If the website designer has to pay for bits each time you view their website without viewing their banner ads, are you engaged in theft?
In order for me to view their banner ads, my browser must actively request the data for that banner in a separate transaction from the one used to get the rest of the contents of the page. I see no reason for me, as the computer's owner and operator, not to forbid the browser from doing so.
As a good citizen of the internet, I think it a good thing that I don't clog the tubes with advertising bandwidth which I do not care to see.
I simply want to use the chip that gives me the greatest floating point throughput I can get.
Define throughput. At some point you need to decide if you are solving equations like LinPack or equations like spec_fp. One causes lots of cache misses and benefits from memory bandwidth, the other does not.
Right now that chip appears to be Barcelona.
Well that's a hypothetical statement based on perception of your needs and their marketing.
I'm not interested with hypothetical arguments
That explains why you're making them (???)
I am looking forward to using Barcelona processors because they will get my mathematical computations done faster.
Hypothetically. Are you going to hypothetically switch when Intel's Penryn with SSE4 comes out? What about Intel's Nehalem?
By the way, check out number 2 and 3 on your top 500 supercomputer list - they're Opterons.
And?? They were designed and built before Core 2 was released. Do you think I'm going to argue they should have used Pentium 4's? Those systems also make solid use of NUMA through a custom Cray crossbar (Seastar), and Intel doesn't have that. If they made them today I see no reason for them not to use Opterons. Do you have a computer with lots of Opterons and a Cray Seastar router on order?
The performance of those systems is measured using LinPack. As I mentioned at the beginning, declaring a 2.0 GHz Barcelona as having faster fp throughput than 3.2 GHz Core 2 depends wholly on which types of calculations you are doing. spec_fp does calculations that are memory bound, LinPack does not (at least not as much). Barcelona's faster fp throughput is not due to markedly superior fp unit (though it may be marginally better) but its onboard memory controller. If you need that sort of thing, great, go with barcelona. If you need raw speed on smaller units (under a couple of megabytes) chances are good that the higher clocked Core 2 with huge cache will win.
When only measuring single core performance, clock for clock, Barcelona is on par with Cloverton.
Unfortunately processors are not generally sold "clock for clock." If you're on par clock for clock, but the other guy is clocked more than 50% faster than you... that could be trouble.
What good is an Intel chip that has fast floating point but the bus cannot feed it data fast enough?
Plenty good if the data can fit in cache, in which case the unit can be fed fast enough. For instance, say you're running LinPack. But then, who uses LinPack as a benchmark?
I don't understand why everyone always talks about AMD's problems.
Because it doesn't matter how many fronts you are leading on, if you run out of money and can't borrow any more, you lose.
AMD has been running out of money, fortunately they can still borrow. If they don't stop losing money their credit rating will tank and then they will not be able to borrow any more.
specfp rate was running faster on pre-barcelona dual core Opterons than on Intel's dual core Woodcrest. The reason is no big secret: specfp is memory bandwidth limited and specfp_rate is specfp's running in parallel. Here is a good anandtech article on the subject.
We already know that AMD has superior memory performance. If you are doing bandwidth-limited floating point, Barcelona is the clear winner.
If you're making a general statement about floating point performance, you're wrong.
I know you laugh but hear me out. Pick up the O-reily quick reference for almost any major language.
Is that a *really* good metric for a language? O'reilly is pretty good as companies go, but they are still after the bottom line. And the bottom line is: bigger "quick references" will sell better and for more money.
And then why does it take a zillion pages in the quickref to explain it when it has less fearutes than stock perl.
See, just like I told you.
Once you learn perl you don't need a big set of reference books to explain every obscure library.
Is there a language that, once learned, you need a big set of reference books? I use both Perl and Python (and 4 or 5 others). I have no books on Python. I have the camel book for Perl. I still find Java's javadoc to be the best language reference around. I no longer program in Java so that's just an interesting side note at this point.
I'm fucking tired of people putting down one of our most ethical presidents since Andrew Jackson.
Wow. It's amazing that a president can do a few things you agree with and you can gloss over what is probably the least ethical presidency since the Nixon administration (possibly worse). How can you look at no-bid contracts given to Haliburton and not at the very least think "appearance of impropriety." You've got one messed up definition of ethics there. How about putting a businessman with no real political experience in charge of rebuilding Iraq? Do you have any idea how many tens of thousands of Iraqi's and thousands of American lives were lost because of L. Paul Bremer's fucked up theories of nation building?
Yeah that's some seriously ethical cronyism. I'll take someone lying about getting a blow job to a hundred thousand dead humans any day.
Intel's Core Microarchitecture is not currently available in a quad-CPU platform.
Incorrect. Intel's "Core Microarchitecture" is marketed under the name "Core 2." The "Core 2 Quad" processors use the Core Microarchitecture. See Intel's product brief on the subject.
It is understandable the multithreaded performance would be poor, then.
The single threaded performance of quad core is similar to the single threaded performance of dual core, clock for clock. This should have tipped you off to the fact that quad core is using the new microarchitecture.
The current quad-cpu architecture is based on Tulsa, which a 65nm shrink of Paxville, which is essentially a Pentium 4 Smithfield, or two Prescotts shoved onto one ship.
Also incorrect. All of those processors use netburst. None of the new Quad Cores do. Your problem seems to be that you are reading dated information on server class chips and assuming all "Quad Cores" are server class. (Although new quad core Xeon's are Core as well)
Basically, it's two years ago's technology. The new Tigerton chip will be in Core based, however, it's not out yet.
Incorrect again. Although you are correct about Tigerton being a Core part.
If they performed slow re-entry (ex: SpaceShip One), then one of their two failures would not have occurred as the heat would not have built up.
SpaceShip One is sub-orbital with a maximum speed of about Mach 3. I don't understand how you can compare the two. A "slow" re-entry would require a whole lot of fuel to slow the vehicle down from orbital velocity to a safe entry velocity. Fuel you would have to launch with. You'd have to burn the fuel relatively quickly to ensure you don't enter a highly eccentric orbit that intersects with the atmosphere before you've finished your maneuver. If anything goes wrong here, you're toast. You'll burn up in the atmosphere.
I'm drafting a letter right now to let Sony know that my loyalty will cost at least $150 million. If I stop posting on/., you'll know they took my offer.
Actually, I disagree. If we keep them, they take a job from an American. If we send them home, they compete with us from abroad, and make money for India/China instead of for the US. In either case, Americans lose.
Yeah, um... these Americans who are qualified for the job but losing them to Indian or Chinese candidates... Could you send them my way? It is damned near impossible for the company I work for (a semiconductor manufacturer) to get Americans just to apply. I don't like hiring foreign talent over native talent (actually I only give a recommendation), but when we have an open job requisition and I'm looking at 10 resumes (7 from India, 1 from China, 1 from Bangladesh and one native) and the only American candidate is laughably unqualified, WHO ARE THESE GUYS STEALING A JOB FROM?!
I used to be seriously critical of outsourcing and the H1-B program . I was fairly certain that my current employer wouldn't even consider me. I went from phone interview, to face-2-face interview to job offer in a couple days. I almost had heart failure when I told them to bump their already generous offer by 10% and they had the increase approved the next morning.
I have taken ongoing education courses at the local university trying to get some locals just to $*&%ing apply - AND THEY WON'T DO IT. It is 10x easier to hire US Citizens than to get an H1-B Visa sponsored. I hate recommending someone who has only a tenuous grasp of the English language. We need more STEM majors in this country so that I don't have to go through this shit.
(I always metamod 'redundant' as unfair. The mods simply get it wrong too often. Too often 'redundant' means "yeah, you said it first, but this other guy replied to an earlier post so I saw his comment first. So I'll just *&$% up your karma a little here.")
Holy shit, did you just say something positive about a major in education?
Are you aware that at just about every college in the US, education is the softest subject on campus? That there are studies showing that education majors are, on average, the least sharp knives in the drawer (lowest average SAT/GRE scores)?
We don't need any more education majors unless they are going to stop giving those degrees away like they are free candy.
And worse yet, sometimes they edit out things that aren't offensive at all.
Damn straight. I guess I won't be shopping at Wal Mart after all. I guess I'll have to continue paying $0.22 per DRM-free song through eMusic.
(Yeah, I know, 99+% of the indie music there sucks, but some of it is really good, and I don't feel ripped off when I only paid a quarter for a song that sucks)
Oh brother. So when the GOP has a majority, the Democrats cry that they don't have any power to stop anything.
I think you need to take civics again. The Democratic majority in congress is very slight. They cannot override a presidential veto. It would take a bunch of Republicans to side with the Democrats to do that, and that simply isn't going to happen for a variety of reasons. In short, the Democrats are unable to pass new laws that Bush disagrees with. They can allow existing laws with sunset provisions to lapse, but they can't erect new laws. Bush worked very hard to consolidate and solidify power in the executive branch. It takes new legislation to undo that, and the president has to sign off on that new legislation.
A great example of this is Bush abusing his lame duck position to finance the surge in Iraq. Bush doesn't have to impress anybody, he isn't running again. The democrats had two choices: finance the war without a withdrawal timeline and get a black eye for not delivering on their election promises, or don't finance the surge and get a REALLY BIG BLACK EYE from public sympathy for millions Katrina victims and minimum wage workers. What the hell were they supposed to do??
Despite the fact that there was a clear national mandate from the people for a speedy resolution to the situation in Iraq, Bush could comfortably ignore it.
People have now seen Democrats "in action", the Congress has a lower approval rating even than Bush, and that is not unimportant going into a presidential election year.
I think people believe they have seen that, but in fact they have not. What they have seen is a political gridlock. It is better than what we had before, but it isn't good.
I'm afraid I fundamentally disagree. I'm not a hardcore gamer, but a difference of 25% is easily noticeable to me. In the base case between these two processors, the performance difference between the two on that benchmark is 36%. That's a difference between 25fps and 34fps - and that should be noticeable even to the casual observer.
However if we start playing headroom and overclocking games, the Core 2 will overclock reliably further than the X2. It will manage to reach your 41% threshold of noticeability (which, again, I disagree with).
I really wonder about your CMOS course if you don't know that higher clock speeds = more heat and more heat = shorter lifetime. Dig the articles up yourselves, but there are numerous known issues with tiny circuits and heat from the chemical (reactions go faster at higher temp) to the physical (greater metal fatigue from larger temperature swings).
Right now on any web site, you can order a X2 CPU with full dedicated L2 cache per core for around $70. The cheapest Core 2 Duo is the E4300 at $150.
Newegg has the E4500 for $146. That comes with 2MB of shared L2 cache, which is twice the combined cache of the Brisbane. In a single-threaded game this means that most of the L2 is going to be used by one processor for the game giving the CPU access to almost 4x as much. Is the shared cache a problem?
That has a bottlenecked 800Mhz FSB, not a fancy 2.0Ghz hypertransport bus like the X2.
Let me start by saying that a dedicated cpu memory controller plus high-speed chip-to-chip interconnect is the way to go. Having said that, this comparison always annoys the hell out of me for a couple reasons:
1) FSB is wider than hypertransport. 2) Hypertransport data must be packetized
The fact that 800 < 2000 does not mean FSB < HT. There are other reasons, this one is naive and wrong.
The lesson is your friend should have overclocked his E6600 to 3.0GHz so that we have a fair comparison. Your anecdotal evidence aside, even if we jump the X2 3200+ EE benchmarks by 26% (assuming a linear increase in performance, which doesn't generally happen) the E6600 is still outperforming your machine handily: see here.
I hate to inform you, but there isn't a single test that can measure up to the 180+ range.
I have great news for you, you get to raise your intelligence just a little bit today! You're wrong! Now you know a single test (like Stanford-Binet which measured Marilyn vos Savant with an IQ of 228) can measure up to the 180+ range and beyond.
Intel demanded that people not carry or display AMD products, or they'd refuse to ship product they already purchased. That is pretty clearly evil.
It's an alleged evil. Since the only major Intel-only brand in the US was Dell, I don't find it a particularly compelling case of evil. In fact it is a pretty short walk from saying Intel was manipulating Dell to saying Dell was manipulating Intel (hey Intel, I hear AMD has some pretty nice procs, sure is hard to turn those down, unless maybe we got a big discount on our next batch of cpus).
Intel doesn't have to buy AMD's IP. If AMD goes belly up, then Intel will have an unchallenged monopoly, and no one has suggested trying to compete with them.
AMD and Intel are fighting it out right now. The margins for each company are so low and the cost of entry so high that nobody else WANTS to jump into that alley fight. If AMD goes belly up, the cost of entry (buying AMD IP) gets a whole lot cheaper. If Intel jumps its gross margins, the potential returns of entering the market get a whole lot larger. "Unchallenged Monopoly" is just sabre rattling. It isn't going to happen.
Barcelona is late, and Intel does have a better manufacturing process. No one is contesting either of these points, but cheap AMD processors are reaching the 3 GHz barrier, so only trolls insist that AMD will never hit that mark.
Of course that is a strawman, as I never said nor implied AMD will never hit that mark. It's fairly certain in the market that AMD is having yield problems due to leakage on their 65nm parts. They are delayed while they get that under control. It also explains why initial Barcelona ships will be binned at 2GHz and only to key customers. AMD will have at most 8 weeks to get Barcelona penetration going before Intel starts shipping its 3.2GHz 45nm "Penryn."
Slashdot Mirror
If the website designer has to pay for bits each time you view their website without viewing their banner ads, are you engaged in theft?
In order for me to view their banner ads, my browser must actively request the data for that banner in a separate transaction from the one used to get the rest of the contents of the page. I see no reason for me, as the computer's owner and operator, not to forbid the browser from doing so.
As a good citizen of the internet, I think it a good thing that I don't clog the tubes with advertising bandwidth which I do not care to see.
So they will be airlifted by Ospreys half of which will crash killing half the invasion force.
Wow. You really think half of the Ospreys won't crash?
I simply want to use the chip that gives me the greatest floating point throughput I can get.
Define throughput. At some point you need to decide if you are solving equations like LinPack or equations like spec_fp. One causes lots of cache misses and benefits from memory bandwidth, the other does not.
Right now that chip appears to be Barcelona.
Well that's a hypothetical statement based on perception of your needs and their marketing.
I'm not interested with hypothetical arguments
That explains why you're making them (???)
I am looking forward to using Barcelona processors because they will get my mathematical computations done faster.
Hypothetically. Are you going to hypothetically switch when Intel's Penryn with SSE4 comes out? What about Intel's Nehalem?
By the way, check out number 2 and 3 on your top 500 supercomputer list - they're Opterons.
And?? They were designed and built before Core 2 was released. Do you think I'm going to argue they should have used Pentium 4's? Those systems also make solid use of NUMA through a custom Cray crossbar (Seastar), and Intel doesn't have that. If they made them today I see no reason for them not to use Opterons. Do you have a computer with lots of Opterons and a Cray Seastar router on order?
The performance of those systems is measured using LinPack. As I mentioned at the beginning, declaring a 2.0 GHz Barcelona as having faster fp throughput than 3.2 GHz Core 2 depends wholly on which types of calculations you are doing. spec_fp does calculations that are memory bound, LinPack does not (at least not as much). Barcelona's faster fp throughput is not due to markedly superior fp unit (though it may be marginally better) but its onboard memory controller. If you need that sort of thing, great, go with barcelona. If you need raw speed on smaller units (under a couple of megabytes) chances are good that the higher clocked Core 2 with huge cache will win.
When only measuring single core performance, clock for clock, Barcelona is on par with Cloverton.
Unfortunately processors are not generally sold "clock for clock." If you're on par clock for clock, but the other guy is clocked more than 50% faster than you... that could be trouble.
What good is an Intel chip that has fast floating point but the bus cannot feed it data fast enough?
Plenty good if the data can fit in cache, in which case the unit can be fed fast enough. For instance, say you're running LinPack. But then, who uses LinPack as a benchmark?
I don't understand why everyone always talks about AMD's problems.
Because it doesn't matter how many fronts you are leading on, if you run out of money and can't borrow any more, you lose.
AMD has been running out of money, fortunately they can still borrow. If they don't stop losing money their credit rating will tank and then they will not be able to borrow any more.
THAT is what righting the ship means.
unless of course they ARE preparing something powerful
Yes, they are.
specfp rate was running faster on pre-barcelona dual core Opterons than on Intel's dual core Woodcrest. The reason is no big secret: specfp is memory bandwidth limited and specfp_rate is specfp's running in parallel. Here is a good anandtech article on the subject.
We already know that AMD has superior memory performance. If you are doing bandwidth-limited floating point, Barcelona is the clear winner.
If you're making a general statement about floating point performance, you're wrong.
Your standards are too low. I was hoping for some Lisa-on-Minmei action.
You can define "on" however you wish.
I know you laugh but hear me out. Pick up the O-reily quick reference for almost any major language.
Is that a *really* good metric for a language? O'reilly is pretty good as companies go, but they are still after the bottom line. And the bottom line is: bigger "quick references" will sell better and for more money.
And then why does it take a zillion pages in the quickref to explain it when it has less fearutes than stock perl.
See, just like I told you.
Once you learn perl you don't need a big set of reference books to explain every obscure library.
Is there a language that, once learned, you need a big set of reference books? I use both Perl and Python (and 4 or 5 others). I have no books on Python. I have the camel book for Perl. I still find Java's javadoc to be the best language reference around. I no longer program in Java so that's just an interesting side note at this point.
I'm fucking tired of people putting down one of our most ethical presidents since Andrew Jackson.
Wow. It's amazing that a president can do a few things you agree with and you can gloss over what is probably the least ethical presidency since the Nixon administration (possibly worse). How can you look at no-bid contracts given to Haliburton and not at the very least think "appearance of impropriety." You've got one messed up definition of ethics there. How about putting a businessman with no real political experience in charge of rebuilding Iraq? Do you have any idea how many tens of thousands of Iraqi's and thousands of American lives were lost because of L. Paul Bremer's fucked up theories of nation building?
Yeah that's some seriously ethical cronyism. I'll take someone lying about getting a blow job to a hundred thousand dead humans any day.
How did this get modded informative?
Intel's Core Microarchitecture is not currently available in a quad-CPU platform.
Incorrect. Intel's "Core Microarchitecture" is marketed under the name "Core 2." The "Core 2 Quad" processors use the Core Microarchitecture. See Intel's product brief on the subject.
It is understandable the multithreaded performance would be poor, then.
The single threaded performance of quad core is similar to the single threaded performance of dual core, clock for clock. This should have tipped you off to the fact that quad core is using the new microarchitecture.
The current quad-cpu architecture is based on Tulsa, which a 65nm shrink of Paxville, which is essentially a Pentium 4 Smithfield, or two Prescotts shoved onto one ship.
Also incorrect. All of those processors use netburst. None of the new Quad Cores do. Your problem seems to be that you are reading dated information on server class chips and assuming all "Quad Cores" are server class. (Although new quad core Xeon's are Core as well)
Basically, it's two years ago's technology. The new Tigerton chip will be in Core based, however, it's not out yet.
Incorrect again. Although you are correct about Tigerton being a Core part.
If they performed slow re-entry (ex: SpaceShip One), then one of their two failures would not have occurred as the heat would not have built up.
SpaceShip One is sub-orbital with a maximum speed of about Mach 3. I don't understand how you can compare the two. A "slow" re-entry would require a whole lot of fuel to slow the vehicle down from orbital velocity to a safe entry velocity. Fuel you would have to launch with. You'd have to burn the fuel relatively quickly to ensure you don't enter a highly eccentric orbit that intersects with the atmosphere before you've finished your maneuver. If anything goes wrong here, you're toast. You'll burn up in the atmosphere.
I'm drafting a letter right now to let Sony know that my loyalty will cost at least $150 million. If I stop posting on /., you'll know they took my offer.
Actually, I disagree. If we keep them, they take a job from an American. If we send them home, they compete with us from abroad, and make money for India/China instead of for the US. In either case, Americans lose.
Yeah, um... these Americans who are qualified for the job but losing them to Indian or Chinese candidates... Could you send them my way? It is damned near impossible for the company I work for (a semiconductor manufacturer) to get Americans just to apply. I don't like hiring foreign talent over native talent (actually I only give a recommendation), but when we have an open job requisition and I'm looking at 10 resumes (7 from India, 1 from China, 1 from Bangladesh and one native) and the only American candidate is laughably unqualified, WHO ARE THESE GUYS STEALING A JOB FROM?!
I used to be seriously critical of outsourcing and the H1-B program . I was fairly certain that my current employer wouldn't even consider me. I went from phone interview, to face-2-face interview to job offer in a couple days. I almost had heart failure when I told them to bump their already generous offer by 10% and they had the increase approved the next morning.
I have taken ongoing education courses at the local university trying to get some locals just to $*&%ing apply - AND THEY WON'T DO IT. It is 10x easier to hire US Citizens than to get an H1-B Visa sponsored. I hate recommending someone who has only a tenuous grasp of the English language. We need more STEM majors in this country so that I don't have to go through this shit.
Is fixing all the messed up countries in the world OUR responsibility, though?
No, fixing all the messed up countries with oil is our responsibility. Aren't you paying attention?!
Mod on crack. This can't be redundant
/.!
You must be new here, welcome to
(I always metamod 'redundant' as unfair. The mods simply get it wrong too often. Too often 'redundant' means "yeah, you said it first, but this other guy replied to an earlier post so I saw his comment first. So I'll just *&$% up your karma a little here.")
Holy shit, did you just say something positive about a major in education?
Are you aware that at just about every college in the US, education is the softest subject on campus? That there are studies showing that education majors are, on average, the least sharp knives in the drawer (lowest average SAT/GRE scores)?
We don't need any more education majors unless they are going to stop giving those degrees away like they are free candy.
And worse yet, sometimes they edit out things that aren't offensive at all.
Damn straight. I guess I won't be shopping at Wal Mart after all. I guess I'll have to continue paying $0.22 per DRM-free song through eMusic.
(Yeah, I know, 99+% of the indie music there sucks, but some of it is really good, and I don't feel ripped off when I only paid a quarter for a song that sucks)
Oh brother. So when the GOP has a majority, the Democrats cry that they don't have any power to stop anything.
I think you need to take civics again. The Democratic majority in congress is very slight. They cannot override a presidential veto. It would take a bunch of Republicans to side with the Democrats to do that, and that simply isn't going to happen for a variety of reasons. In short, the Democrats are unable to pass new laws that Bush disagrees with. They can allow existing laws with sunset provisions to lapse, but they can't erect new laws. Bush worked very hard to consolidate and solidify power in the executive branch. It takes new legislation to undo that, and the president has to sign off on that new legislation.
A great example of this is Bush abusing his lame duck position to finance the surge in Iraq. Bush doesn't have to impress anybody, he isn't running again. The democrats had two choices: finance the war without a withdrawal timeline and get a black eye for not delivering on their election promises, or don't finance the surge and get a REALLY BIG BLACK EYE from public sympathy for millions Katrina victims and minimum wage workers. What the hell were they supposed to do??
Despite the fact that there was a clear national mandate from the people for a speedy resolution to the situation in Iraq, Bush could comfortably ignore it.
People have now seen Democrats "in action", the Congress has a lower approval rating even than Bush, and that is not unimportant going into a presidential election year.
I think people believe they have seen that, but in fact they have not. What they have seen is a political gridlock. It is better than what we had before, but it isn't good.
I'm afraid I fundamentally disagree. I'm not a hardcore gamer, but a difference of 25% is easily noticeable to me. In the base case between these two processors, the performance difference between the two on that benchmark is 36%. That's a difference between 25fps and 34fps - and that should be noticeable even to the casual observer.
However if we start playing headroom and overclocking games, the Core 2 will overclock reliably further than the X2. It will manage to reach your 41% threshold of noticeability (which, again, I disagree with).
I really wonder about your CMOS course if you don't know that higher clock speeds = more heat and more heat = shorter lifetime. Dig the articles up yourselves, but there are numerous known issues with tiny circuits and heat from the chemical (reactions go faster at higher temp) to the physical (greater metal fatigue from larger temperature swings).
Right now on any web site, you can order a X2 CPU with full dedicated L2 cache per core for around $70. The cheapest Core 2 Duo is the E4300 at $150.
Newegg has the E4500 for $146. That comes with 2MB of shared L2 cache, which is twice the combined cache of the Brisbane. In a single-threaded game this means that most of the L2 is going to be used by one processor for the game giving the CPU access to almost 4x as much. Is the shared cache a problem?
That has a bottlenecked 800Mhz FSB, not a fancy 2.0Ghz hypertransport bus like the X2.
Let me start by saying that a dedicated cpu memory controller plus high-speed chip-to-chip interconnect is the way to go. Having said that, this comparison always annoys the hell out of me for a couple reasons:
1) FSB is wider than hypertransport.
2) Hypertransport data must be packetized
The fact that 800 < 2000 does not mean FSB < HT. There are other reasons, this one is naive and wrong.
What's the lesson?
The lesson is your friend should have overclocked his E6600 to 3.0GHz so that we have a fair comparison. Your anecdotal evidence aside, even if we jump the X2 3200+ EE benchmarks by 26% (assuming a linear increase in performance, which doesn't generally happen) the E6600 is still outperforming your machine handily: see here.
I hate to inform you, but there isn't a single test that can measure up to the 180+ range.
I have great news for you, you get to raise your intelligence just a little bit today! You're wrong! Now you know a single test (like Stanford-Binet which measured Marilyn vos Savant with an IQ of 228) can measure up to the 180+ range and beyond.
Are you trolling? Sure seems like it to me.
No, I'm stating some inconvenient truths.
Intel demanded that people not carry or display AMD products, or they'd refuse to ship product they already purchased. That is pretty clearly evil.
It's an alleged evil. Since the only major Intel-only brand in the US was Dell, I don't find it a particularly compelling case of evil. In fact it is a pretty short walk from saying Intel was manipulating Dell to saying Dell was manipulating Intel (hey Intel, I hear AMD has some pretty nice procs, sure is hard to turn those down, unless maybe we got a big discount on our next batch of cpus).
Intel doesn't have to buy AMD's IP. If AMD goes belly up, then Intel will have an unchallenged monopoly, and no one has suggested trying to compete with them.
AMD and Intel are fighting it out right now. The margins for each company are so low and the cost of entry so high that nobody else WANTS to jump into that alley fight. If AMD goes belly up, the cost of entry (buying AMD IP) gets a whole lot cheaper. If Intel jumps its gross margins, the potential returns of entering the market get a whole lot larger. "Unchallenged Monopoly" is just sabre rattling. It isn't going to happen.
Barcelona is late, and Intel does have a better manufacturing process. No one is contesting either of these points, but cheap AMD processors are reaching the 3 GHz barrier, so only trolls insist that AMD will never hit that mark.
Of course that is a strawman, as I never said nor implied AMD will never hit that mark. It's fairly certain in the market that AMD is having yield problems due to leakage on their 65nm parts. They are delayed while they get that under control. It also explains why initial Barcelona ships will be binned at 2GHz and only to key customers. AMD will have at most 8 weeks to get Barcelona penetration going before Intel starts shipping its 3.2GHz 45nm "Penryn."