AMD Says Barcelona Will Outperform Clovertown

Dysfnctnl85 points out a ZDNet Blog posting in which AMD claims that its upcoming quad-core "Barcelona" chipset should be 40% faster than "Clovertown," Intel's quad-core Xeon 5300 line. AMD says that the introduction of Barcelona marks a shift in their strategy from emphasizing price to performance. The post goes on: "Intel is eager to claw back some of the server market share from AMD, and this is where Clovertown comes in... The Xeon 5300 line will represent excellent value for money since Intel plans on pricing them the same as its dual core Xeon 5100 processors. That could make things tough for AMD."

Comments

You mean if they made OSX for all PC's?

[Cordath]

Why doesn't Apple do this? One the one hand, they risk losing a portion of a rather small chunk of the desktop market. Their laptops are already good value for the money and would probably continue to sell just as well. However, look at the install base of normal PC's out there. Then consider how many people would run MacOS if they didn't have to buy a separate machine to do so. Getting people to switch when the price is under $200 is a lot easier than it is currently, when switching requires completely new hardware. (unless you're willing to hack things a little, which the majority of people aren't.) In the end, I think Apple would win big and so would consumers. So why is Jobs hyping gadgets like the iPhone when he has a product ready to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft for a significant share of the global PC market? I think the iPhone will be a winner, but not on the scale that an officially sanctioned PC-version of OSX would be.

Re:You mean if they made OSX for all PC's?

[NRecob]

"why everything "just works.""

What a laugh. Sure fanboy. Be a good little MacStain and go sell your hype elsewhere.

Re:You mean if they made OSX for all PC's?

[evilviper]

Because then OSX would be just as troublesome as Windows and Linux.

No. Not unless Apple half-asses the project.

Linux is troublesome only because it hasn't been designed to just work, and because vendor support is nil.

The BSDs are far better, in this area. OpenBSD detects all the hardware in a system on boot-up. So either it works, or it doesn't. There is no messing around, no configuration, no hdparm, no editing modules.conf, no loading modules, etc.

FreeBSD, is probably the best example, though. It detects pretty much everything except for soundcards on boot-up, but that is detected and loaded by the installation program, and you can tell it to load all the soundcard modules, without adverse effects, and be able to put that FreeBSD system in any PC hardware around. Even with that, FreeBSD is rock-solid on every bit of PC hardware out there.

Linux has two minor things over the BSDs... One is eth0... The BSDs use different names for network cards (xl0, de0, etc.), so you have to set your network addresses again when you change cards, or you have to put the information in the config file repeatedly, with the different card types you think you might use. The other advantage is X11, since the BSD's don't have programs like Kudzu, X11 needs to be configured by hand. Not that either of these two issues isn't pretty close to trivial to workaround.

So with OSes like FreeBSD out there, and working perfectly right now, the excuses of instability due to variety don't hold one bit of credibility. It's purely an attempt to do what software companies have always done... Blame hardware for their bugs.

Re:"native quad core"

[Anonymous Coward]

Rule #1: AMD never does anything wrong
Rule #2: When AMD does do wrong, it is justifiable
Rule #3: When AMD does do wrong, do not post about it as it goes against slashdot groupthink

Re:The bounty of true competition

[Snarkhunter]

Yeah, totally unimportant. Unless you were gonna, you know... but a processor or something, but who on /. is gonna be doin that?

Re:If only I/O speeds could also grow as fast

[Anonymous Coward]

...PHP... ...technology... BWAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!

AMD is not and never has been a serious CPU

[GuyFawkes]

The day you can remove the fan and heatsink from a running AMD CPU and it will simply carry on running throttled down until the fan and heatsink are replaced, they will be ready for "professional" use.

You only have to see one or two CPUs go up in smoke because the HSF failed or whatever, taking the mobo with it, and blowing the PWN thus frying things like hard disks, to never ever ever fit anything but Intel to a "serious" machine.

I recently swapped from 3.5 GHz P4 to AMD 3200, both on A-bit, by way of experimentation.

Allegedly these are similar CPUs.

In practice, the AMD is slightly faster at some things such as gaming.

Overall the Intel, thanks to hyperthreading, felt faster.

The AMD was slightly unstable, while the intel needed the windows xp driver updates to achieve best performance, the amd needed them to achieve stability, as without them it has a *slight* tendency to reboot.

One of the reasons AMD were cheaper, bang for buck, is they left out all the extra stuff Intel did not, like on chip thermal management so it didn't catch fire when the heatsink / fan failed. Penny wise, Pound foolish.