New Xeon CPU Hot and Underpowered

Posted by Zonk on Friday October 21, 2005 @10:34PM from the more-tweaking-needed dept.

Kasracer writes "Web Sites The Register and GamePC received several of the new dual-core processors from Intel, dubbed 'Paxville', and ran a battery of tests on them. What did they find? From the article: 'There's no doubt about it, Intel's dual-core Xeons are their most power hungry Xeons to date ... Even when idling, two dual-core Xeons consume nearly 400W of power at any given time, which is amazingly high, even by Intel's standards ... their new dual-core chips (while powerful in their own right) simply are bested across the board by AMD's dual-core Opteron processors. Even worse, the Opterons typically perform much better while running at slower clock speeds and only having half the amount of on-die L2 cache to utilize.'"

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Re:This should change by Anonymous Coward · 2005-10-21 23:54 · Score: 5, Informative

I'll give you a quick hint: the K8 (I.e. Opterons and Athlon 64 and X2 series) is a freaking marvel of technology. The dual-core variants even more so.

Intel's dual core chips are just two chips pasted on the same die. Take a look at a proper description of an X2 some time -- there's cache sharing, an inter-cache on-chip hypertransport bus and all that nice shit that Intel just doesn't have. It's not far-fetched to say that at the moment, speaking from a microarchitecture point of view, AMD is a generation ahead of Intel.