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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.
The enemies of Democracy are
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!
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.
Sony ha
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?
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck