no reason why they should take the challenge. I mean come on, they are in the business of making money, not proving a community of geeks right.

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.

Two Reasons

[popo]

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.

AMD could actually lose this one

[vlad_petric]

If Intel, for instance, chooses to pit a dual Itanium 2 system against the dual Opteron. Itanium 2s can have shitloads of L3 cache (like 6M, vs 1M in the Opteron), which is perhaps the most important performance feature of a server chip.

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.