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Intel vs. AMD - Today's Generation Compared
Bender writes "The Tech Report compares 15 Core 2 and Athlon 64 processors from Intel and AMD — from sub-$200 to a cool grand, from slower dual cores to fast quad cores — in 32 & 64-bit apps in Windows Vista, including the new, multithreaded RTS game Supreme Commander. 'The release of Windows Vista and a round of price cuts by AMD prompted us to hatch a devious plan involving Vista, a new test suite full of multithreaded and 64-bit applications, fifteen different CPU configurations, and countless hours of lab testing. That plan has come to fruition in the form of a broad-based comparison of the latest processors from AMD and Intel... from the lowly Athlon 64 X2 4400+ and Core 2 Duo E6300 to the astounding Athlon 64 FX-74 and Core 2 Extreme QX6700.' Folding@Home in Linux, power use, and energy efficiency are tested, too."
I disagree with their definition of "low end." Maybe low end as far as what they tested, but there are a lot of non-X2 Athlon 64s and Pentium/Celeron Ds being sold. At the true low end, AMD is still more than competitive. It's only when you near the most-horsepower-per-dollar peak that Intel really pulls away (and that's where they seem to start measuring here). It's worth noting that I have no dying love of AMD. I have two AMD processors and one Intel processor running in my current personal machines and plan to get a Core 2 as soon as the next significant price drop occurs.
Nice reading.
But of course conclusions are not that surprising. AMD is 10+ times smaller than Intel (judged by capitalization). Intel has many fabs - while AMD is constantly struggling expanding its production capacities.
Yet, AMD (with Athlon 64) had managed to pull quite a match against Intel. Kudos to AMD: without you Intel's CPUs for sure would have costed $2500 a piece.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Most of these benchmarks are targeted towards unified caches.. (Intel)
Meanwhile real world apps favor separate caches per core.
(Where one user app isn't flushing cache entries of another app executing on different core.)
If they wanted to make it fair..
They should execute n-copies of each benchmark compiled separately using different module names. (no unified cache sharing.)
Next item.. Graphics & games. What are they really measuring?
The ability of some device driver writer to take advantage of some esoteric CPU optimization?
Last item they disabled Cool and Quiet on over clocked AMD configuration s it should have never been published.. I.E. They're simulating certain AMD configurations and aren't testing the real thing..
What gets to me is the way that most reviewers compare power usage by simply comparing the listed thermal envelopes. AMD lists the maximum power used, whereas intel lists the typical power used. Furthermore, for laptops and other machines where heat is your big concern, you do care a lot about the loaded maximum power used. However, for most desktops in which heat is not really an issue, you're more concerned about the cost of the electricity you burn. In that case it's almost more relevant to measure the idle power usage, since most desktops sit around doing nothing most of the time. Any good review should actually measure the system power between wall socket and PSU, otherwise it's not really infromative to the actual concerns of the user.