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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.'"
The two companies take turns one-upping each other for the bleeding edge, but every time (10 years running) I've specced out a mid-range (home gamer, single CPU motherboard) to low-end (grandma's email/photo machine) machine, AMD's been the way to go. It's a lot like trying to decide which company's video boards to pick if you're trying to make a game machine without breaking the bank.
Some people are Intel partisans, some people AMD partisans. Benching them and looking at spec, I've consistently found that AMD's got faster chips (for the same $) up to the "sweet spot" in the curve where price starts shooting upwards during the times I've been buying, but I also know there were times I was not in the market when Intel had done a price cut and AMD hadn't caught up.
I'm not going to call someone an idiot for their CPU choice, as it's a long-term purchase decision that has to be balanced with other factors (motherboard choice, RAM, video board, power concerns, cooling solution, etc) anyways. In fact, I recommend consumers try to stay OFF the "bleeding edge" because they're basically throwing money away on it; even if you buy the latest, hottest chip right from the factory it's obsolete by the time you get it home. Your best bet is looking at the curve, because there's always a spot (usually between $150 and $250) where the price starts to jump up exponentially for only an incrementally "faster" product. Buy at the spot beyond which the relationship between price and performance fails to be linear and you'll turn out pretty happy.
Comparing two CPUs based on clock speed alone is like comparing the speed of two cars by measuring only the RPMs of the tires. It won't get you anywhere ... you need to know the size of the tires as well!
Thus concludes my first /. car analogy. Thank you.