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AMD Undercuts Intel With Six-Core Phenom IIs
EconolineCrush writes "As Slashdot readers are no doubt aware, Intel's latest 'Gulftown' Core i7-980X is an absolute beast of a CPU. But its six cores don't come cheap; the 980X sells for over a grand, which is more than it would cost to build an entire system based on one of AMD's new six-core CPUs. The Phenom II X6 line starts at just $200 and includes a new Turbo capability that can opportunistically raise the clock speed of up to three cores when the others are idle. Although not as fast as the 980X, the new X6s are quick enough to offer compelling value versus even like-priced Intel CPUs. And the kicker: the X6s will work in a good number of older Socket AM2+ and AM3 motherboards with only a BIOS update."
There are more than a few things that AMD besides gaming and over clocking (Intel strong points) that make an AMD a good choice. I don't want to start holy war here but there is not much real gap here 10-5% in my tests at best. The price * power use thing shows AMD is a good choice in many places. Price alone makes me deploy more than a few AMD clusters. Don't just look at the max value on the "speedometer" to see how good a car is, we mostly drive at the speed limit. Take from it what you will.
It gives us VM's - lots and lots of VM's. I can reproduce a production app environment entirely on one quiet little box, including the load-balancer, firewall and name servers. It used to take a half a rack of loud, expensive servers all with disks and other stuff that breaks and needs monitoring and replacing. I can't wait for the 8-core chips to become affordable.
I have been wondering for quite some time - do regular joe consumers really need all those cores? OR is everyone buying into the marketing hype of processor manufacturers without thinking whether we would actually need that many cores??
First of all, any computer organization text will inform you that as the number of cores increase - scheduling amongst those cores becomes an exponentially costly issue in itself. This scheduling/load balancing of course has to be ultra low latency to maintain a reasonable throughput.
Not to mention the fact, that on software side managing threading and choosing instructions to parallelize is a big headache. Many decent programmers cannot get it right so that in itself defeats the presence of different cores.
Secondly - unless you are continuously doing protein folding, calculating eigen values of huge matrices, or are acting as a node for traffic in your part of the world -- most people's processor cores will spend a majority of their time idling or spin-lock. Is it any surprise then that both Intel and AMD are advertising technologies to power down three cores, boosting the power for the other three?? Simply because most end-users will rarely utilize all six of their cores simultaneously. Yes, that is even true no matter if you are doing heavy video transcoding or running multiple servers, and playing games simultaneously - you will still leave your cores without any task simply because unless the bandwidth of the memory bus catches up, your cores will be waiting for data to process.
This is why Intel's i-series architecture is superior to AMDs and likely the fact their processors cost more, because they have addressed the memory bus issue.
You have to realize your computer acts like a chain and it is only as fast as its weakest link.
I have been advising people that any new dual or quad processor will suffice - they should instead spend that extra money on buying a better motherboard, speedier RAM, and of course high-speed HDD.
Trust me when I say that just that approach above will yield systems that are actually much faster than coupling an i7/Mega-core behemoth with an old hard-disk and crappy RAM.
It is an altogether different matter that computers are already so speedy that most users cannot for the love of God discern between the speeds of any recent dual-core and a top-of-the-line processor - and it is not their fault -- the advantages now we are talking about are incremental. The power is present but cannot be harnessed. So any gloating is moot.