Intel Stepping Up to Combat AMD's 4x4

Grooves writes "Intel has said that the company is stepping up the pace of its Core 2 architecture rollout to compete with AMD's 4x4. Two "quad-core" parts originally slated for release in the first half of 2007, Kentsfield for the desktop and Clovertown for servers, will make their debut as early as the end of this year. The Ars article warns that per-core bandwidth problems could end up giving a performance advantage to AMD's 4x4 approach."

Comments

Whichever... Competition is a good thing!

[ackthpt]

So I'm pricing a new mobo+CPU combo for a friend. I bought an AMD64 about 14 months ago for $350. Now I see I can't even get that model anymore unless I buy the parts separately as "replacements" A few steps up from what I run is now $150. It's a good thing.

Maybe in a couple years I'll consider a Conroe or AMD 4x4 type system if I need any heavy rendering done, but for now It's astounding the bang for buck we get.

Latencies and more

[cnettel]

The fact that the two dies (with two cores on each) will communicate over the FSB is of course limiting, but we also have to remember that each of those dies will have 4 MB of L2, 8 MB in total. We've already seen what the Core 2 prefetching can do in hiding the memory controller latency, so if things are good it will work equally well in prefetching data from the L2 on the other die. Then, the memory bandwidth is irrelevant, while the FSB bandwidth is still relevant. I seem to remember reading that either Kentsfield or Clovertown would carry some kind of dual-bus solution (with support in chipset), but maybe that was further ahead.

Let's also not forget that the NUMA properties of the AMD solution, with less advanced prefetching, can actually be a more significant latency problem in latency-sensitive applications. The bandwidth, on the other hand, will absolutely be there.

Re:And so it begins

[Mr. Flibble]

Do most chip sales happen at the release date, or do most people wait for the competitors product to come out spurring price drops to compete? I know I seldom buy anything at the alpha-expensive stage, usually preferring to wait a few months for the inevitable price drop.

It is not a question of inital chipsales, it is more a question of marketing. Back when both companies were trying to hit the 1 Ghz mark, AMD got there first. That was a big win for them, as consumers could now say 1000 Mhz! WOW! Even though intel quickly came out with faster chips thereafter. It was a win for AMD because the name AMD got into the minds of customers. The same thing with the 64 bit. Now, most people here on slashdot know what a 64 bit chip is, and does, and does not do. But the public does not. And since AMD had the 64 bit chip out first, consumers wanted it, even if it had no real benifit for them initally.

The same goes with this technology. Whomever gets it out of the gate first wins the "mindshare war" as we call it now. IIRC, the book "Predatory Marketing" covers how this works in detail - but they don't use the "mindshare" term in it.