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%."

Comments

Re:Using "up to" in benchmarks and comparisons...

[grasshoppa]

"Up to" means nothing to me, except as an advertisement for the competator; whichever has the least unpleasant average and worst case performance is the one I'm interested in.

And those numbers would be indicative of anything either. The problem with CPU benchmarks is that they have no real world application; Everyone has different needs. However, the marketing types for both the suppliers and consumers need numbers to push in front of each other, so they make up these things which those of us in the field understand have no real world meaning.

It's a vicious circle, non?

Why casual users can't be bothered

[ushering05401]

Over the past week we have heard about Intel's dominance and flashy new products, AMD's disastrous quarter, and now AMD's supposedly dominant new offering.

I read tech news daily and am getting sick of the media wars... It is no wonder casual users get fatigued trying to keep up. Casual opinions depend on which day (or week or month) a person chooses to research product offerings. It is no wonder I am always hitting a brick wall when trying to get my users to educate themselves so they can get more out of their tech. They don't know what to make of all the posturing.

This is not a function of the tech world developing *that* quickly. It is a result of the major players trying to out-strategize each other. I don't want to see anymore benchmarks (or hear about anymore promised software) until I am standing in front of a demo machine that is running the tech.

Guess I woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

Regards.

Heh.

[Skadet]

Indeed. I work in a law office as a graphic designer/web designer/video editor. That's what I do all day (when I'm not reading slashdot).

2 of our attorneys just got quad-core Mac Pros with Studio displays. For writing documents on. Maybe the occasional slide show. I'm stuck on this 3-year-old Dell with dual CRT monitors. Old ones.

Sorry, just had to bitch a little. Your comment is more real-world than you may have realized.

Re:AMD needs to rebrand itself too

[Chris Burke]

Sorry, but performance/watt has become one of the major metrics by which CPUs are chosen, especially in business and double especially in business server rooms. Performance/watt is the new performance/$, because wattage tells you how much the hardware is going to cost on a continual basis for both the electricity to run it and for the necessary air conditioning. These costs dominate over the initial cost of the hardware, and are thus more important. Plus, if you have limited space you have a limited heat capacity, and higher perf/watt means you can get more perf in your server room.

Re:Nice attempt, AMD.

[Chris Burke]

Intel can't copy AMD's advances. They'd have to license some tech to do so, and that's not very likely (I believe HTT for instance belongs to AMD).

Actually Hypertransport is an open standard and anyone can implement it. AMD doesn't have the clout to force proprietary standards on the market, so their only hope to have a standard adopted is to make it open and royalty free.

Which is why Intel will (probably) never implement it. They aren't interested in standards which they don't control. They already don't like the fact that AMD is cross-licensed for all x86 tech, which was part of the motivation for creating the entirely separate IA-64 ISA. When IA-64 failed and Intel was forced to implement x86-64, the only reason they used AMD's spec was because Microsoft said that they would only support one x86-64 ISA, and AMD got their first. Basically it took MS to out-monopoly Intel. So unless they are forced to use HT, they won't, and I can't see any way they could be forced. They may implement something similar -- they will have to in order to address multi-socket scalability -- but it will not be compatible.

AMD would love for Intel to copy their tech. Every time they do, it makes AMD look like the leader and Intel the follower. You could practically hear the screams of orgasmic joy from AMD when Intel announced EMT64.