Intel Core 2 Duo Vs. AMD AM2

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Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday September 12, 2006 @01:50PM from the cpu-shootout dept.

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.

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Nice, but... by Anonymous Coward · 2006-09-12 13:51 · Score: 3, Funny

Nice, but can it perform cunnilingus on a hardwood floor?
1. Re:Nice, but... by Nimey · 2006-09-12 13:57 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  I'm trying to work out where you'd stick your tongue.
  
  --
  Hail Eris, full of mischief...
  
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A consumer win! by jellomizer · 2006-09-12 13:52 · 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.

--
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
1. Re:A consumer win! by Anonymous Coward · 2006-09-12 14:20 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  we the consumer will loose.
  
  Loose what? The hounds?
2. Re:A consumer win! by P3NIS_CLEAVER · 2006-09-12 14:36 · 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 · 2006-09-12 15:37 · 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 Z34107 · 2006-09-12 17:47 · 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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No 64-bit benchmarks by David+Jao · 2006-09-12 13:59 · 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 · 2006-09-12 14:01 · 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 · 2006-09-12 15:26 · 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.
Isn't this a bit old? by LIGC · 2006-09-12 14:13 · 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.
6502, biznatch! by BitwizeGHC · 2006-09-12 14:31 · Score: 3, Funny

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

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Re:Note to Slashdot...Nobody cares by tempest69 · 2006-09-12 14:34 · 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
Obvious by Anonymous Coward · 2006-09-12 15:31 · Score: 4, Funny

The floor's construction is obviously tongue in groove.

And I'm so ashamed, I'm posting as AC. *sigh*
Screwed up comparison by Jerry+Coffin · 2006-09-12 15:43 · 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 · 2006-09-12 16:32 · 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.
Intel is very open source friendly too by DrunkenPenguin · 2006-09-12 20:11 · 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.