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Intel Core 2 Duo Vs. AMD AM2

ThinSkin writes, "ExtremeTech has an extensive performance roundup across the entire line of Intel Core 2 Duo and AMD AM2 CPUs, from the cheap to the ultra-high end. Both companies bring five processors to the table, ranging from $152 to $1,075, with the mid-range CPUs boasting the best in price/performance. From the article: 'It's clear that Intel's Core 2 Duo lineup offers superior performance across the product line when compared with AMD's Athlon 64. In some applications, even a lower-cost Core 2 Duo can outperform some of the higher-end Athlon 64s.'" The ExtremeTech article is spread over 10 ad-laden pages. You can read it all on the printer-friendly page, but you'll miss out on the pretty graphs.

36 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Nice, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Nice, but can it perform cunnilingus on a hardwood floor?

    1. Re:Nice, but... by Nimey · · Score: 4, Funny

      I'm trying to work out where you'd stick your tongue.

      --
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      E pluribus sanguinem
  2. A consumer win! by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Ah, Competition at its finest. Although it seems right now AMD is a bit behind Intel in speed I am glad it is there. Without head to head competition with Intel and AMD Intel will probably still be pushing higher GHZ with little consideration of performance/heat and power usage. I will not be to surprised if in a year or so AMD will be faster then in a couple years Intel will be faster. As well with these to guys fighting it out the consumer wins, as the companies compete for performance and price. I would say it is best not to be in love with either Company because if this processor war is won, we the consumer will loose.

    --
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    1. Re:A consumer win! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      we the consumer will loose.

      Loose what? The hounds?

    2. Re:A consumer win! by P3NIS_CLEAVER · · Score: 4, Insightful

      -10 Insightful
      Every stinking intel/amd article has this same goddam statement. Who the hell is this insigtful to?

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    3. Re:A consumer win! by Enderandrew · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I agree. Everyone should be happy to see both pushing each other.

      Actually when you calculate performance per dollar, it is closer than most think right now. This article is comparing a $200 Intel processor to a $150 AMD processor. When you compare the $200 AMD to the $200 Intel, not only are they neck-and-neck, but in certain benchmarks, the AMD comes out on top.

      Imagine that.

      Perhaps those that read articles and think for themselves will see such things. Those that only read headlines and troll won't.

      Intel does have a very good processor line on their hands with the Core Duo 2. Even the AMD fans admit that. No one has said otherwise. It is the Intel fans who refused to acknowledge how far they were behind for 4 years. Now both are striving to be the top-dog. AMD claims they will be the best with the 4x4 line soon, and no doubt Intel will respond with a new line of their own.

      Meanwhile performance is going up considerably, and prices down at the same time. I built my AMD 3000 system two years ago, and I can't believe what you can build now for the same price.

      --
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    4. Re:A consumer win! by feepness · · Score: 2, Funny

      Every stinking intel/amd article has this same goddam statement. Who the hell is this insigtful to?

      Me... I was thinking by moving to a single payer, government sponsored chip manufacturer we could eliminate wasteful overhead, advertising, executive salaries, and that irritating itch to upgrade every 6 months.

      You damn Libertarians need to realize the free market isn't for everything...

    5. Re:A consumer win! by Z34107 · · Score: 3, Informative

      with DX 10 "regulating" what features can go into the cards, MS wins.

      Uh, DirectX is free. Writing DirectX problems with the free DirectX SDK is also, you guessed it, free.

      Microsoft doesn't profit directly from DirectX. Instead, by making Windows a better platform for game development they, shock, get more game developers on Windows.

      Also note that Microsoft doesn't decide what features can and can't go into a DirectX 10 card - it sets a minimum featureset for cards that want the sticker. How horrible that a card being marketed as supporting DirectX 10 has to support DirectX 10 functions. (Remember that DirectX emulates hardware functions your videocards lack, allowing games written for it to transcend specific videocards. If the videocard doesn't support any advanced texture, lighting, and whatever else features, you really have a DirectX 10 complaint CPU.)

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    6. Re:A consumer win! by xtracto · · Score: 2, Funny

      Writing DirectX problems with the free DirectX SDK [

      That has to be the BEST description of the resulting multimedia applications developed by using Microsoft's API.

      --
      Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
    7. Re:A consumer win! by default+luser · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yes, AMD's pressure has pushed Intel to make a lot of changes for the better.

      AMD's 386DX 40 Mhz pushed Intel to release faster 486 chips...otherwise Intel would have ridden their overpriced 486DX 33 forever.

      AMD and Cyrix produced Pentium clones which pushed Intel and forced them to reduce prices.

      AMD's push to revive Socket 7 (Super 7) with the introduction of the 100 MHz bus and the K6-2 forced Intel to release the Mendocino Celeron. With on-die cache, it was one of the best budget gaming processors ever released. The K6-2's "3D-Now!" instruction set forced Intel to finally admit that MMX was a failure, and release an addentum in 1999 with SSE.

      AMD saved us from the hot, expensive, high-latency world that is Rambus. Without AMD pushing the industry-standard PC-133 SDRAM and later DDR SDRAM, Intel would have made Rambus the defacto desktop memory standard.

      Fast-forward to today: AMD has been at parity or better for years, and it has slowed their improvements. After the cancelation of the K9 project, AMD sat on its ass, just releasing small improvements for K8. But now, with Conroe wiping the floor, AMD has to get back in gear, and is releasing K8L next year.

      It's the way of the business. When you're on-top, you tend to stagnate.

      --

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      And occasionally whores for Karma.

  3. crypto work by tomstdenis · · Score: 2, Interesting

    :-) crypto benches.

    Seems core2 is closer to Opteron but not quite there.

    Tom

    --
    Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    1. Re:crypto work by tomstdenis · · Score: 2, Informative

      Clock speed won't change the cycle counts. I'm not counting wall time here. So you can expect that if AES takes 247 cycles @1.83GHz then it will probably take 247 cycles @2.93GHz.

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    2. Re:crypto work by qbwiz · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That depends on if all the data is in cache, and if the speed of the cache increases at the same rate as the speed of the processor.

      --
      Ewige Blumenkraft.
    3. Re:crypto work by Wavicle · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Seems to me you have an odd comparison. You took the lowest end Core 2 Duo with the smallest L2 cache and pitted it against a high end AMD offering. And they about tied. What does this tell us?

      The E6300 costs about $230. How much does the Opteron 885 cost?

      --
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      Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
    4. Re:crypto work by tomstdenis · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's an ALU benchmark nothing more. The goal is to see if the ALU has improved or not.

      The code all fits in either the L1 or L2 (the test program is less than a 1MB) so it doesn't matter that I used a low end Conroe. The 1.83Ghz conroe has the SAME CORE as the expensive 2.9GHz conroe...

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
  4. No 64-bit benchmarks by David+Jao · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I'm disappointed to see that as usual the review contains no mention of 64-bit performance. Does anyone know any place that provides 64-bit benchmarks for core 2 duo?

    As much as it's done for us in the last 20 years, 32-bit x86 is not the future. Linux was AMD64-ready three years ago and Windows Vista which is just around the corner already puts more emphasis on the x86-64 platform than x86. Reviewing the 32-bit performance of core 2 duo is like reviewing Pentium processers based on 16-bit performance. Let's get some forward looking reviews instead of backward looking reviews, please!

    1. Re:No 64-bit benchmarks by tomstdenis · · Score: 4, Informative

      http://libtomcrypt.com/ltc113.html

      crypto work done in 64-bit mode on the Core 2.

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    2. Re:No 64-bit benchmarks by David+Jao · · Score: 5, Insightful
      64bit benchmarks???!? how many 64bit applications are you running/ are there in usful production?

      everyone's got the 64bit crazy Ive had 64bit technology a long time can you say risc?

      This is clearly a troll post, since you denigrate the availability of 64-bit computing in your first paragraph and then contradict yourself by claiming you jumped on the 64-bit bandwagon before everyone else, but I'll squash your post anyway.

      Only a windows user (or possibly a Mac user) would treat 64-bit computing as useless or unavailable. Linux has been available in 64-bit versions since the days of the DEC Alpha, or since 2003 if you count only AMD64. Almost every Linux application benefits from recompiling for AMD64 as opposed to x86, because of the increased register space, and the nature of open source guarantees availablity of such versions. Compute-intensive applications such as cryptography (ssh/scp over gigabit ethernet) and media encoding (ogg, mp3, mpeg) exhibit performance gains of over 100% with 64-bit operations owing to the quadratic nature of block multiplication.

      Scientific applications such as Mathematica and Maple, which I require for my job, have been available for AMD64 almost from the beginning days of the hardware platform, and gain rather a lot from AMD64 not only in terms of CPU performance but also from the larger virtual address space.

      Even if all of these things weren't true and Linux didn't exist, the fact is that Windows Vista (vaporware jokes aside) really is coming out in five months and really does spell the end of 32-bit computing for mainstream performance applications. Windows Vista isn't some half-unfinished 64/32 bit mixture like Windows 95 was a half-unfinished 32/16 bit mixture -- Vista is 64-bit through and through.

      The fact that your elitist risc platforms had 64-bit addressing some 30 years ago is not relevant to this discussion. Like it or not, x86 has "won" the platform battles, and x86-64 (unlike Alpha, IA64, Sparc) is the first and only 64-bit computing platform that will be relevant for general purpose computing.

    3. Re:No 64-bit benchmarks by DrDitto · · Score: 2, Informative

      Thats nice. But most users use non-scientific applications that will see very little benefit from 64-bit ops. The extra register space is really not a big deal with a superscalar out-of-order where register renaming and high L1 bandwidth keeps the instructions moving. Stack spills/fills nearly always hit in the L1 and performance nowadays is becoming dominated by cache misses. 64-bit is certainly necessary to move beyond 4GB of address space (with segment tricks), but most users will see no benefit from 64-bit ALU operations. In fact, 32-bit datapaths can be clocked faster than 64-bit datapaths.

    4. Re:No 64-bit benchmarks by this+great+guy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This is Slashdot. The GP, I and probably a lot of other readers who are not average users care about performance in 64-bit mode. See, for example, I write 64-bit assembly code optimized for AMD processors. So far I have never had the chance to evaluate a Core 2 CPU. So, like the GP, I would like to see 64-bit benchmarks of Core 2 CPUs. Is it so hard to understand ?

  5. Isn't this a bit old? by LIGC · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Weren't there about 20 Core 2 Duo reviews/comparisons with Athlon 64 X2's on July 23 when Core 2 officially launched? We've known these results for longer than a month.

    1. Re:Isn't this a bit old? by Frogbert · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yes but for those of us with Core 2 Duo systems it just gets sweeter each and every time we read about it.

  6. 6502, biznatch! by BitwizeGHC · · Score: 3, Funny

    The CPU of the true pimp. Nothing matches the Commodizzo' Sitty-Fizzo'!

    --
    N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
  7. Re:Note to Slashdot...Nobody cares by tempest69 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Processors have become a commodity. You buy as much processor performance as you need or can afford. The Intel and AMD processors are all great right now...well all except the old Intel P4 and Celeron stuff but that will be mostly gone in a few months anyway. Move along...there's no story here.

    ok, I'll bite....

    This is slashdot. We look at specs and drool. We crave machines with 64 gigs of ram, and a solid state hard drive in the petabyte range. If there is some way to make things blinky or shiny, someone is wondering how much longer their kids can put off braces. If someone comes out with a way to make IE 7 beta 4 load pages 3% faster, someone is going to be running tests all night long. It's news for nerds, stuff that matters. Go troll on digg or break.com and you'll have a point, but not here.

    All in all I'm glad that Intel has decided to retake the lead in the price/performance war, AMD needs a new kick in the pants.

    Storm

  8. Re:What are ads? by Rodyland · · Score: 2, Funny

    You must be thinking of spanking the monkey. Punching the monkey doesn't sound as fun.

  9. Re:Why even bother? by Lehk228 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    competing companies often take turns being the technological leader; rick romero reports at 11

    --
    Snowden and Manning are heroes.
  10. Overclocking... by steppin_razor_LA · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The last Intel processor I bought for home use was a P2. I recently purchased a Core 2 Duo 6400 and I am *so happy* with it. As discussed at this article:

    http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=28 02

    The Core 2 Duos are tremendously and easily overclockable. I upped my performance 25% by changing the FSB from 266 to 333. While this sounds like a significant overclock, for the Core 2 Duo it is actually rather conservative. You juse switch to DDR-667 memory. I'm using the stock Intel cooler and my chips are running just fine temperature wise. People who are more ambitious are going for 400+. When you combine the inherent performance and value in the line with the ease of significant overclocking, AMD isn't even in the same ball game anymore.

    --
    Evolution: love it or leave it
  11. Where are they pricing these chips? by SeaFox · · Score: 2, Informative
    Both companies bring five processors to the table, ranging from $152 to $1,075, with the mid-range CPUs boasting the best in price/performance.

    Looks to me like AM2 starts a little lower than $152.
  12. Re:X2's? He said they routed X2's.. by cdw38 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Every AM2 processor is dual-core, or "X2."

  13. Re:Why even bother? by JustNiz · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm not going hunting for the links, but all power consumption comparisons I've seen show intel in the lead over AMD now in terms of power consumption vs. performance.

    I'm not sure about dollar for dollar any more, AMD stuff is going cheap now because they've lost the lead, especially if you don't mind relatively poor performance.

    dB for db? since when did processors make noise? If you're talking about their respective heat output for equivalent performance, again it seems intel are now ahead. The core 2 runs cool enough that he cpu fan can be easily replaced with a fanless (silent) alternative anyway.

  14. Obvious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    The floor's construction is obviously tongue in groove.

    And I'm so ashamed, I'm posting as AC. *sigh*

  15. Screwed up comparison by Jerry+Coffin · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Quite a few people seem to have missed what seems to be a pretty obvious problem: the choices they've made as to what Intel processor to compare to what AMD processor just don't make sense. Look at the price table:

    Intel Frequency Price AMD Frequency Price
    E6300 1.83GHz $190 3800+ 2.0GHz $152
    E6400 2.13GHz $230 4200+ 2.2GHz $187
    E6600 2.40GHz $360 4600+ 2.4GHz $253
    E6700 2.67GHz $559 5000+ 2.6GHz $346
    X6800 2.93GHz $1,075 FX-62 2.8GHz $825
    In every case, the Intel processor more expensive than the AMD to which they compare it. The Intel E6700 is over 60% more expensive than the AMD 5000+ they consider comparable. The Intel E6300 is not only more expensive than the AMD 3800+, but also more expensive than AMD's next step up, the 4200+.

    Given their prices, the E6300 should obviously be compared to the 4200+ rather than to the 3800+. Looking at this particular pairing, rather than the nearly clean sweep for Intel, they each win some and lose some. If you simply count wins, the Intel wins more than the AMD -- but to mean much, you need to look at what they win at, not just how many different benchmarks they win. Just for example, PCMark05 goes 3:1 in favor of the E6300 -- but quite frankly, none of PCMark05 really means a thing.

    Unless money is no object to you, the two lines look pretty closely matched. In video encoding and rendering tasks, Intel wins quite easily. In the ScienceMark scores, AMD wins pretty easily. Elsewhere, a lot are really too close to call based on the data provided. There are a number of cases in which each wins by less than 2%. It's impossible to say for sure without knowing things like the standard deviations on these scores, but there's a pretty fair chance they have no statistical significance at all.
    --
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    1. Re:Screwed up comparison by timeOday · · Score: 4, Informative
      Nope, just look at the 4 graphs to compare any pair of processors you like (on 3 different pages: 1 2 3)

      At the low end, the E6300 at $190 beat the $187 AMD 4200+ in all tests, and also beat the $253 4600+ in 3 out of 4 (with the 4th test extremely close).

      At the midrange, the $360 E6600 beats even the $825 FX-62 in all 4 tests. That is bad, bad, bad for AMD.

      At the high end, AMD simply has no answer to the $559 E6700 or the $1075 X6800.

      Granted, none of their graphs shows the ScienceMark. But overall the results seem pretty one-sided to me. I'm surprised AMD hasn't dropped prices more.

  16. Intel is very open source friendly too by DrunkenPenguin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Core2duo processors seem very attractive - nobody can deny that. HERE you can find Tom's Hardware benchmarks of Core2Duo against AMD processors.
     
    However, another interesting thing is that Intel is very open source friendly. Intel's new top of the line graphics adapters (found on some core2duo motherboards) have _FULLY_ open source Linux drivers! That is a _BIG_ thing! You can find more information HERE. Imagine! Now you can have fully open source OS without any binary drivers messing up your system. These on board graphics adapters are also very fast and capable, so it's a big thing to many of us.

  17. Re:Why even bother? by MrNemesis · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Many of the reviews I've seen show that the AMD systems consume significantly less power at idle than the equivalent C2D system. Whilst the C2D is pretty much undoubtedly the faster of the two arches, I'm still pretty staggered by the energy efficiency of the AMD64. As anothe poster pointed out, AMD's cherry picked ADD chips (well, the 3800 X2 ADD anyway) consume utterly tiny amounts of power, even on an appallingly stone aged 90nm lith process ;) I can't wait for AMD's 65nm to start shipping once their process is all sorted out, since 90nm SOI has worked so well for them. That said, since the ADD series are cherry picked they're expensive and hard to come by - last I heard they were of limited availability in Germany.

    Since most computers I own spend 90% of their time idling away at 1-5% load, I'm sticking with my AMD's for the time being - I'm not a gamer (although I do alot of video endocoding and have been contemplating a C2D system for my main workstation) so balls to the wall performance is not my highest priority, and keeping the costs of running my PVR's down is quite important to me.

    As an aside, has anyone seen any benches for a Merom chip outside of a laptop? I've been thinking abut using one of these as a new Myth frontend, but the chips are like rocking-horse poo at the moment and I'm not aware of any UK stockists.

    Anyway, like I said last time - yay for competition! For the first time in years both CPU companies are releasing some pretty interesting kit. Prices for both chips are incredibly low, and given that you can grab an X2 (i.e. more than enough CPU grunt to run anything quickly, including vista, except the latest games at max settings) for less than £100 makes this a great time for customers.

    Anyway, enough rambling, time to drool over more CPU specs... :D

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  18. Re:A consumer win!-how so? We have lost choices by default+luser · · Score: 2, Interesting

    While it is true that you can buy any chip you can imagine in a server, the original poster gave me the impression that he/she wanted a cheap solution with a simple chip-on-a-board (ala PegasOS). Unfortunately, the money is in complete systems tied in with services, so that's the last thing you'll catch IBM selling.

    And sure, IBM's chips are popular in consoles, but that's mostly because IBM is the only major chip house that will offer to develop custom chip designs. The game console companies help fund the R&D bill and sign-on for some minimum initial shipment, and IBM makes some money. IBM takes existing core logic and pieces it together to optimize performance for consoles, and out pops a new chip design.

    But there's a good reason IBM has time for game consoles: IBM doesn't have NEARLY the sales volume of AMD, let alone Intel. AMD doesn't have time for custom chips because they have enough trouble just meeting market demand for their x86 products. They are shooting for 100 million chips next year once their new fab ramps up, and Intel is shooting for 300 million. IBM, by contrast, will sell only 3-20 million chips per-console, per-year, depending on popularity, and those sales rise and fall periodically as consoles get introuced and mature. Even with all three consoles in their pockets, don't expect IBM to sell more then 30 million per-year.

    I don't really see what the attraction is to small-market chips like CELL anyway. My prediction on the subject has already come true: way back when IBM announced the CELL, I predicted that by the time it was released, the PC market would have a similar-performance chip on-offer.

    With Intel's release of the quad-core Core2 products later this year (Clovertown), my prediction becomes reality. With 2x128-bit SIMD units per core (for a total of 8 128-bit units per chip), Clovertown is capable of the same performance levels as Cell. AMD's K8L, due out next year, is expected to boast similar performance levels.

    --

    Man is the animal that laughs.
    And occasionally whores for Karma.