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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."
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The problem is AMD is using an outdated architecture.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.
Rest assured that most of the 1337 h4xx0rZ who will soon spew reams of artificial benchmark trivia are just demonstrating that what they really use their Maibatsu Monstrosity XP9000 system for is running a web browser.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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".
Although not as fast as the 980X, the 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.
So doubly pointless
Indeed as this is the "the" new X6s.
I still like the underdog and hope they do well. The latest and greatest is often overkill.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So why on earth are you even bothering to comment on this article? You clearly have no need for a top of the line system. Good for you! You're just like my mom! Does it make you feel superior to brag about your single core? Are you the computer ascetic of our generation?
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
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.
watching HD porn of course!
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
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?
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
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."
back in 2003 i ordered a custom built machine at a local shop, they favored intel, but since the northwood 3.0 GHz (only intel chip i cared about at the time) was WAY out of my budget (700 euro cpu, 300 euro mobo), i insisted on an athlon XP. The guy tried to convince me that amd makes unreliable shit and overclocks their own stuff and such, but i insisted.
I got my system, and was happy, but after i while i found out it was running at 100 mhz FSB (as opposed to the specced 166 mhz), they had just upped the multiplier to have the core clock match the specs (yes, my athlon XP 2600+ does not have a multi-lock, none of those chips did until the barton core came about). I asked the guy who built it about this and he claimed that he could not get the system stable at 166 mhz (implicitly blaming AMD). A few years later i found out the stick of ram he had used has errors in it, and doesnt run stable at 166 mhz, causing the instability. Just last weekend i swapped some different ram in there, upped the FSB to spec, and the system is solid as a rock.
moral of the story, people slagging off AMD for stability and such are tools and dont know what they are talking about
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