Intel has already announced major price cuts for the Fall. I can't see how this does anything other than hurt Intel and current sales. For instance, I'm sure I'm not the only one that sees that and goes... hmm, I might have considered a new Intel CPU, but the prices are dropping significantly in a couple of months. And then there's the AMD roll out at the same time, maybe I'll wait and see what that brings to the table.
that article happens to state that 1) only the 3800 is an EE chip. 2) they're running on one of the most power hungry motherboard chipsets made for AMD: the nVidia 590 SLI 3) only the X2 5000+ is a 65 nm CPU
So basically, let's stack the deck as much as possible against AMD in this test without showing a best case scenario, while postulating that they're showing a "worst-case scenario" with a "bad E6300 sample".
I like Anandtech usually, but this article could almost have been sponsored by Intel and is far from Anand's usual quality and attention to detail. It almost reads like a Tom's Hardware piece. Lines like the below from the Conclusion just cement that feeling. So equal prices and equal performance? (Remember, AMD's tech is 3 years old...) Oh, and AMD is faster in "outlier cases". Intel should have totally rocked these tests. That they don't indicate something else. Lastly, let's note that Intel has already stated a large price cut for the fall, around when AMD is set to ship. I wonder if they got hold of a pre-prod Barcelona or two and had to change their undershorts?
With the latest round of price cuts AMD is far more competitive than at any other point since the release of Intel's Core 2 processors. Unfortunately for AMD, this means that at best, it can offer performance close to that of Intel's Core 2 processors at similar prices.
Overall, the performance advantage still goes to Intel's Core 2 lineup but there are a few situations where the performance between the two families is close enough to be considered a tie. There are also the outlier cases where the Athlon 64 X2 actually ends up faster than the Core 2, but we suspect that they are more isolated incidents than indications of the norm.
It's not purely about FSB, although that is a major short coming for multi-core designs. Intel won't radically improve their performance by going with a hypertransport design, but they'll improve their scalability (the quads are already beyond the maximum FSB - see the Xeon benchmarks for Mac Pros that's available). The 10 year old design refers to their falling back to the P-III core and then adding in a bunch of cache logic, fab processes and other more minor tweaks to improve that core's performance to what it is today in the C2D. The next major improvement for Intel's performance scalability is with Nehamal (I think it is) when they're supposed to finally implement a HTT type solution for memory communication, although I was unclear whether it also addresses multi-CPU/core communication. I would think it would, as anything less would be moronic.
AMD has other items up its sleeve. Not all are pure performance improvements, but interesting things like hardware virtualization. This will become more improtant in the future, and may even filter down into the consumer space. Wouldn't it be great for every app to essentially have its own virtual world? That would indicate a much lower potential for harm inherent to the OS architecture. (Note, odds are MS won't go this way because it breaks forced dependencies on the OS, but it certainly opens up new worlds for others)
Intel can't copy AMD's advances. They'd have to license some tech to do so, and that's not very likely (I believe HTT for instance belongs to AMD). Intel's current big performance leap occurred because they dumped P4 and followed AMD's approach. In any case, Intel did have a lot of smart people, but with the 10,000 personnel layoffs, how many of those smart peopel won't look for better jobs elsewhere? (Layoffs don't exactly inspire confidence for a company's future) Of course, AMD announced they may have to do the same after Q1's results.
pre-production runs have been shipped. I'm sure we'll be starting to see some numbers sometime soon, but I feel safe in saying that AMD's increased optimism about Barcelona's performance is based on these first chips performance.
Seriously though, Intel's got the performance lead for now, but AMD's got the better tech and their release schedule "lags" Intel's a little. So Intel got the "jump" on AMD release cycle wise, and now you've got the situation where Intel has a brand spanking new product out that beats AMD's old offering by about 10-20%, at best at stock speeds.
I personally am waiting for AMD's release and benchmarks before making a final decision, but the fact that I'm doing so already says which way I'm leaning. I should also mention I recently bought both a C2D and an X2 system, so I'm not exactly a fanboi in either direction. The C2D is in a laptop and rocks. The X2 is in a desktop and OC'd and for the money an Intel C2D system couldn't touch it. I had 2GB of DDR RAM sitting on my desk, so that's essentially free and a $40 high end motherboard didn't hurt things either.
And then add in the power savings, among other things. I actually expect Barcelona to have an even larger gain on multi-threaded applications, it's single-threaded apps that will have the smallest gain or be roughly even.
I'm seriously wanting to see what video editing and rendering performance numbers will be between the two. Clovertowns will have inherent cache flushes, as there are 2 independent caches each shared by 2 cores that need to stay in sync. Barcelona has a shared L3 cache among all 4 cores and independent L2 caches.
Note that AMD has 3GHz Opterons out now. The frequency advantage at the moment is slim to non-existant in shipped CPUs.
In any case, what matters is what Barcelona will ship at, which has not yet been specified. In any case, if Barcelona lives up to AMD's stated expectations on performance, it will be a killer CPU. Your statement about Intel's potential improvement leaps are spot on, and fall into Inforworld's Tom Yager's statements about Intel which are essentially phrased as "Core 2 is Intel's last hurrah". Why? Because Intel is essentially running on 10 year old technology and is rushing to catch up, despite some of the nifty architectural things they did recently to speed up C2D (integrated L2 cache for example).
I also believe that Intel is now following AMD's lead by leaving extra headroom for those that prefer to OC their CPUs and concentrating more on TDP and stability. I've noticed that Intel's chips since P4 are certainly more stable, while my rather severely OC'd AMD CPU occassionally (twice this year) shuts down, most likely due to heat or a RAM instability (since the shutdowns happen during low usage periods at night, I'll bet the 20% OC'd RAM is probably to blame).
Basically, right now Intel owns the crown, but they own it while comparing to AMD's last gen CPUs which are 3+ years old.
Which I have anyways, and is useful for other things like editing multi-media, unlike that high end DX10 card. Besides, I have a reasonably high-end DX9 card.
If you're going to go as far as to print to PDF (or PostScript which will also fix the issue) why bother with MS apps at all? That's the approach I'm taking.:)
And what's even more scary is that I just found a stack of Dragon magazines in a box from the roughly 1981-1985 or so time period, along with the first 5 Chainmail books. It's amazing what happens when parents move.:)
Good lord, you must be kidding! The one thing I do fault MS for, and the reason I used to avoid their systems if at all possible and now do again is precisely because they don't know the first thing about fonts and typesetting.
When a formatted multi-page document changes layout merely because you print to a different printer, even within the same brand (HP III to HP II for instance) it indicates serious problems with how you're handling fonts and layouts. Yes a pure text document will change layout under certain circumstances under windows with an application that handles fonts, like, say, Word.
This is extremely annoying when you're creating a document for publishing on blue-line paper.
Sole source contracts are at times exactly what is needed. For instance, to buy a set of hardware that will run a specific program that will perform a certain task or to build a specific item with a specific process for R&D testing.
However, for general desktop/computer resources/services, no such driving requirements exist, and sole source should be a red flag.
They already do. The cost of OEM windows is pretty darn low and doesn't even register with the masses because it's "included" in the cost of almost any PC you can buy.
I believe you can fix that by with the Tab Mix Plus plugin. There's a slew of options that become available regarding tabs when the TabMixPlus Session manager is enabled (don't go with FF 2.0's session manager, I have yet to figure out how to make it work, Use Tab Mix Plus's instead).
I'm going to try removing a couple of extensions and see if that improves anything, including turning off the spell checker. I have a secondary system with a bare FF 2.0 installation on it, so I'll add extensions one by one until I find those that cause the sluggishness. I think I'll have dual installations, one with all my dev tools, and one for browsing. With 1.5 the full set caused some slowdowns, but those are due to known extension issues.
Yes, I'm aware it's there now. The problem existed in the first months after the takeover, when they neglected to place that information on the website, and no one seemed to know anything. All they said was visit the designated web page, which was an ActiveX based applet.
Any web developer who does not know about Firefox is stupid or lazy. I'd say they are both, and incompetent to boot.
In any event, there is no need to support Firefox, Safari, IE or any browser at all. There is only a need to code to W3C standards, not to browser-specific hacks. IE's extensions to standard HTML were made specifically to Embrace, Extend, then Extinguish the free internet. Don't contribute to the trap. And that is truly the heart of the matter. Everyone should be coding to W3C standards, and if a browser doesn't support it, the browser manufacturer should fix it. This failed to occur in the past because MS effectively killed all competing browsers. The rise of Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's mac sales w/ Safari are both contributing heavily to a fundamental shift in the web from MS's preferred world view back to W3C's world view.
I just hope that Thunderbird 2.0.0 is good, because Firefox 2.0.0 wasn't and still isn't. The 1.5.x range is much better. So I'm not the only one that noticed that FF 2.x seems significantly slower than FF 1.5.x? It appears that something was broken in the JS engine, perhaps that stupid spell checker? I can literally out type it when posting to/.:)
I use IMAP and Thunderbird - and so do all my customers. POP3 is just way too insecure, Outlook is sucky and Thunderbird is the perfect solution. Outlook sucks rocks yes, but Thunderbird 1.5 wasn't a shining beacon either. There's several UI decisions that just suck rocks in Thunderbird (search kinda blows, although worlds better than Outlook). Mac's Mail is better in some ways, but it's not the panacea I'm looking for either. I still feel like I'm in circa 1992 with Eudora. Mail clients have essentially stagnated since then with very little improvement from a user perspective. Maybe TB 2.0 will fix that. I'll be looking forward to trying it out.
POP3 is perfectly secure in SSL mode. IMAP is supposed to add some features, but is not inherently more secure than POP3.
Maybe think before you write such generalising statements. As should you.
How many people, aside from the slashdot crowd, actually use POP3/SMTP clients anymore (at home, not work)? Isn't some ridiculous amount like 90% using gmail/hotmail/yahoo mail/aol mail/etc? Only everyone that has Comcast, RoadRunner, AOL, AT&T, or Verizon ISPs. They may also use the webmail listings, but every single one of those ISPs has POP/IMAP/SMTP clients, even if they are installed/configured by a script.
And they are extremely unfriendly to the Mac/*nix crowd. My current home ISP recently converted to TW's RoadRunner. Finding out what the settings were for mail took a month, mainly because I don't think they had them on their site. They wanted you to run an ActiveX script via IE. Hard to do on my Linux and Mac boxes.:)
The only things that have come back to me are idiot users that don't know what a forged header is. That would be about 99% of the current internet users....
I think that more companies, MS Especially, because of their large market share should look at their web browsers from an application platform standpoint, ant try to do what they can to improve the usability for those designing the web sites, instead of focusing on the person browsing the web. What? And kill their monopoly?
That's another issue. I don't mind if you can opt in/out for a spam filtering service. It would certainly help people like my parents.
I agree with the improved client, but as long as MS Outlook (express) is the target (and yes, that includes Thunderbird) I'm not very hopeful about email. I also very much agree with secure channels, and that email alone makes mail trusted, as how could they encrypt if they didn't have a key. I've actually thought about something along this line for a while, but it's a tedious problem to solve. It can be solved, but with email clients being essentially free, there's little to no motivation to solve it.
As for spam filtering - reread what I wrote before you sling ****'s.
Maybe I'm not seeing your irony (It was quite late and the 1040 really sucks).
iPhoto for instance -> JPG in, JPG out. In some/many cases, it's the same JPG. I'm confused.
iMovie -> DV/MPEG2/etc in, MPEG2 out (for final product) iMovie is an assembler with cropping capabilities. I haven't used any deeper than that, but I fail to see how that creates anything similar to the scenario you posted.
GarageBand -> same basic functionality as iMovie from what little I've played with it, it assembles multiple tracks and creates a composite in a standard easily usable output format.
I think I know what you're trying to say, but your analogies are falling short because the differences are too great. Perhaps a better comparison would have been Pages or Keynote, except IIRC both can produce PDFs which again are multi-product compatible.
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Intel has already announced major price cuts for the Fall. I can't see how this does anything other than hurt Intel and current sales. For instance, I'm sure I'm not the only one that sees that and goes... hmm, I might have considered a new Intel CPU, but the prices are dropping significantly in a couple of months. And then there's the AMD roll out at the same time, maybe I'll wait and see what that brings to the table.
It's going to be very very interesting.
That would explain the current state of games.
1) only the 3800 is an EE chip.
2) they're running on one of the most power hungry motherboard chipsets made for AMD: the nVidia 590 SLI
3) only the X2 5000+ is a 65 nm CPU
So basically, let's stack the deck as much as possible against AMD in this test without showing a best case scenario, while postulating that they're showing a "worst-case scenario" with a "bad E6300 sample".
I like Anandtech usually, but this article could almost have been sponsored by Intel and is far from Anand's usual quality and attention to detail. It almost reads like a Tom's Hardware piece. Lines like the below from the Conclusion just cement that feeling. So equal prices and equal performance? (Remember, AMD's tech is 3 years old...) Oh, and AMD is faster in "outlier cases". Intel should have totally rocked these tests. That they don't indicate something else. Lastly, let's note that Intel has already stated a large price cut for the fall, around when AMD is set to ship. I wonder if they got hold of a pre-prod Barcelona or two and had to change their undershorts? With the latest round of price cuts AMD is far more competitive than at any other point since the release of Intel's Core 2 processors. Unfortunately for AMD, this means that at best, it can offer performance close to that of Intel's Core 2 processors at similar prices.
Overall, the performance advantage still goes to Intel's Core 2 lineup but there are a few situations where the performance between the two families is close enough to be considered a tie. There are also the outlier cases where the Athlon 64 X2 actually ends up faster than the Core 2, but we suspect that they are more isolated incidents than indications of the norm.
It's not purely about FSB, although that is a major short coming for multi-core designs. Intel won't radically improve their performance by going with a hypertransport design, but they'll improve their scalability (the quads are already beyond the maximum FSB - see the Xeon benchmarks for Mac Pros that's available). The 10 year old design refers to their falling back to the P-III core and then adding in a bunch of cache logic, fab processes and other more minor tweaks to improve that core's performance to what it is today in the C2D. The next major improvement for Intel's performance scalability is with Nehamal (I think it is) when they're supposed to finally implement a HTT type solution for memory communication, although I was unclear whether it also addresses multi-CPU/core communication. I would think it would, as anything less would be moronic.
AMD has other items up its sleeve. Not all are pure performance improvements, but interesting things like hardware virtualization. This will become more improtant in the future, and may even filter down into the consumer space. Wouldn't it be great for every app to essentially have its own virtual world? That would indicate a much lower potential for harm inherent to the OS architecture. (Note, odds are MS won't go this way because it breaks forced dependencies on the OS, but it certainly opens up new worlds for others)
Intel can't copy AMD's advances. They'd have to license some tech to do so, and that's not very likely (I believe HTT for instance belongs to AMD). Intel's current big performance leap occurred because they dumped P4 and followed AMD's approach. In any case, Intel did have a lot of smart people, but with the 10,000 personnel layoffs, how many of those smart peopel won't look for better jobs elsewhere? (Layoffs don't exactly inspire confidence for a company's future) Of course, AMD announced they may have to do the same after Q1's results.
pre-production runs have been shipped. I'm sure we'll be starting to see some numbers sometime soon, but I feel safe in saying that AMD's increased optimism about Barcelona's performance is based on these first chips performance.
Well, blame Intel. ;)
Seriously though, Intel's got the performance lead for now, but AMD's got the better tech and their release schedule "lags" Intel's a little. So Intel got the "jump" on AMD release cycle wise, and now you've got the situation where Intel has a brand spanking new product out that beats AMD's old offering by about 10-20%, at best at stock speeds.
I personally am waiting for AMD's release and benchmarks before making a final decision, but the fact that I'm doing so already says which way I'm leaning. I should also mention I recently bought both a C2D and an X2 system, so I'm not exactly a fanboi in either direction. The C2D is in a laptop and rocks. The X2 is in a desktop and OC'd and for the money an Intel C2D system couldn't touch it. I had 2GB of DDR RAM sitting on my desk, so that's essentially free and a $40 high end motherboard didn't hurt things either.
So AMD will win outright then?
Seriously, Intel's got nothing on AMD in performance per watt.
And then add in the power savings, among other things. I actually expect Barcelona to have an even larger gain on multi-threaded applications, it's single-threaded apps that will have the smallest gain or be roughly even.
I'm seriously wanting to see what video editing and rendering performance numbers will be between the two. Clovertowns will have inherent cache flushes, as there are 2 independent caches each shared by 2 cores that need to stay in sync. Barcelona has a shared L3 cache among all 4 cores and independent L2 caches.
Note that AMD has 3GHz Opterons out now. The frequency advantage at the moment is slim to non-existant in shipped CPUs.
In any case, what matters is what Barcelona will ship at, which has not yet been specified. In any case, if Barcelona lives up to AMD's stated expectations on performance, it will be a killer CPU. Your statement about Intel's potential improvement leaps are spot on, and fall into Inforworld's Tom Yager's statements about Intel which are essentially phrased as "Core 2 is Intel's last hurrah". Why? Because Intel is essentially running on 10 year old technology and is rushing to catch up, despite some of the nifty architectural things they did recently to speed up C2D (integrated L2 cache for example).
I also believe that Intel is now following AMD's lead by leaving extra headroom for those that prefer to OC their CPUs and concentrating more on TDP and stability. I've noticed that Intel's chips since P4 are certainly more stable, while my rather severely OC'd AMD CPU occassionally (twice this year) shuts down, most likely due to heat or a RAM instability (since the shutdowns happen during low usage periods at night, I'll bet the 20% OC'd RAM is probably to blame).
Basically, right now Intel owns the crown, but they own it while comparing to AMD's last gen CPUs which are 3+ years old.
Which I have anyways, and is useful for other things like editing multi-media, unlike that high end DX10 card. Besides, I have a reasonably high-end DX9 card.
If you're going to go as far as to print to PDF (or PostScript which will also fix the issue) why bother with MS apps at all? That's the approach I'm taking. :)
And what's even more scary is that I just found a stack of Dragon magazines in a box from the roughly 1981-1985 or so time period, along with the first 5 Chainmail books. It's amazing what happens when parents move. :)
Good lord, you must be kidding! The one thing I do fault MS for, and the reason I used to avoid their systems if at all possible and now do again is precisely because they don't know the first thing about fonts and typesetting.
When a formatted multi-page document changes layout merely because you print to a different printer, even within the same brand (HP III to HP II for instance) it indicates serious problems with how you're handling fonts and layouts. Yes a pure text document will change layout under certain circumstances under windows with an application that handles fonts, like, say, Word.
This is extremely annoying when you're creating a document for publishing on blue-line paper.
Sole source contracts are at times exactly what is needed. For instance, to buy a set of hardware that will run a specific program that will perform a certain task or to build a specific item with a specific process for R&D testing.
However, for general desktop/computer resources/services, no such driving requirements exist, and sole source should be a red flag.
They already do. The cost of OEM windows is pretty darn low and doesn't even register with the masses because it's "included" in the cost of almost any PC you can buy.
I believe you can fix that by with the Tab Mix Plus plugin. There's a slew of options that become available regarding tabs when the TabMixPlus Session manager is enabled (don't go with FF 2.0's session manager, I have yet to figure out how to make it work, Use Tab Mix Plus's instead).
I'm going to try removing a couple of extensions and see if that improves anything, including turning off the spell checker. I have a secondary system with a bare FF 2.0 installation on it, so I'll add extensions one by one until I find those that cause the sluggishness. I think I'll have dual installations, one with all my dev tools, and one for browsing. With 1.5 the full set caused some slowdowns, but those are due to known extension issues.
Yes, I'm aware it's there now. The problem existed in the first months after the takeover, when they neglected to place that information on the website, and no one seemed to know anything. All they said was visit the designated web page, which was an ActiveX based applet.
POP3 is perfectly secure in SSL mode. IMAP is supposed to add some features, but is not inherently more secure than POP3. Maybe think before you write such generalising statements. As should you.
And they are extremely unfriendly to the Mac/*nix crowd. My current home ISP recently converted to TW's RoadRunner. Finding out what the settings were for mail took a month, mainly because I don't think they had them on their site. They wanted you to run an ActiveX script via IE. Hard to do on my Linux and Mac boxes.
That's another issue. I don't mind if you can opt in/out for a spam filtering service. It would certainly help people like my parents.
I agree with the improved client, but as long as MS Outlook (express) is the target (and yes, that includes Thunderbird) I'm not very hopeful about email. I also very much agree with secure channels, and that email alone makes mail trusted, as how could they encrypt if they didn't have a key. I've actually thought about something along this line for a while, but it's a tedious problem to solve. It can be solved, but with email clients being essentially free, there's little to no motivation to solve it.
As for spam filtering - reread what I wrote before you sling ****'s.
Maybe I'm not seeing your irony (It was quite late and the 1040 really sucks).
iPhoto for instance -> JPG in, JPG out. In some/many cases, it's the same JPG. I'm confused.
iMovie -> DV/MPEG2/etc in, MPEG2 out (for final product) iMovie is an assembler with cropping capabilities. I haven't used any deeper than that, but I fail to see how that creates anything similar to the scenario you posted.
GarageBand -> same basic functionality as iMovie from what little I've played with it, it assembles multiple tracks and creates a composite in a standard easily usable output format.
I think I know what you're trying to say, but your analogies are falling short because the differences are too great. Perhaps a better comparison would have been Pages or Keynote, except IIRC both can produce PDFs which again are multi-product compatible.