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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%."
Wow! The underscore makes all the difference!
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has always bothered me.
"Up to" is sugar-coated for "You can't expect any better than this" with a implicit translation of "It can get a whole lot worse".
Ex: If CPU X get "up to" 100% more performance than CPU Y, but in all tests but one, actually has 1% of the performance, I'd rather have CPU Y.
"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.
34486853790
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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.
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.
I can't wait to run Microsoft Word on these babies!
I think one of the major reasons why AMD did so poorly last quarter was its silly marketing campaign. Towering signs on billboards and large airport ads tout AMD as "smarter choice", since it uses less power.
Marketing a chip as using less power is the same as having Toyota make an exclusive advertising campaign toward wheel-chair bound people: the group you're targeting has few people in it and they're going to research any product they buy. The server market is important, but when I buy my shiny new server, power consumption isn't my first consideration, nor is that the only thing AMD offers.
With this announcement, I'm hoping AMD starts a new slogan touting, say speed. That's what I buy a processor for primarily. AMD's always been fast for the cost and it's high time they market themselves as being faster and better rather than being "as good as" Intel. My new pick for a marketing slogan? "Upgrade to AMD" AMD should position its chips to be slightly more expensive at every pricing tier, but in doing so, blow them away in performance. (In the present economy, businesses have money and will gladly spend more money on products they feel are superior. Ford spends more money on marketing than BMW (but which would you rather own?). AMD should be trying to make Intel look like Ford, rather than being the "Ford alternative".)
AMD is marketing to a minor concern of a niche audience, while they ought to be using their superior performance (at a given price point) to sell hardware. Would you rather be a "power saver" or "upgrade to AMD".
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Note that AMD has 3GHz Opterons out now. The frequency advantage at the moment is slim to non-existant in shipped CPUs.
In any case, what matters is what Barcelona will ship at, which has not yet been specified. In any case, if Barcelona lives up to AMD's stated expectations on performance, it will be a killer CPU. Your statement about Intel's potential improvement leaps are spot on, and fall into Inforworld's Tom Yager's statements about Intel which are essentially phrased as "Core 2 is Intel's last hurrah". Why? Because Intel is essentially running on 10 year old technology and is rushing to catch up, despite some of the nifty architectural things they did recently to speed up C2D (integrated L2 cache for example).
I also believe that Intel is now following AMD's lead by leaving extra headroom for those that prefer to OC their CPUs and concentrating more on TDP and stability. I've noticed that Intel's chips since P4 are certainly more stable, while my rather severely OC'd AMD CPU occassionally (twice this year) shuts down, most likely due to heat or a RAM instability (since the shutdowns happen during low usage periods at night, I'll bet the 20% OC'd RAM is probably to blame).
Basically, right now Intel owns the crown, but they own it while comparing to AMD's last gen CPUs which are 3+ years old.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
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I'll do you 50% faster and 20% harder than your date last week, and promise not to cost you more.
But marry me soon baby, I need the money
SSE4? Please, don't get distracted over little things like whether or not I can cook!
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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Actually if Intel is running on 10 year old chip design technology (I presume this is primarily a remark about the FSB) then this suggests they have the potential to *radically* increase performance over AMD. If Intel's process advantages and chip design teams can actually gain a performance advantage while using 10 year old technology they can sit back and pick the low hanging fruit (changing to modern methods) and gain huge performance boosts while AMD has to do truly innovative things to gain any performance increases.
Frankly this sounds more like fanboi talk than a serious analysis. If your goal is to diss Intel and give AMD props then saying they are using 10 year old technology makes sense. If you are actually trying to argue that AMD's future is much brighter than Intel's it's totally non-sensical. If Intel can gain huge performance benefits just copying stuff AMD is doing now while AMD has to make huge advances just to stay competitive I know who I would put my money on.
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Really I find my current PC fast enough. What I want is lower power and heat for the entire system.
Now if AMD can produce a cheap and silent system with good graphics performance I am all for it. Say something as fast as an X24400 and an Nividia 7600 GT all for about $300 then you have a winner. You will sell millions.
A quad core system? I just don't need it yet.
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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.
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