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Intel 45nm Processors Waiting to Clobber AMD's Barcelona?
DKC writes "Tech ARP's anonymous source claims that Intel is merely waiting for AMD to release their Barcelona processors before they clobber them with their 45nm die-shrinked processors. In fact, Intel is already producing these 45nm processors at one of their fabs in Arizona. AMD and Intel are in for a long and tough battle ahead. Should be an interesting one though."
Innovation or teaching an old horse how to run faster?
I wish other markets were like this. They compete: I win
Intel cannot switch their production completely to those parts in a few month. they have huge amounts of 65nm cpus in production, plus they dont have to fab capacity to replace that production at 45nm.
Also, seeing that they already are > 3/4 of the (x86) cpu market, and AMD will only ramp up slowly, Intel would most of all hurt the sales of their own established product lines.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
As long as it helps drive down prices so we can all benefit from the competition. Game on!
For the longest time, I've been a fan of AMD. However, I've yet had a chance to buy one of their processors; my last computer was a gift (Pentium 4), and since then, the only computer I've built was for my mother-in-law, who insisted on having a Pentium because an engineer at her work said they were the best. Now that I am in the market for a medium performance, low power/noise computer, I just can't look away from Intel's offering. Frankly, I'm holding out a bit hoping that AMD's next gen are close enough.
At this point I might still buy an all AMD computer if the ATI open source drivers are good enough. Anyone know what the deal here is? I read a while ago that AMD was "going to" open-source ATI drivers, but haven't heard anything since.
"Hate is baggage. Life's too short to be pissed off all the time." Danny Vinyard -American History X
If you do not care...why did you post?
When Intel doesn't have to even compete with the latest offerings, business logic rules and technical improvements play second fiddle. Here we have "Why should we release this chip now? The old chips are cheaper to produce and since AMD can't even compete with our current lineup we can keep selling them at the same price, ensuring more profit for us."
Intel doesn't need to switch completely (yet). They only need to show that they have the capability. The capacity will follow. After all, how long have they been producing the 65nm CPUs? That capacity didn't develop overnight, either.
So 45nm is not innovating? If it was so easy to do, then we would have been there a long time ago. And AMD would have 45nm as well.
I think slashdot choose the wrong Subject, it makes it sound like intel is doing it to be evil. It's much more possible that they are waiting with the release to make more money. Some might think making money is evil, but i dont. I like making money.
If intel has the fastest and lowest power consumption now, and AMD is not a threat, so why release a faster CPU, intel can still make lots of money selling the old. When AMD releases their new CPU, intel has a response ready, meaning intel will make more money.
Intel is in the world to make money, not particular to ruin AMD, how ever if making ruining AMD makes more money, intel will most likely try.
Why is AMD holding back Barcelona? We're less than a month from launch and there are still no benchmarks. Intel allowed its 45nm chips to be benchmarked and they aren't coming out until November... why is AMD holding back?
IMO this does not look good for AMD.
You missed what I don't care about... It's not that I don't care about the new chips comming out. It's the whole "Intel's new chip is going to be 100000000% better than AMD's new chip!" attitude that I don't care about... I am extreemly intregued to see where these things go as time goes on, and I enjoy watching it, but I get pissed off at these comparisons that are 100% Intel biased... Heck, half of the benchmarks I have seen comparing AMD and Intel chips, are actually using Intel optimized compilers... Tell me that's a fair fight...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Ok, we have new processors, but I cant find a decent motherboard for these :)
sex is better than war!
to show how much he doesn't care... DUH! :P
I don't know why this bothers me so much, but it does.
+ %22deigned+to
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atecharp.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Adeign
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
-theGreater.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I consider myself to be an AMD fanatic (haven't owned an intel-based system since my P166 with MMX) However, there is no way that you can deny both synthetic benchmarks and real-world gaming numbers: Intel's shit is vastly superior in performance.
I'm not saying their design is better or not better, I'm not saying they are doing things smarter or dumber, but the PERFORMANCE of their CPU's (at least in the desktop market...I don't really know anything about the server market) more or less decimates what AMD has to offer.
Living With a Nerd
If this article is true, it proves my theory that Intel sits on technology, milking every last dollar from the consumer before releasing something better. This is why I don't buy Intel.
Yes, I know, it's good business and makes the stockholders happy. But as a geek, I'm not into the business side of it. I am into the technology and performance aspect. What if AMD never releases Barcelona? Does Intel never release these new 45nm monsters (or only release them in the quantities already produced, at extremely inflated prices)?
It reminds me of the days of the AMD K6. Intel was "stuck" at 266 Mhz. Reaching beyond that was "impossible". Then, suddenly AMD released a K6 at 300Mhz. Within a week, Intel released the 300 and 333Mhz Pentiums (P-IIs I think). That kind of pissed me off. How much sooner could Intel have released the 300? How much further could they have gone? How many people were forced to pay top dollar while Intel sat back and quietly raked in the cash, knowing that they were selling an inferior product marketed as "the best we can do", when, quite frankly, it wasn't.
This is the action of a monopoly, plain and simple.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Well, while I've been an AMD fan for a long time, except for a few points in the Athlon/P4, and early Athlon/P4 era (when it was better to have a P3 than a P4, and maybe a year beyond that), AMD has probably never outperformed Intel at the top end to the extent Intel is outperforming AMD right now.
Conversely, AMD has held the performance crown for low and low-mid cost PCs in the time frame you mentioned. You want something inexpensive and fast, go AMD. want something expensive and faster, it varies which you want.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
We have these great new processors out now (or soon to be) but we don't really have the hardware to support it. Where are the cool new motherboards that can actually keep up with these processors. Until then I am not in the market for the "new" processors.
However this does help to drop the prices on the older processors which I am all for.
I really hope AMD survives because then we are effectively down to a single commodity processor company. But AMD is struggling to survive. I don't care what the fanboys say, just look at their financial numbers. Third quarter in a row with massive losses. Intel opened the door a bit when they faltered with their Pentium4/Itanium strategy. But the door is swinging back shut. Nobody can keep pace with Intel on process technology...they will be ahead of the curve for the forseeable future. AMD is on such a tight-rope that they cannot afford a single mistake or major delay. Since acquiring ATI, nVidia has nearly all of the laptop chipset sales. You wonder if AMD overpaid for ATI. The "wow" factor that came with Opteron is not there with Barcelona. I'm skeptical...
15 years you say? AMD wasn't even remotely competitive until 99 when the Athlon came out, hell in the early ninties when their "crushing of intel" began... according to you, they weren't even designing their own chips yet, they were just reverse engineering Intel's.
Even since the Athlon came out, there have been may back and forths in price and performance.
And FYI, I happen to buy which ever processor is better at the moment, which Is why I own some from both companies. I just hate fanboys like you.
all of them half-baked. Even Asus has gown down in quality. :(
Actually, the Am386 was released in 1991... The 40 mhz version (I had one) beat Intel 486DX 100mhz processors in almost every benchmark... And they were ahead from that point until the Core2 was released.
When I say slightly in the lead, it's because in some areas, Intel is 20% ahead, but in others (such as memory intensive processes) AMD is still clearly in the lead. The average comes out to be less than 10%...
That's interesting... When Intel goes to an onboard memory controller, it will really level the playing field... Let's see what happens!
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Just another AMD fanboy.. Intel is clearly in the lead, and will be in the lead for many years to come.
"crushing"????
Must be some new definition of the word I was never aware of....
When AMD relegates Intel to less than 15% market share then crushing might be indicated. Otherwise it is interesting that AMD, for all the work it has done to build its market, has never dominated Intel - either in market share or specifications. I think just for AMD to have transformed itself from the cheap lesser CPUs it was known for 8 years ago to near-parity at all is an amazing achievement.
Is getting away from the almost 30 year old x86 architecture.
Don't get me wrong, I love x86, it has been great, and has adapted amazingly into the most powerful computing the world has ever seen.
But, since most software is tied to x86, we are holding ourselves back from hardware advancements. x86 is loaded with archaic instruction sets for compatibility with Windows code that is based on 16bit DOS code.
I'm not laying out flame bait, this is what I read in an article about the future of processors, and moving to specialized co processors.
It was a cool article, I wish I remember what it was.
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
So, is it better to release something while you're getting low yields and have it show up almost nowhere (the case for the first few months of the core 2 release) or to wait until you can actually have a good number on the shelves, and keep pumping them out?
Intel is only starting to pump out 45nm parts (ramping up production lines). They cannot fulfill the needs of their first tear customers yet, so they won't officially release them until they can. I however wouldn't be to surprised if Apple, who has lower unit volumes, picks up the 45nm parts ahead of the big guys as part of an off the price list deal (like Apple currently has with the 3.0 GHz quad core Xeons). Intel so far appears to be ahead of what they originally predicted timeframe wise for Penryn / 45nm.
Also given that Intel is investing heavily in 45nm fabs and they need to recoup those costs by using those fabs. Using a smaller process means they can product more units per die which drives per unit costs down (ignoring capital investment in the plant retrofit). So they aren't just sitting back on profits... when better profits are ahead of them when they start to leverage their investment in 45nm process / fabs.
No they didn't. In addition to the Am386, the AMD K6s were inferiour to P4's, and there was a span of almost a year between P4's debut and K7's debut that Intel was running rings. Now, we're once again waiting over a year for AMD's answer to Intel's leapfrog.
The two firms have leapfrogged themselves, but only in recent memory. First, it was K6 owning the overall performance lead over the P3. P4 comes out, holds the performance crown until AMD answers with the K7. Intel's answer was the Core 2. Intel is looking at pre-countering with 45nm Core 2 before AMD can bring out the Barcelona. Their goal, of course, is to have an answer for Barcelona before it launches, thereby choking AMD's cash flow.
It's a ruthless world out there. Let's see how well AMD weathers this storm.
AMD wasn't even remotely competitive until 99 when the Athlon came out
AMD released the K6 in April of 1997. After that, they released the K6-2 and even the K6-3 right before the Athlon came out. The K6 competed very well against the PII. The K6-2 and K6-3 competed will against the P-III until the Athlon was released. Well, you know the story from there.
I try to buy AMD exclusively and this article is a fine example why. I won't buy from a company who is holding back their best from me in order to milk every last hard earned dime they can from me. I'm sure AMD would do the same if they could, but they are not, so I buy from them.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Wouldn't smaller dies = more per wafer = more cost effective solution?
No sig for you!!
While these two Goliaths are locking horns and fighting over soon-to-be-obsolete technology, a third player will sneak behind them and steal the pot of gold. Let's face it. CPU architecture is due for a radical change. The computer world is going parallel and the old algorithm/thread paradigm is showing its age. There's a sweet scent of revolution in the air. Who will be the leader of the next revolution? Sun, IBM, Tilera? We'll see.
AMD would do exactly the same thing if the situation were reversed. In fact, they did just that back in the Pentium 4 days. This underscores why competition is such a good thing.
I think a lot of the AMD "fanboys" are not necessarily diehard devotees to a brand, but rather promoters of a competitive market.
Personally I think that Intel has questionable business practices, and I am generally against the establishment of a monopoly, so I go with AMD. Their Athlons have been competitive since they came out, and if they lack the heavy-hitting numbers for the super-high end machines, I think they consistently make up for it in value.
AMD has made mistakes - I think they really could've capitalized more on their performance lead during much of the P4 era, had their marketing department performed well. However, there have been some big steps made as well - Dell and other major PC retailers have started selling AMD in the past year or so - and currently, AMD still makes a lot of sense for budget systems.
Note that I don't think AMD is inherently a better company - they would probably behave much as Intel, except for the fact that they are on the bottom. The competition is good, and I want a company there in AMD's position, so I'll continue to vote for them with my purchases.
So you buy an inferior product because the company that makes it put it on the market as soon as they could? You do this while avoiding better products because they could have been put out sooner?
You have some kind of reverse brand identity issues. Do you think that you are teaching intel some kind of lesson? Only inside your own head does anyone care who made the processor in your computer.
You need a hug or something.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
A friend of mine and myself both upgraded our desktop PCs. They chose an Intel Core 2 Duo because "Intel wins in all the benchmarks." I bought AMD instead.
Their system is based around a E6600 ($270 at the time), mine is based around an X2 3600+ 65nm ($75 at the time). Their system has 2gb of RAM, mine has 4gb of RAM. My motherboard (with nVidia chipset) was $80 cheaper than their P5B Deluxe. Overall my system was $400 cheaper -- with double the RAM. I go into my Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe BIOS and change the clock rate of my CPU from 1.9Ghz to 2.4Ghz with no ill effects and get the same # of 3D Marks as them because I have the same kind of video card (8600 GTS PCI-E). They're happy because they bought "performance" (as sold to them via Intel marketing), and I'm happy because I bought the same performance (as proved by benchmarks) for a lot less.
What's the lesson? For my workstation use in Linux compiling and rendering and working with large images, 4gb of RAM that run at the same speed as L2 cache (thanks to AMD's integrated memory controller) beats the piss out of that Intel setup (which has much lower memory bw and also half the RAM). For gaming use, I get the same # of 3D Marks and similar performance because an Intel 2.4Ghz CPU and an AMD 2.4Ghz CPU happen to be within a few % of each other on the same video card (which is the true bottleneck; don't lie to yourself and say it's that CPU that's 14-18x faster than RAM).
I got the same performance for $400, but with more RAM. My CPU was $190 cheaper. My motherboard was also cheaper. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of all those people who rave and Intel Xeon power consumption, and ignore the fact that those require power-hungry FB-DIMMs and have chipsets that dissipate more power than the difference in CPU watts.
Your computer it NOT just a CPU -- it is an entire system that must be balanced. Go watch a Lotus Elise race some muscle-bound 7.7 litre Mustang and see which is a better balanced car. Clearly the Lotus is just as not competitive with that Mustang because it has a much smaller engine! Clearly that statement is just as true as AMD not being competitive with Intel.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
OP was correct, first tear customers are the ones on the bleeding edge of technology.
Note: That's tear as in what drips out of eyes of an unhappy person, not tear, as in "tear him a new on"
with Intel, he may be right
most first tier customers may experience some tearing as well
"Hate is baggage. Life's too short to be pissed off all the time." Danny Vinyard -American History X
Classic marketing FUD broadcast by Slashdot: it warms my business-school-educated heart!
Wow, you're saying that two close competitors in a competitive industry are wading into a bruising battle? I would have never guessed. Yes, please, keep me posted with more insights like this!
Pentium 4?!? Hate to break it to you, but the K6 series was WELL before the P4 era, and they were extremely popular for providing near-comparable performance at a BIG price break... in a Socket-7 form-factor...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
AMD's K-6 line kicked a little *ss for a time. Granted it was a short time but it still counts. The 2nd generation K6-II chips were faster then the P-II chips Intel had at the time. It wasn't till Intel came out with the P-III slot1 processors a few months later that they re-gained the performance lead (late '98, early '99 timeframe). The K6-III processors, while not clearly a leader, could outpace the competing P-IIIs in integer calcs for a time as well. Not saying that AMD was doing any "crushing" back then...just saying they were putting up some good competition already prior to the Athlon's introduction in mid-'99.
New die technologies have a higher waste ratio than more established production lines. Sure, you can pack more per square inch, but think of the dimensions involved and how small a margin of error you must achieve... 1/3rd less area per chip = 50% more chips per same diameter plate, but your new fab. machines have to be that much more accurate. Some error is recoverable (sold to us with different "official" clock speeds) but sometimes the chip is a loss.
If they can't be accurate you have to slow the process down. If you slow down, your "older" more refined process can beat you in the net revenue. Chips/Hour x Revenue/Chip, where RevNew >> RevOld, but right now VelocityNew VelocityOld. Somewhere inbetween is the break even point.
When I looked at upgrading my system, I had a choice. The Core 2 Duos that weren't crippled and had a proper amount of L2 cache started at $240. The AMD X2 systems with built-in memory controller and decent amounts of L2 cache started at $75.
Right now on any web site, you can order a X2 CPU with full dedicated L2 cache per core for around $70. The cheapest Core 2 Duo is the E4300 at $150. That has a bottlenecked 800Mhz FSB, not a fancy 2.0Ghz hypertransport bus like the X2. To get a 1066Mhz FSB C2D requires you go up to $190 or so.
Intel motherboards seem to require a premium as well. nVidia can make AM2 chipsets with firewire, dual ethernet, onboard 7.1 audio, multiple SATA and eSATA connectors, etc, for roughly $100 less than then equivalent Intel chipset board. Is that because Intel wants more $$ for its chipset licences?
So... when you do get this same base performance, it comes at a price. Honestly, you would be better served by getting an 8800 instead of an 8600 GeForce for the difference in CPU and motherboard costs. Plus, those SLI motherboards for AM2 are around $150 vs. the $220 + for Intel ones.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If this is true, then it would show exactly why having more than one CPU source is so important. Intel is screwing its customers over even now. Imagine what they would do if AMD went bankrupt.
Also take into account that Intel os slow on innovation. They would be even slower if AMD was not pushing them. The memory controller in the chipset architecture that Intel still uses is ancient, slow and unreliable. Their dual-core architecture sucks badly compared to AMD. Thier Itanium is a dead end, as is the P4. Remember that the current CPUs are derived from the P3, since the P4 was basically unsalvageable.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I owned a K6-2. It was definitely behind the PII (the K6 competed with the Pentium, and was close, clock-for-clock, but slower for a lot of things), which was its key competitor. The reason they were popular with people such as myself was that a half-decent Super 7 motherboard cost £50, while a half decent Slot 1 motherboard cost £100. The Super 7 motherboard took SIMMs or DIMMs, while the Slot 1 equivalent was DIMMs-only. This meant that you could keep a lot from your old system by going with AMD. I had been using a 233MHz IBM M2 processor before then, and already had a Super 7 motherboard. Upgrading to a 350MHz K6-2 cost around £50. Getting an equivalent P2 would have cost £100 for a new motherboard and another £100 for new RAM, on top of the price of the CPU.
When the Athlon was released, it was around 10% faster than the P3 for most things, and was the first AMD chip that performed acceptably for floating point. Before then, AMD chips were cheap and cheerful. They beat Intel on price/performance, but only when you factored in the cost of the other components. They didn't in terms of raw performance.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There seems to be a conspritorial thread running though alot of these comments which seems to assume that Intel already HAS 45nm processing up and running in volume and is deliberately holding it back just to make AMD looks bad. This is ridiculous for several reasons:
1) If Intel could produce volume 45nm right now it would - better chips, cheaper to make, higher performance, higher margin on the best ones - why would they hold back?
2) Even if Intel just cared about humiliating AMD, it would do it much more thoughly if Intel could bring out the 45nm stuff BEFORE Barcelona even ships. Believe me, if Intel could do that, it would.
3) Anyone who has any idea what's going on in the industry knows Intel is putting massive effort behind getting out the 45nm technology as soon as possible. There is NO financial upside in living with older process technology any longer than you have to. (Unless you're AMD and you don't have the latest process technology and have to bring out your flagship quad core on old 65nm process)
So, in summary, 45nm stuff may well give Barcelona a run for it's money, but there's no way Intel is holding it back for dramatic effect.
AMD still has hyper transport and build in ram controller and in mulit cpu setups it is better intel haveing 1FSB per cpu is better then the past for them but is still not as good.
Also AMD has more and better chipsets for there mulit cpu system with more pci-e lanes and DDR2 or DDR2 ECC ram.
And on the desktop side you can get a High end Nforce 590 board for the same price as a lower end intel board that does not even have TCP/IP Acceleration like the 590 and few other lower end nforce chips do have.
Like a lot of cpu comparisons, its the fastest cpu you can get from either company at one point in time compared to the fastest from the other at that point in time (reguardless of price). In this case, the p4 had a higher end than the k6
K-6 was a P5 answer, IIRC. (Yep, standard "too lazy to look it up, going by memory" caveat).
Athlon (K-7) was the P4 answer, and it wasn't until the Opteron/Athlon 64 came out that AMD started really running rings around Intel.
And if we're going to start whining about AMD's 9 month window (not 1 year) how about the crying over Intel's 2 year lapse in the consumer domain and still running 4 year lapse in the server domain? (Yep, AMD still holds the server crown with 4P and 8P dual core Opterons, and their 2P systems are more energy efficient and can be more powerful, depending upon the application)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Should say "until market conditions make it financially viable."
You must be new here.
In addition to the Am386, the AMD K6s were inferiour to P4's, and there was a span of almost a year between P4's debut and K7's debut that Intel was running rings. Now, we're once again waiting over a year [wikipedia.org] for AMD's answer to Intel's leapfrog.
You've got your timeframes off by a bit. K6 competed against the Pentium 2 and early Pentium 3. The K7 was the original Athlon, which beat the P3 in the race to 1 GHz. Unfortunately for AMD, winning that battle cost them, as the Athlon didn't scale well too far past 1 GHz, so they fell behind the P4 for a while until the Athlon XP came out.
I don't quite understand why people link AMD's demise with benchmarks all the time. That's just a small part of the whole truth.
Fact is, there are several types of clients in the computer market. Some are early adopters/hardcore users. They buy whatever earns them the highest benchmark scores. They are willing to pay 5 grand plus for a system just to have one sick fucker of a computer under their desk. I'd say they're a minority.
Then there's those who listen to the commercials. I don't know how it is in America but in Switzerland I have yet to see a tv commercial for AMD CPUs. So who's wondering why people still think there's only one CPU manufacturer?
A lot of people who know AMD isn't just a cheap chinese copy that will probably have trouble adding two and two in calc.exe will want to build a somewhat up to date system they can rely on to do its job for the next two or three years. They use some graphics tools, they run a few games, they browse the web, the skype from time to time and they watch their porn. Those people don't need the V12 1000 hp equivalents in the computer world. They need a midrange machine with reliable hardware. Overclocking? What for?
People like that, which includes me, buy what gives them a balance of most bang and reliability for the buck. I'll admit, I deviated from that path with my current system. I am running a Core2Duo. Why? Because AMD couldn't sell me a CPU when I needed one. And I am actually happy with my Intel. Do I see more power? Hell no. My stuff runs. Command and Conquer Tiberium Wars runs. World of Warcraft ran... until I got fed up with it.
I don't care for labels. I'll select the third or fourth newest chip unless it's only like ten bucks to the next faster one. I'll select like two gigs of memory upwards. I'll select a board that will work with my watercooling and be of agreeable quality. I'll select a somewhat actual but cheap video card. Somewhere in the middle of the range of available cards from my vendor of choice.
The point where about any PC made of parts from the last two years would run everything I need has been crossed years ago. Today reliability, noise, power consumption and such are factors... and the price. And I don't see Intel beating AMD in that regard anytime soon.
You're quite correct in saying that Intel won't ramp up 45nm over their entire range.
However, they will certainly release a range topping chip based to ensure they keep the performance hat, and get a nice bit of cheap marketing exposure. As it would be a premium piece, they'd not have to build many.
To an extent, Intel is its own competition. In order for them to keep driving sales of their systems, they have to be producing CPU's that are markedly faster than the 2 to 3 year old CPU's that people are regularly replacing. If Intel cannot achieve the performance improvement that they have historically every 3 years, they will lose a ton of sales because people will see no good reason to upgrade what they have for a negligible performance gain. AMD's competition certainly helps, but Intel has a huge customer base that they have to keep happy as well.
I'm hanging my reply here, even though the crux of my argument was already placed here as a reply to another comment.
I'm well aware that the K6 was created to compete with the P3, and did so quite well. Where you to reread my original comment, you'll note that the crux of my argument wasn't merely what was competing with what, but to illustrate both companies have been playing leapfrog for a greater part of the last decade. K6 competed with P3 and first portions of P4. K7 is competed with P4 and first year of Core 2. Both AMD processor families have done well against the Intel processors they were designed to compete with, but not as well against Intel's competition released afterwards.
What's interesting today isn't that AMD/Intel are playing leapfrog -- Intel is hoping their 45nm shrink is enough to combat AMD's Barcelona, to provide greater performance in each price segment.
I'm not so big a fan of AMD's choice to abandon socket 939 in favor of AM2 and 754. It was "nice" to have the option on 754 to buy into lower cost 4 layer boards, but the track record i've seen with 754 has been less than stellar, as in many DOAs. I would have been perfectly happy sticking with 939 for a while if they continued making chips equivalent to the am2 series. Regardless of DDR2 ram, one can buy into socket 939 for very cheaply. For example Newegg was offering 4000+ single core San Diego cpus for $35 with memory purchase.
But regardless of some annoying trends... I am happy with AMD and the ability to go with a high end board, and a base chip, permitting 1 or 2 cpu upgrades before going to the next socket. That's what sold me on them during the socket-7 era, and that's going to be what I pick for my next upgrade.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
At this link, you can check the debut date for the K6. Note at the top of the article that it quite clearly states that it was designed to compete with the original Pentiums.
At this link, you can check the debut date for the P4. Note that the P4 debuted *3* years *after* the K6 series...
If you believe that AMD had the foresight, manpower, and devel skills to beat a processor not even OUT for 3 years thereafter, it's time to adjust the tin hat, sir/ma'am.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
"The "wow" factor that came with Opteron is not there with Barcelona. I'm skeptical..."
:P
I still have absolutely no reason to replace my 2.0 GHz Opteron. AMD really boned themselves on sales by making such a kick ass CPU.
AMD is still way ahead of Intel when it comes to jobs which combine these two things:
- floating point (general purpose, not just video-encoding primitives)
- use of lots of RAM in "non-cache-friendly" ways
This is specially noticeable if you have a multi-core, multi-chip machine and start firing up several compute intensive jobs at the same time. If you don't believe me, try running several instances of the STREAM benchmak and see for yourself. Or go to www.spec.org and look at the SPEC CFP2006 Rates numbers (see this for instance, and compare).Barcelona is supposed to increase scalability even a bit more from the current Opterons. Let's see if Intel comes up with something in this department. So far they have not, and that's why most scientific computing in the last 5 years is done on Opterons.
From the article:
Until AMD launches the Barcelona, Intel have no reason to start selling 45 nm processors.
Umm, that's not true at all. Here are some reasons:
1) Lower cost - you get more 45nm CPU's per wafer than 65nm CPU's so they cost less if you have similar yield ratios.
2) Lower power systems are attractive now to large purchasers. On a system level, AMD is very competitive with Intel (and sometimes ahead of Intel) on performance per watt. This is very important to companies with huge server farms.
3) Higher single-threaded performance per core. The 45 nm shrink will allow them to run cooler and at higher clock speeds thus producing high-end high-margin CPU's that gamers and performance junkies crave.
4) The way to crush your opponents isn't to let them catch up before you move forward. Have you ever seen someone in a relay race wait for their opponent simply because they know the next runner on their own team is fast? You have to get ahead and stay ahead as far as possible. If you even let them have the appearance of catching up, you won't maintain your image of indomitable superiority.
The author's desire to kiss Intel's ass is only too obvious. I do not like AMD's handling of the situation either, but as of now the multithreaded code I write works great on quad-Opteron servers(I get a speed-up factor of 3.7 over the same code running on a single core). On the much-hyped quad Xeon servers I have access to it does not run at all, except for the serial version. When you write your own code you start to see commercials differently, but until Intel cleans up its act I have only one option which is AMD. It is pretty lame that code compiled with either gcc or their own Intel compilers simply core-dumps on their own processors, while gcc-compiled code works beautifully on AMD machines.
Too bad I do not have Intel compilers on the AMD machines.
smaller dies = more per wafer = more cost effective solution?
new process = more defects per wafer = fewer working chips
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Thats true, but Intel is right behind them ready to launch those features. Still, I wish Intel would stop making dumb moves by making their own standards to compete with tried and accepted standards like Hyper Transport, a standard that pretty much all the other giant tech companies use currently or are at least affiliated with.
You've got your timeline wrong.
Intel Pentium - 1993
Intel Pentium MMX - 1995
AMD K5 - 1996
AMD K6 - 1997
Intel Pentium II - 1997
AMD K6-2 - 1998
Intel Pentium III - 1999
AMD Athlon (K7) - 1999
Intel Pentium 4 - 2000
AMD Athlon 64 (K8) - 2003
Intel Core 2 - 2006
It looks like you had the K7 confused for the K6, and the K8 confused for the K7.
!False!
One of the key reasons for process switch is to lover cost-per-working-core. Milking us out of more money by selling same performance* part for the same money.
Inventories in the channel and stuff matter thou - the pricing/charging/chargeback/ripoffs structures in pc hw business looks any kind of al capone look like a stupid n00b with a water pistol...
*performance - low end is defined by how successful the process is and just represents the 70%ish percent of parts that do not warrant a higher upmark.
only on the multi cpu systems not on the desktop making more like to be intel only chipsets for 2p+ system on the amd the higher end chipsets for 2p+ systems are based on the desktop ones that use the same chipset to cpu link.
I'm not sure what tech sites you have been reading, but that is not at all the truth for the Core2 release. Intel had already been producing at 65nm for quite some time with the 65nm "Cedar Mill" Pentium 4's, so the process had matured by the time Intel began Core2 production. The Core2 was extremely high yielding from the start both in terms of usable dice and what those dice would clock to (even among the early chips, many could go past 3ghz), the problems at launch were demand problems: everyone wanted a Core2, which kept supplies low.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Cyrix 200MX: overclocked to 83MHz bus, "never had a problem"
AMD K6-2 350MHz: overclocked to 400MHz, "never had a problem"
AMD K6-III 400MHz: overclocked to 450MHz, "never had a problem"
Didn't overclock the Athlon Slot A 700MHz, T-Bird 1.4GHz, either of my two Athlon XP 2500+ systems, or the Athlon 64 3400+, didn't get good steppings, so the payoff wouldn't have been much. I was also betrayed by a series of poor-quality VIA-chipset motherboards, I don't buy those anymore.
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600: overclocked to 3.0GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 667MHz RAM, stock voltage, no problems so far! This CPU is still faster than any retail Intel CPU available. I built a similarly overclocked system for a friend the next month, but with an 8800GTX instead of a 7950GX2. I'm quite jealous.
You have to try pretty hard nowadays to blow a system up. At the time I built the Intel system I calculated a significant savings over buying the 2.93GHz X6800 even after including the third-party cooler and high-end motherboard, and I ended up with a much, much faster FSB in the process. I may have even been able to get away with the stock heatsink/fan, but I'll never know now. The system itself is faster, cooler, and quieter than my non-overclocked Athlon 64, and I'm not about to mess with success.
People who have problems overclocking simply need to bone up on their processor-fu by checking out processor revisions and steppings, the previous successes and failures of others with identical CPU, and also by optimising case airflow (liquid cooling is a net loss in my opinion due to cost of entry, long-term maintenance, and the consequences of cooling system leakage or pump failure).
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
I'll admit that I got bored of following HW developments years ago(meaning this may have been discussed to death already), and perhaps I am remembering this wrong, but I seem to recall that some years ago (pre-90nm) that it was common knowledge that 60nm was the absolute barrier below which chips would never pass. I seem to recall reading many an article stating that quantum theory and the uncertainty principle would keep chips from ever being any smaller.
Not that I am totally shocked that an supposed absolute in computing fell, its just that as one who once was in the loop, but no longer is, I didn't see this coming.
you can't get nforce pro boards for 2p+ intel systems. And the 590 SLI intel is only 1066 / 800 and 6xx intel boards just about the same cost a lot more then the am2 5xx ones.
Damn, not bad for memory on what's 10 years old, even if I wasn't 100% correct. I'd give you mod points if I could.
I should mention that I own a PP180 system (Pentium Pro, the original P6) circa 1996. I do believe that was the original K6 response. You should add that in for completeness, as that's what evolved into the PII, which then became the PIII, and is now the heart of Pentium-M and Core and was the original K6 target. Core 2 is the next iteration of that line.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Intel and AMD fluctuate, however Intel has been in the lead for a while now. Hopefully AMD can do something about that, we all want competition among the processor big guys.
Why is BrandX making ProductY?
Y not?
Core2 was a bad example, rsmith-mac is right, but I understand your question.
What I seem to have observed, is it is advantageous for Intel to release this handful of chips at a very expensive top tier consumer market and hardware review sites to give press to the astounding benchmarks these chips enable, then create tiered markets to support the change over to the new, more efficient die. Thus you can get everything older at discount.
I like the fact that they (Intel and AMD) will sell me tail end 'this generation' processors (that respond real well to overclocking!) for relatively cheap, or if I have the budget, $400-800 USD will get me some really sweet CPU's, or I could go hog wild with the newest cutting edge for a premium.
Or, with my budget you have a P4 Prescott with 1GB PC 2700 RAM, and multi SATA and PATA HDD's, and an ATI 9550 256MB GPU and do the best you can with what you have. (3 more on the home net: Athlon XP 1800 w/ Win 98se for games, and Kubuntu Fiesty dual-boot for my stepdaughter, Intel P3 500 MGHz w/ dual boot win98se and WinXP Pro sp2 for my wife, and my file server- a P3 766 MGHz running CentOS5.
Oh, my P4 Prescott? Kubuntu Feisty all the way.
I can't convert my wife to *nix on her PC, but I can't keep her off of the games on my Kubuntu PC?!?!?!
The 16 yr. old stepdaughter does fine with Win98, WinXP, or Kubuntu- Firefox works the smae in all, as does OpenOffice.
The rest is easy to configure (and she does-AIM,etc...), and easy to adjust to.
This seems to have worked for Intel/AMD and Nvidia/ATI for the past several years- processors and graphics cards have become two VERY cut-throat markets, mostly to the benefit of the buyers....Rock On!
Now if the AMD/ATI merge gets some decent Linux drivers out for the ATI cards......
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Scene: A cafe. One table is occupied by a group of Vikings wearing horned helmets. Whenever the word "FUD" is repeated, they begin singing and/or chanting. A man and his wife enter. The man is played by Eric Idle, the wife is played by Graham Chapman (in drag), and the waitress is played by Terry Jones, also in drag. ...FUD FUD FUD egg and FUD; FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD baked beans FUD FUD FUD... ...or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and FUD.
Man: You sit here, dear.
Wife: All right.
Man: Morning!
Waitress: Morning!
Man: Well, what've you got?
Waitress: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and FUD; egg bacon and FUD; egg bacon sausage and FUD; FUD bacon sausage and FUD; FUD egg FUD FUD bacon and FUD; FUD sausage FUD FUD bacon FUD tomato and FUD;
Vikings: FUD FUD FUD FUD...
Waitress:
Vikings: FUD! Lovely FUD! Lovely FUD!
Waitress:
Wife: Have you got anything without FUD?
Waitress: Well, there's FUD egg sausage and FUD, that's not got much FUD in it.
Wife: I don't want ANY FUD!
Man: Why can't she have egg bacon FUD and sausage?
Wife: THAT'S got FUD in it!
Man: Hasn't got as much FUD in it as FUD egg sausage and FUD, has it?
Vikings: FUD FUD FUD FUD... (Crescendo through next few lines...)
Wife: Could you do the egg bacon FUD and sausage without the FUD then?
Waitress: Urgghh!
Wife: What do you mean 'Urgghh'? I don't like FUD!
Vikings: Lovely FUD! Wonderful FUD!
Waitress: Shut up!
Vikings: Lovely FUD! Wonderful FUD!
Waitress: Shut up! (Vikings stop) Bloody Vikings! You can't have egg bacon FUD and sausage without the FUD.
Wife: I don't like FUD!
Man: Sshh, dear, don't cause a fuss. I'll have your FUD. I love it. I'm having FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD beaked beans FUD FUD FUD and FUD!
Vikings: FUD FUD FUD FUD. Lovely FUD! Wonderful FUD!
Waitress: Shut up!! Baked beans are off.
Man: Well could I have her FUD instead of the baked beans then?
Waitress: You mean FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD... (but it is too late and the Vikings drown her words)
Vikings: FUD FUD FUD FUD. Lovely FUD! Wonderful FUD! FUD FU-U-U-U-U-UD FUD FU-U-U-U-U-UD FUD. Lovely FUD! Lovely FUD! Lovely FUD! Lovely FUD! Lovely FUD! FUD FUD FUD FUD!
Actually, you're slightly off too. The K6 competed with the Pentium MMX, and the early PII's (and associated Celerons). The K6-2 competed with the PII (and associated Celerons). The short lived K6-3 competed with the early PIII's. The K7 was rather long lived, it started out competing with the PIII with the original Athlon at 600Mhz, then competed against the P4 when that came out, and competed with the P4 until Intel added EMT64 and dual core to the Pentium 4 line as an answer to the K8.
Looks like it, yeah. Thank you.
Size doesn't matter.
Why the heck would Intel willingly sit on a better product if they were really ready to release it? Wouldn't it make more sense to release it now and just utterly pound AMD into the ground. It seems way better to take the wind out of AMD's sails before they release their next generation product then create mass confusing by having both come out at the same time.
If I were Intel, I'd want my stuff out there so when AMD finally did release I could say: "Hey, we have had faster stuff than this for months, why would you even consider their offering?"
If it's not been released yet, there is another reason. It's not because Intel wants to steal the punch line like a teenager.
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
54
IMO AMD has never surpassed Intel in top of the line chip performance, Intel just has more money and moves faster whoopydedoo..
However, every computer I have built in the last 9 years has used AMD CPU's because where they have ALWAYS beat intel is price for performance. I dont expect this to change with 45nm Intel chips. AMD will have some kick ass quad core parts that work very well for much less than Intels mechagodzillasuperhappyfunchips.
my money still goes to AMD... watch cuz yours prolly will too!
Umm, no. Some memory intensive benchmarks show AMD in the lead, but not even all of those.
Intel has a much better cache hierarchy, and far far better memory execution subsystem in
the chip (ie. it can do out of order memory execution to hide a lot of latency).
I don't know how you are coming up with an "average" like that unless you include disproportionate
weight on HPC or dumb memory benchmarks, but really, Core2 is a far better core than Opteron.
Actually one legitimate area where AMD can be ahead is in 4 socket servers. 4 is where their
interconnect and memory controllers beat the glueless Intel solutions, but haven't got themselves
tangled up by their cache coherency protocol (as in 8 sockets).
The playing field is not even level now (ie. its tipping Intel's way), so I don't know why you think
it will become level when Intel introduces their IMC. (Unless you mean level, as in, Intel's core will
no longer be disadvantaged, and we will be able to _really_ see how superior it is to AMD's).
Here we have "Why should we release this chip now?
Because if you don't release a better chip, who will upgrade and give you more money?
The old chips are MORE expensive to produce. The 65-nm die size is about 140mm^2 and the newer 45-nm die size is about 107mm^2, so actually, the next generation chip is cheaper to make.
In the absence of AMD, Intel would still have to compete with itself, otherwise nobody would upgrade and sales would tank.
Newegg has an Athlon64 X2 at 2 ghz for $60 or so.
I have yet to find anything dual-core in that price range from Intel, though perhaps I haven't looked hard enough.
But I actually do want to support Intel now, because I want to see Intel enter the graphics card market, so I can finally play new games on an entirely open OS. And meanwhile, of course, I'm buying nVidia... Buying AMD means supporting ATI, and I don't like that.
Still, money talks. The cheapest Intel Core 2 Duo on Newegg is $120. Is there anything comparable to that X2 from Intel, anywhere?
Yes, but the wafers themselves cost much much much more. Also the cost of the tooling equipment hasn't yet been depreciated. Generally a given chip will be cheaper in a process one step behind the leading edge, because of the tooling cost. For analog circuits (not the kind we're talking about) the oldest process possible is the cheapest, because the whole of the equipment needed to manufacture is free from a relative standpoint.
Nice if you aren't the one spending YOUR nights and weekends. Personally, I cannot imagine working in one of these sweatshops... though Verizon must have been pretty close! I still hate that company after being gone three years now. There comes a point where there is little point to the competition. How many of us actually use 3 GHz and 2 Gigs of memory -- or 64bit processing with zetabyte file systems? Yeh, us geeks do, but the machines aren't really produced for our benefit. They are produced for the mass market, where the folks are mainly clueless. Also, what is the point of being able to buy a machine very cheaply if YOU can't get a job anymore because they've either gone offshore, or imported slave labor? Don't see a lot of [good] morality in that.
No. And that is precisely what is wrong with current multicore CPUs and the way the industry looks at parallelism in general. The truth is, parallel algorithm is an oxymoron. It is explained further here: Why Threads and Current Multicore CPUs Are Evil.
It destroys one tenth of AMD's offerings?
I'm sure you're right. I didn't know the details of when the K6/K6-2/K6-3 came out, so I just lumped them all together into K6. At the time, it didn't really seem like there was a huge difference between them.
K7 was long lived, but Athlon XP was a pretty significant upgrade which gave a lot more life to the K7 line.
Actually, there wasn't really much of a difference between the K6 and the K6-2. The K6 was meant to compete directly with the Pentium MMX (as in it was a drop in replacement for the Pentium MMX chip). After Intel abandoned the Socket 7 platform for Slot 1 for the P2, AMD (and Cyrix) extended the Socket 7 platform to support faster bus speeds (up to 100MHz, compared to 66MHz for the Pentium MMX/K6). The only real difference is that the K6 could (in theory) be plugged into any board that accepted a Pentium MMX, while the K6-2 needed one of the "Super 7" boards to run.
The K6-3 was a huge change as it had 256K of L2 cache on the die, but otherwise it was basically a K6-2. It was significant as it was AMD's first chip with an on-die L2 cache, which in my mind made it kind of a test run for the later Athlons. The K6-3 was a pretty fast chip, though I always felt the Socket 7/Super 7 platform, which by 1999 was really showing it's age, held the chip back.