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AMD Launches First 45nm Shanghai CPUs
arcticstoat writes "The wait for AMD's next-gen CPUs is finally over, as the company has now officially launched its first 45nm 'Shanghai' Opteron chips for servers and workstations. 'AMD's move to a 45nm process relies on immersion lithography, where a refractive fluid fills the gap between the lens and the wafer, which AMD says will result in 'dramatic performance and performance-per-watt gains.' It's also enabled AMD to increase the maximum clock speed of the Opterons from 2.3GHz with the Barcelona core to 2.7GHz with the Shanghai core. Shanghai chips also feature more cache than their predecessors, with 6MB of Level 3 cache bumping the total up to 8MB, and the chips share the same cache architecture as Barcelona CPUs, with a shared pool of Level 3 cache and an individual allocation of Level 2 cache for each core.'"
This news is about a server/workstation chip, and I don't do any purchasing of those. As far as desktop chips are concerned, AMD was ALWAYS competitive on a price-performance basis. The key word there being price.
According to Anandtech's review, it's highly competitive for database servers. http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3456
No, they weren't. For the past year Intel has boxed AMD in with chips at the same performance and lower price, or the same price and higher performance, or both.
And Intel has had performance segments (QX*) stretching well above AMD's, and pricing segments (Atom) well below AMD's.
AMD's short-lived price/performance superiority in the desktop sweet-spot in 2004 and 2005 has left many people thinking they're still in that position. That hasn't been true since Core 2 came out. HyperTransport gave them a slight edge in very-high-end servers for certain applications, but Intel stayed near them with reliably higher clock speeds, and is coming out with QuickPath in four days, wiping out those few use cases where AMD can make easy sales today.
What I'm saying is, right now you are likely to choose Intel in almost all situations, if you are objective.
cycles aren't everything in all cases... AMD still has more system bandwidth, which speeds up everything when talking about IO bound applications. FSB speeds up every aspect of the computer.
The applications where AMD is superior are IO bound applications like database servers, and music production.
Intel is better for video because you are dealing with a limited number of streams and it's computationally expensive, so is CPU bound.
With audio you can have hundreds of streams (often 4-6 per fader on the mixer), and at 24/96, will quickly overwhelm any intel based system. Since a lot of us use DSP cards ( think of it as GPU for sound) the data path capacity, especially to the DSP processors (PCI/PCI-e) is very important, and Intel simply can't touch AMD in this respect.
AMD architecture simply has untouchable plumbing. If you will notice, Apple is looking for a new chip vendor. This probably has a lot to do with it since most audio professionals use Apple gear.
If Jobs and Co. were smart, they'd offer both intel and amd architectures, depending on the job being done. Intel is fantastic for video and a lot of pro video peeps use Apple gear too. Those are two market segments that couldn't be more different in their requirements. To be the best of the best for multimedia, Apple needs to either build a new architecture or offer both AMD and Intel.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.