Core Duo Reaches the Desktop

rtt writes "AMD has long reigned the desktop CPU market due to Intel's offerings struggling to keep up in terms of performance and power consumption. Yonah is the predecessor to the Core architecture and is predominantly a mobile chip, and is used at the heart of Intel's Viiv technology. Bit-tech has an article about Yonah beating the top of the range desktop AMD chip, the FX60, clock for clock. From the article" 'When Yonah is running at the same clock speed as AMD's Athlon 64 FX-60, we found that it beat it into a corner in just about every situation.'"

Comments

every situation?

[Anonymous Coward]

mp3 encoding and other floating point workloads are quite common. AMD wins hands down there.

Wake me up when it supports 64-bit

[RelliK]

When it supports AMD64 instruction set, it will be worth a look. Until then who cares?

It's a play on words.

[insomniac8400]

"When Yonah is running at the same clock speed as AMD's Athlon 64 FX-60, we found that it beat it into a corner in just about every situation." If this is true, it would be the first time intel made anything better than amd. But in the end, all that matters is that AMD's $200 chip outperforms intel's $200 chip.

Re:It's a play on words.

[anagama]

It's worth noting that the comparison is between the FX-60 running at factory speed, and a Core Duo running overclocked.

Re:It's a play on words.

[spleck]

It's worth nothing that the comparison is between the FX-60 running at 2.6 GHz, and a Core Duo running at 2.6 GHz. Hence the clock-for-clock comparison. I think they were trying to compare architectures, for which I thought the article did a good job. I learned that the Yonah is nice, but can't do 64-bit or FPU operations well.

Actually, I already knew that, but I still looked at the benchmarks.

Over the top

[Rorian]

I think they go just a bit overboard in saying that Yonah beats the FX-60 "into a corner".. Most benchmarks had it either infront or behind by around 2-3%. Is it really worth forking out a few hundred dollars for such a dismal gain in performance? Does it have better performance-per-watt? That's what really seems to count these days anyway.

Dubious Test

[cait56]

As near as I can determine from reading the article, it proves that a Core Duo *slightly* outperforms an Athlon 64 XP2 when doing heavy number crunching with a 32-bit Windows application.

Comparing the same application build for 64-bit on Linux vs. 32-bit on Linux (or BSD) would have been a far more meaningful comparison.

Just shows how selective statistics can lie

[jmorris42]

Ok, Intel is getting some game, 'bout freaking time. But this isn't an "AMD killer" by any means.

Notice how they only included ONE FPU intensive task and AMD (and several of the Intel products) schooled this mobile offering? Most reviews include a lot more balanced set of tests, this one obviously had their storyline written for them and was tailoring the tests to fit the plot.

And also, let us not forget that the STOCK benchmark numbers for this chip were anything but impressive, so they played up the overclocked numbers. However, while this chip does have some seriously intersting overclock potential it isn't the first chip to be massively overclocked. Just last week we were salivating over a budgie Intel chip that somebody overclocked into the world's fastest CPU. So why not include THAT firebreathing monster's numbers on the chart along with some seriously overclocked AMD parts? Perhaps that would't have had such a dramatic narrative? Ah.

Meanwhile, I'll keep comparing parts running at factory spec and waiting to see what AMD drops next week to compare current gen parts to current gen parts.

Enter obligatory comment

[Temujin_12]

Entry obligatory AMD zealot, "intel can't possibly make something better then AMD" comments here _______.

Seriously, I'm sick of the overly zealous statements when it comes to "OS vs. OS" "Company vs. Company" etc. debates. Why is it so threatening when another companies/organizations happen to produce something better than your favorite company/organization?

Sometimes intel will get it right and sometimes AMD will. Deal with it.

Ya, I know. This is probably eligible for flaimbait and/or troll mod points. Oh well, I just needed to get this off my chest.

Re:What the heck is "Intel's ViiV technology?"

[mrchaotica]

Unless that means it doesn't support DRM?

On the contrary, it means that it does support DRM. And not just DRM, but Treacherous Computing. In hardware.

That marketing blurb should read:

Intel says: With Intel Viiv technology, we control a highly locked-down Intel platform designed for protecting publishers' "Intellectual Property". That means you can: Let us take charge of "your" media. Share experiences with movies, photos, and music with your friends and family if we let you. Complicate your digital life.

It's 1984-style DoubleSpeak.