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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. "
This is just marketing by AMD. There is no way that Intel and AMD would come to agreement on the benchmarking software to use. Both companies know their weak points and their strong points. Neither company is going to agree to lose.
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.
Should Intel accept AMD's challenge, the duel would take place at a public venue to be announced in the coming weeks
Place the chips in an unmarked bag and drop them in the trash on the corner of 2nd and 4th. We'll let you know when our neutral, third-party testing lab is finished with them and post their results.
Finally an open match between two independent groups who compete to prove who has the best product available and competing in a leve where the rules are set and the process is (at least somewhat) clear.
This is what has been missing in the benchmark field. I hope that this trend picks up and that from now on we see the companies battling it out on the technical field instead of the marketing field.
P.S.:yes I know. This is marketing too. But still, it is a lot better than obscure references and funny and dubious charts which show vage and misleading numbers.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Nah.
...and it would be as accurate.
It'd be more interesting if the opposing CEOs dressed up in colorful, masked outfits with capes and boots and took turns body-slamming each other in a ring, surrounded by thousands of cheering fans, and the play-by-play by a prominent Mexican wrestling announcer.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Two computers crunching numbers next to each other, big deal.
Fistfight between executives, I'd watch.
... global warming on the rise again.
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
Maybe we could get a few undercard matches as well?
Windows v. Linux, quickest from blank disk to running system
vi v. emacs, first to edit a 10 page document
RMS v. Bruce Perens, which person does the audience kill first
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.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I don't see where Intel would enjoy any strategic advantage in participating.
Burger King has in the past been fond of touting its #2 status -- as has Pepsi.
But the big boys, McDonald's and Coke, generally like to pretend that #2 doesn't exist. After all, it would only publicly legitimize their fear of a threat by doing so. AMD gets positive publicity whether they play and win, play and lose, or if Intel refuses the contest.
Whereas Intel can only AT BEST hope to win the contest and essentially say "Hey, it's actually true that there are viable alternatives to our technology out there, but just remember that for the time being we outperform the competition by 1.23%."
Corner of 2nd and 4th? Whoa, there, boy! We're not in Euclidian space anymore!
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
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
Intel's Paul Otellini has already publicly refused to take up AMD's challenge. He said he prefers such things "to be worked out in the market."
That's Intel-speak for "we know we can't beat you in any fair contest, so we're just going to outspend you ten-to-one in marketing and make everyone think we're faster, just like we've been doing for the last five years."
Yup, that's the way to do it. If you can't beat 'em, FUD 'em to death.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In the end, they both sell more units to the piglets.
God, I detest corporate marketing.
I've been accused of being, 'Too Serious' and not allowing myself to just, 'Have Fun'. Fine. I can sort of see the argument. . .
After all, this is the only time in history, a window which will be open for only a few brief nano-seconds on the geologic time scale, where I can buy scratch-n-sniff stickers and scratch-n-win lottery tickets, and fizzy sugar water in a can, and pop a high-tech ecstasy pill and wear spandex and running shoes and play video games and watch movies and all of that other crazy stuff. Hey. Sure. It's all fun. This is a once in a billion chance of a lifetime to try all those funky toys out.
But pardon me for thinking there are FAR more interesting things in life than falling in line with some corporate promotional department's greedy wishes so that some millionaire can make another million off everybody's inability to resist their fascination with shiny plastic doo-dads and fake boobs.
Sure, perhaps I might seem, 'Too Serious' to the average burger-eating, cell-phone fashion zombie. --But I also have self-respect and an identity of my very own which I didn't buy at some death star mall. I take pride in not jumping whenever some corporate marketing shill tells me to get addicted to his ice cream.
And I DO NOT CARE whose microchip is faster.
But then. . , perhaps I'm just getting old. All that crap was fun when I was a teen, so to each his own. Live your life in whatever way suits you best!
-FL
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
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.
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.
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.