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AMD's Barcelona to Outpace Intel by 50%
Gr8Apes writes "AMD is upping the performance numbers for Barcelona by stating that "Barcelona will have a 50% advantage over Clovertown in floating point applications and 20% in integer performance 'over the competition's highest-performing quad-core processor at the same frequency'". AMD also claims that the new 3.0 GHz Opterons beat comparable Intel Xeon 5100 series processors in three server-specific benchmarks (SPECint_rate_2006, SPECint_rate2006, SPECompM2001) by up to 24%."
Yeah, and notice that they say "at the same frequency", when Intel currently has a frequency advantage (not as big as P4, but then again Core 2 isn't an IPC dog like P4 was). Not that I expect any minor improvements Intel makes in the next 60 months to produce their own 50% leap in performance, this comparison still seems very suspect. As in pure marketing BS.
However AMD doesn't need to attempt become relevent again. They are currently very relevent. Did Intel become irrelevent when they were behind AMD on performance? No. In the past, AMD did lose more by not having the performance crown, and one could certainly imagine the momentum they were gaining in the K7 days fading quickly if Intel had come out with a superior chip. But today, AMD has both the marketshare and the OEM support to be merely competitive performance-wise and still be relevent. So they lose out at the top speed grades. If they can continue to match up their products to Intel's at lower speed grades, and they will, then they will continue to be a good choice for many people, and will definitely still be relevent.
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When the fastest Barcelona is ~2.5GHz and Clovertown is 3.0GHz, comparisons at the same frequency are pointless. What matters in reality is performance at the same price or performance at the same power or highest available performance at any price.
Note that AMD's claim is to be faster "at the same clock". When the P4 was pushing clock speeds into oblivion, AMD stressed the point that clock speed is irrelevant -- what really counts is how fast the system runs your software. How you get there is quite beside the point. How odd that AMD is now using clock speed as a key indicator.
Ummm... they're not. If they were using clock speed as a metric, they would be saying "Look! We're running at 3.5GHz and Intel is only running at 3GHz!" while completely ignoring the actual performance -- exactly what Intel did all those years. They are instead talking about performance-per-clock-cycle, which (according to this) means that a 2.66GHz AMD chip would be considerably faster than a 3GHz Intel chip. We can expect them to continue touting the overall performance rather than raw clock speed, since they look better from a performance standpoint and worse from a raw clock speed standpoint.
How is that different than what they've been saying all along?
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