Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
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.
Barcelona is a new microarchitecture (which reportedly takes a lot from K8). Core is just over a year old right now. Barcelona adds a variety of new things (and is native quad core), Penryn adds SSE4 and some other bits. Who exactly has the old horse?
Its only short term, that lower prices are good.
Long term, if AMD doesn't make a profit, and eventually liquidates, Intel will be the only remaining manufacturer of x86 CPUs (At least the only one able to meet demand, at cost effective prices)
They'll have an effective monopoly, which means without a doubt, Intel will raise their prices... Its not like a competitor can spring in to compete. The capital required, both in plant, and research, to enter such a manufacturing market is mammoth, how many billion have AMD invested in their own manufacturing plants, let alone research?
If AMD dies, the only thing that could keep Intel in check dies, and with it, fair prices.
The same can be said with nvidia, since ati's fate is tied to amd.
To avoid criticism; Say nothing, Do nothing, Be nothing.
Be careful what you wish for. There is a slim chance that Intel could be holding onto this technology because they don't want to be 'anti-competitive'. Let's assume Intel could hypothetically release chips that are twice as fast as anything that is out there right now. What would happen? It could kill AMD if Intel can keep up that technological growth at a much superior rate than AMD. Anti-trust lawsuits would follow.
But, before you call the anti-trust lawyers a bunch of SOB's stifeling technological growth, consider this. If Intel did run AMD out of existance. Intel would no longer have a reason to sink as much money in R&D. They could slack off with only moderate growth and nobody could do anything about it.
I dare say Intel understands very well and they are going to do all that they can to remain #1 in the industry while at the same time avoiding all possible litigation that could be brought against them by the competition.
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.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
I don't count scaling as innovative...but I wouldn't rush to say that Intel's new product with unknown specs isn't innovative. It won't be the scaling, though, it'll be what they do with it.
If they've come up with an efficient way to run multiple cores at full speed (or close to it), then they've been quite innovative. If they've come up with a computer that can run a 2 GHz equivalent and sit on your arm, then it's innovative. If they've come up with a way to build chips 3-dimensionally (rather than 2 1/2), then it's innovative.
There's lots of ways that the product could be innovative. They could have a new microcode language. Nobody would notice, but that, in and of itself, could be quite innovative.
N.B.: Scaling, while not, in and of itself, innovative, frequently enables innovation. Consider the digital wrist watch. (Note also that innovations aren't always improvements.)
OTOH, innovation often isn't noticed as such. Consider those phone speaker/mikes that people are now frequently wearing in their ears. That's innovative, even though it wasn't much of a technical advance (if any).
Literally innovation means the making of something that's new...but different people have different standards for what's needed to count as new. For me, scaling doesn't suffice. It enables, but it doesn't suffice.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I didn't mean to suggest that shrinking the die from 65nm to 45 is a trivial task. What i am saying is that they're taking an old core (c2d) and shrinking it. Yes, there will be some slight alterations for sse4 performance and whatnot, but it's the same old core.
AMD is not taking the shrinking route (lets face it, they were having lots of problems shrinking 90 to 65, hense the delays) but rather creating a whole new core that's a native quad core cpu.
It's not that hard to see AMD applying a 45nm shrinking process to the k10. Maybe they'll do that by the time that nephilim (whatever intel's new architecture is called) is supposed to come out (end of 2008).
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.
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.
Worst product ever:
Codename was SH (or SH II, don't quite remember). A step silicon had a severe issue, yield of 2%. B step solved the issue and projected yield to 95+%. Then the bottom fell out of the dot com market and the projected demand fell so badly that the decision was made to sort and dice the A step wafers and sell the good 2%. That was projected to meet all demand for the lifespan of the product.
Ouch.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
We can sit here all day and just guess what's causing Intel to do what it does, or if we actually wanted to understand the CPU market we could study the facts of the situation. Ass-delving for reasons doesn't help anyone.