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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."
In short this posting is old and not very accurate. So doubly pointless
all these cores and benchmarks...
i still run computer with one core and no modern graphics card
Someday we'll hit the human carrying capacity. And the band will just play on.
Price/Performance of the i7's is actually quite decent.
We all should hope AMD does well. I use AMD chips in about 90% of my systems. Value is the main reason. Intel makes excellent products however you invariably have to upgrade the motherboard to use a new chip. AMD has been kinder in this regard recently. I go with a middle of the pack system anyhow and I really appreciate the value AMD provides.
The problem is AMD is using an outdated architecture. More cores != more speed for general use. Yeah, if you are compiling your own software you can get things to work really fast with 6 cores but how many applications really take advantage of multiple cores? Very, very few. A single fast core can outperform a few slow cores in general usage and AMD seems only concerned with getting more and more cores on a single CPU die which really doesn't translate to great performance in the real world for general use.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
On a price performance basis AMDs Phenom IIs have consistenly been a better buy for some time now. To the point it's hard to suggest anyone buying intel at all, unless money is no object. (I don't know why I bought Intel anyway :S).
Honest hardware review sites (that aren't far up the ass of vendors) are at the point of recommend AMD CPUs on a price/performance basis.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/best-gaming-cpu,review-31857.html
It seems Intel doesn't get even a "honorable mention" until page 3. At $120 price point, Core i3 gets a look in. Oh, they also don't recommend anything above about $160 to quote Tom's: "Best gaming CPU for $190: None".
To add further insult, money saved from AMD motherboards being cheaper (in particular SLI/xfire AMD boards are a good whack cheaper) will let you put money towards more storage, a SSD or a step up in CPU speed.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
And additional benefit of AMD processors is that they all support ECC RAM.
Yeah, a lot of people waiting for i7 price to drop instead of actually buying nice AMD product will surely result in drops of Intel CPU prices, right?
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
I have four cores. I run an IDE and an AppServer at all times, which uses up at least two cores. Then there is my bit-torrent app and...
Seems like you can easily use all those cores.
Blar.
AMD basically has a processor that has a high performance/price ratio for any budget. I will be loyal to AMD for quite some time. Im seriously considering tattooing AMD on myself.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
includes a new Turbo capability that can opportunistically raise the clock speed
Does this mean I can get my turbo button back on my computer?
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Yes actually...I've worked with so many boards that were made for AM2 that were made long before Phenom came out that work phenomenally with Phenom chips after a quick bios update. Now if your talking a prebuilt HP special POS, well that's your own fault.
Yeah, a lot of people waiting for i7 price to drop instead of actually buying nice AMD product will surely result in drops of Intel CPU prices, right?
Of course it does. It doesn't matter why someone chooses to not buy a product, it only matters that they make that choice and thus the product doesn't sell. Companies have gone bankrupt because people chose to wait for a better deal.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Yes. This is far from the first time a new CPU has been supported on older boards by updating BIOS.
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.
For all us virtualization types more cheaper cores = more better. The future is in virtualization and I think AMD gets this.
Thus resulting in a lower price on the new i7 MacBook Pro!
waiting... waiting...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
For less than the price of Intel's top desktop chip, you can get an uber-1337 AMD Opteron with 12-cores. Beat that, Intel...
Prices start at $750.
I've noticed some IDEs are annoyingly more CPU hogging than a lot of other applications I run. Code::Blocks, for example, seems to start eating up CPU usage after being kept open with not even a very large amount of files open. It gets worse with more files open, but I've seen it happen with relatively small projects. I've seen the same with other IDEs, also--I've just been using Code::Blocks with one project I've got going lately, so it's most fresh in my mind. I'm not quite sure what it's doing, but some of them seem to like eating up CPU even when the window is off on another virtual desktop. That seems to affect me more on Linux, though. On Windows, I usually close what I'm not using, because it drives me nuts having so many windows open with only one desktop area to work with. As such, I'm not sure how the comparison goes...
Even if you throw in multi-media, including voip and video, I doubt your average user will be able to use all that computing power
...but once you thow into the mix all the dozens of viruses, trojans, spywares and phising systems which the clueless user has collected by clicking open every single e-mail attachment, suddenly you realise that Average Joe's computer has even problems keeping up with simply sitting idle (and spitting tons of SPAM, coordinating DDNS attacks, etc) let alone have enough processing power to run even a browsing session in addition to the rest.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Modern IDEs do quite a bit these days beyond just organizing files and giving you a color coded editor. Between parsing your code as you write it, context-sensitive auto-complete, and dynamic recompilation of the files you're changing, there's plenty of things for it to do to try and make your life easier as a developer.
Intel started doing a bit more than "cut prices, but also released a huge speed bump" (BTW, remember P3 Coppermine 1.13GHz? ;p ), as shown by recent record-breaking fine from the EU and settlement with AMD (both almost $3 billion total? Supposedly Intel cheated the market for at least that much...imagine what AMD could've done with R&D and fabs if they would have the funds which were otherwise illegally funelled to Intel). The company for which you presumably do care about doesn't really share your enthusiasm for competition...the way they fought, it kept costs higher and quality lower on AMD side.
BTW, "Ok but they were still plenty good chips, they performed well enough for what most people used" in regards to P4 wasn't quite the case with first versions, which were much more expensive and slower than P3s they replaced. Plus lots of unsuspecting people of "CPU must be from Intel" type got Willamette Celerons, which were very castrated, cache-starved (as far as Netburst was concerned)...making them very slow, and a horrible deal.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Anandtech managed to get a stable 4.0 GHz overclock with air cooling. It makes an already great deal all that much better in my opinion.
How is a $299 6 core/6 thread chip at 4GHz a better deal than a $199 4 core/8 thread chip that can also be overclocked on air to the same speed, and benchmarks far faster at that point?
To me the new AMD six core is a little bit of "me too!" from AMD. Not that there won't be people who won't find practical uses, and no buying one to OC it so that you can get a higher folding score does not count imo, for them but it's still as many have pointed out hard to find real world scenarios where people need that type of a CPU on their desktop.
AMD not only has to compete with Intel on the technology front but marketing as well. And again I don't want to take anything away from AMD and the idea behind pushing the envelope on new tech. But when it comes to end users they really don't know and or care what is driving what they do with their computer. I see people's eyes glaze over when I even start to talk about what type of hardware I'm going to set them up with. They simply do not care.
However I have seen where people have been brainwashed by the marketing. People have asked me if their system is Intel Inside. I try to explain to them that at most price points AMD is a better buy and the more brainwashed come back to me with some very clueless lines like, "But if I don't have and Intel I won't be able to run what I need to." I even remember back in the early 2000's walking into a local computer shop, I needed a mobo asap, and one of the sales reps told me that AMD CPU's were, "Garbage. We don't even stock any AMD parts."
I asked if he knew about the, at the time very high end, computing array that was I think setup at GT that was using AMDs and he started to sputter. "Well, I don't know about that." Of course you don't you idiot I felt like saying, but I just left and have since made it a point to make sure that people that I know and do work for look out to be wary of that place.
My main point is that AMD serves many purposes in what our modern computing landscape is. I personally do like them a lot but as someone who deals with many systems I deal with Intel plenty too. And hell I like a lot of Intel's products. They have top notch R&D and blah blah blah. But we would be a poorer group of computer users without AMD even without all of the other reasons to like them.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Maybe you'll be happy to know there are other alternatives that are very interesting appearing on the CPU manufacturer radar:
1)Godson 3A(4-core) and 3B(8-core).
http://translate.google.ca/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gmw.cn%2Fcontent%2F2010-04%2F21%2Fcontent_1099818.htm&sl=zh-CN&tl=en
www.lemote.com will also have a 3A offering in August.
2)Nivida Tegra T20 seems to also be a 4-cores among other cool features.
http://www.clonedinchina.com/2010/01/viewsonic-vtablet-101-android-tablet.html
I'm in a computational biology lab. I extensively benchmarked intel vs. AMD. We run different kinds of calculations, some of which will use a whole node's worth of processors and others that run just on a single core, but we run tons of them at the same time. AMD is a tremendous value in either scenario. Intel processors are interesting if you can only have a certain small number of nodes and are only trying to maximize processing power rather than cost effectiveness, but AMD's approach of just giving you a bunch of cores on the cheap has been great for us.
Lots of cores are good. A good amount of RAM helps too. And when you put a bunch of servers that do real services in one box, storage and network bandwidth and latency are also important. At the moment memory seems to be the sticking point rather than cores.
For many virtualization scenarios right now with VMWare there is the VMWare licensing to consider. The 8GB DIMMS are still spendy but so is the VMWare licensing so there's tension between server density with expensive DIMMs to minimize rackspace and licensing cost, or twice as many servers with the cheaper DIMMS and paying the increased licensing.
HP and Cisco both have interesting propositions in this area, with blades that do 10GbE and FC for good bandwidth, have dual 6-core processors and support 192GB of RAM or more. When better processors and cheaper memory come out the Cisco UCS solution may have challenges because the architecture may become I/O bound with only 2 10Gbps links for both network and storage per half-width blade, and sharing at least half of that in the chassis uplink. The HP blade solution supports full line rate between servers and an insane amount of uplink - and it's denser than the UCS so it takes up less rack space. The UCS solution uses an ASIC to more than double the number of memory sockets, so for example a full-width server supports up to 192GB using the cheaper 4GB DIMMS and they claim they all work at 1333MHz. I don't know what IBM and Dell are doing here but I know they have products too.
All of the basic virtual environments are basically free (except Microsoft's Hyper-V, of course). Microsoft software is practically free in education environments so they're making inroads there. But in the enterprise the high availability and reliability features of the advanced commercial packages are compelling. There's something awesome about asking an admin management type to evacuate a server so you can work on it (because the local IT support is out today), and watching her migrate the VMs off in a few seconds so you can take it down.
One of the really neat things about VM consolidation is that 20 physical servers with 4x 1Gbps Ethernet don't actually use it so by consolidating them you eliminate waste. Not only that, but by moving to the VM host with 10GbE you get virtual servers that have multiple 1Gbps connections but each has a 0.2ms ping to the external gateway and each other. This makes many things work faster like databases, websites and such. The downside is the downside of sharing: if you don't plan carefully and get a storm load, the servers will contend for bandwidth and knock each other offline.
Now that DDR3 is becoming cheaper than DDR2, I'm glad to see AMD adopt it. I like their 8-core server chips for workstation stuff - a coworker and I are building out dual-8 core boxes for virtual machines and such.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Don't doubt for one minute that Intel gets that too.
That's why intel disables their VT instructions on certain CPU's
People, what a bunch of bastards
On the other hand Youtube is filled with people doing HD-video, so I guess it's not such a small fraction of the users anymore, it's very close to mainstream actually.
New things are always on the horizon
I have found that it doesn't matter for computer life if you have Genuine Intel, or Authentic AMD.
Want to know the stuff that actually matters?
1: First and foremost a decent PSU. This means the difference between a well made, stable machine versus one where components die of mysterious causes every few months. I have had great luck with Corsairs and Antecs. Just make sure to get one that has significant headroom between the estimated wattage and its rated wattage. Mainly because one of the most reliable ways to feed USB devices power is through hanging them from your machine, and a couple USB PCI cards. When in doubt, find a quiet 1000 watt power supply, and call it done.
2: A decent enclosure. Yes, people talk that cases are cases, so go with the cheapest. However, I've had enclosures last multiple motherboards. So might as well get a case that has rolled metal edges to minimize getting cut, a solid rack for hard disks, etc. Cooling is important, so it can't hurt to get a case that can support multiple fans.
3: Cooling. What can kill a machine is not enough air blowing through it. Getting a case and decent fan setup can make a machine last a long time.
4: Motherboard. Yes, it might be easy to go cheap on this, but this is what is controlling your CPU, and going cheap on this may mean major headaches in the future, especially if something partially works. You want to get a decent name brand motherboard, because the better ones actually have true hardware RAID on board (not hardware-assisted), which allows you to use two drives for your OS.
5: RAM. I've seen people buy pulls and then wonder later on why they keep having subtle problems, until I fire up a RAMtest utility and find areas with problems.
6: This is one thing that is important as everything else, but something not often checked after. A UPS. Unexpected power cut outs are horrific for equipment. Not just software with unexpected downtime, but hardware. Putting your machines on a solid UPS will easily prolong their lives a number of years.
So do you think it's only the occasional cinematographer or pirate who uses software based on FFmpeg and X.264
AMD and Slashdot are located in the United States. In the United States, the encoding process that x264 uses is subject to royalty-bearing patents, and royalty-bearing patent licenses are incompatible with the copyright licenses for FFmpeg and x264. So anyone using FFmpeg and x264 is a pirate, except possibly in one or two corner cases that someone is likely to chime in to clarify.
to transcode vids for HTPC or iPod?
Before this discussion succumbs to Layne's Law, let us clarify something: Are we referring to major-label video or homemade video?
For anyone that plans on using this CPU as a workstation or light server chip, this is the best way to go. I recently priced an Asus M4A785TD-V EVO motherboard and it's only an amazing $120. (Comes complete with a built in low powered graphics card too) Pair that with this Phenom X6 and ECC ram and you have an amazingly great value Virtualization or Parallel rendering system. This chip is probably overkill for consumers and gamers but for the folks who can use it, it's an amazing steal. :) In any event, I work for a small company and so far AMD's proven to be the best value for light servers. Intel's primary best designs and strengths are in the Laptop market where they make advanced chips but on the Desktop I still find AMD to be great.