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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.
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.
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
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.