AMD Launches Counterstrike Against Core 2 Duo

DigitalDame2 writes to mention a PC Magazine article about the AMD 4x4 enthusiast platform, which is meant to counter Core 2 Duo. The article observes that AMD is now facing many of the same business practices it used in its war against Intel. From the article: "While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, improvement can often be a slap in the face. Intel's C2D was designed with both low power and performance per watt in mind, two key design metrics that helped AMD cut into Intel's market share with the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 X2. And, as preliminary numbers have indicated and final performance reviews now show, the C2D has learned its lesson well: its performance now tops AMD's Athlon 64 architecture by a substantial margin."

Comments

Re:4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else

[MarcoAtWork]

remember that AMD is slashing the prices of several X2 processors by about 50%, hence the price differential is mostly only the mobo differential, which I don't think will be that much...

Re:4X4 is more a marketing ploy than anything else

[Azarael]

[Blockquote]Mounted on each socket will be an AMD dual-core processor (not necessarily an AMD Athlon64 X2, according to an AMD representative)(Emphasis Mine), for a total of four cores.[/blockquote]

The article says otherwise.

Re:Ah, but you can fudge the number of cores...

[Bitmanhome]

Not at all. AMD's cores have unique caches per core, plus they share the same memory bus. However, AMD put some effort into the crossbar. While Intel's early multicore offerings were essentially the same, there was no crossbar, so bus contention was a little worse.

The Core 2 series now has shared L2.