Core 2 Reviews All Around the Web

NerdMaster writes "NDA for Intel Core 2 CPUs was lifted on the night from yesterday to today and all major hardware reviewing websites are posting Core 2 Duo E6700 and Core 2 Xtreme X6800 reviews. Here is a collection of several reviews so you can check for yourself whether Core 2 Duo is faster or not than Athlon 64 X2. Reviews posted at Tom's Hardware Guide, AnandTech, HEXUS, Hardware Secrets, OCAU, TweakTown, HotHardware, The Tech Report, Trusted Reviews, Legion Hardware, bit-tech, ExtremeTech, Legit Reviews, Sharky Extreme, HardOCP, PC Perspective, GotFrag Hardware, Gamepyre, X-bit Labs - Part 1, tbreak, neoseeker and Byte Sector." We've already touched on this technology, but there has been (obviously) a lot of discussion about it since it was announced.

Comments

The giant has awakened ...

[vlad_petric]

Intel has been betting on two "mediocre" horses for too long. The first - Pentium 4 - has been successful initially, with its high clock rates, but in the end people figured out that it doesn't deliever performance (regardless, they kept it at their flagship for ~5years).

The second - Itanium - as far as I'm concerned, it's simply a step backwards. A processor these days is most of the times limited by the slow memory (it can easily take 200-300 cycles to service a request from memory, as opposed to 2-3 cycles from the L1 cache or 6-20 cycles from the L2). Out-of-order execution (Pentium Pro and after) alleviates the problem to a certain extent, by allowing other instructions that do not depend on the result of the instruction that missed to execute. So the processor can still do something while servicing the miss (quite often it executes other loads that miss, effectively increasing the memory-level parallelism of the processor). Because Itanium executes instructions in order, it simply can't do that. Furthermore the compiler can't tell which instructions are going to miss (it needs a profiler to figure frequently-missing instructions, and only then it can generate prefetches). Intel's solution - let's throw shitloads of caches on the Itanium, to reduce the occurence of the misses. Of course, that makes the chip huge, considerably more expensive, etc.

Nevertheless, Conroe seems to be an awesome chip. Time to buy some INTC shares ...

So what will AMD do?

[mgblst]

for the techreport article:

In fact, after seeing the Core 2 in action, many folks may be wondering how AMD is going to keep up. The Athlon 64 X2 4200+ currently lists for more than the Core 2 Duo E6600, and that's just not gonna cut it. Fortunately, AMD has confirmed to us that a major price move is coming in July. We don't have the specifics just yet, but they say they intend to maintain a competitive price-performance ratio. That may mean we'll see the dramatic price cuts rumored to be coming, which would be a good start.

For its next trick, AMD needs to get its 65nm fab process going ASAP. I've heard prognostications that AMD won't be able compete against Core 2 chips with its current AMD64 microarchitecture. That may be the case, but I'm not entirely convinced. The contest we've seen in the preceding pages pitted CPUs manufactured on AMD's 90nm process against CPUs made on Intel's 65nm process. The Netburst fiasco at 90nm has made us forgetful about the benefits of process shrinks, but they can be substantial. AMD could be in a much stronger position if it gets to 65nm quickly.

Why are there so many fans of AMD? We can all see the core duo is a great chip, but AMD managed a coup, to topple the crown of the reigning champ Intel a few years ago, and that deserved much kudos. I think a lot of us were worried about Intel becoming another Microsoft, and Intel had some very dodgey practises (Rambus, Pentium divide, PIV)

Re:FTFA: Funny Closing comment

[friedman101]

I know slashdotters pride themselves on running old machines because they don't need all that fancy stuff but windows 3.1... come on. How can you be productive when you can't load document files that people email you (provided they're running a semi-modern version of office)? With desktops so cheap these days (especially if you're willing to go with a celeron or sempron) there is no excuse for running such old hardware. I mean for real slashdot cred you should be running NetBSD; windows 3.1 just makes you sound lazy.

Re: Response from a Fanboy

[Patented]

My name is ArcherB and I am an AMD fanboy. This processor, imho, is as much an AMD product as it is and Intel one. Not because AMD developed it, but because it would not exist if it were not for AMD. If AMD were to go under tomorrow, this would be the last processor we can expect to see from Intel for at least 10 years. For this reason alone, I will continue to buy AMD.

While I applaud you sticking to your guns, I do not understand this stance at all. "Since Linux desktop distros would have never progressed with the user-friendliness they have today without Microsoft Windows, I'll continue to use Microsoft Windows".

I personally believe that we should acknowledge Intel for making a revolutionary product, and look forward to AMD's response. Being a fanboy just means that you purposely put blinders on yourself for something as trivial as hardware... something normally reserved for politics or religion.