EPTIn light of recent developments I questioned whether I should post this or not. But then I realized that I'm awesome and I'm going to post it. This time though I decided I would give my IRL self some credit and tried to make it as PLAIN AS POSSIBLE as to who wrote it. Also, for reference. I put it up at my own personal web space provided by my school. You'll notice it does not have this preface and was uploaded PRIOR to me posting this here. There may be discrepancies as I tend to get confused when working with 2 walls of texts and trying to format them with different tags. Enjoy.
http://www.csupomona.edu/~cmung/Articles/AMDvsIntel2.html
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http://www.csupomona.edu/~cmung/Articles/AMDvsIntel2.html
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For those of you who want to know my previous post to try and prove my innocence was not trustworthy, so my status as a FAILURE is open-ended.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
BY CHRISTOPHER UNG
Blackened roar, massive roar, fills the crumbling sky
Shattered goal fills his soul with a ruthless cry
I wrote a a couple months ago that Intel’s upcoming Clarkdale processor would be Thor’s mighty hammer coming down on AMD’s Cinderella shoes. Most of my deductions were based on hearsay and rumors. Well, today reviews of the new Clarkdale are making front page of any tech blog worth its weight in bandwidth. The clock has struck twelve, will AMD find a fairy tale ending?
Now that the Clarkdales are official, let’s see their lineup.
![[image loading]](http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/400/64537101.png)
An unexpected surprise, and not the pleasant kind. We see that the i5 line, while impressive in its own right, is priced into quad territory – a dual core no man’s land. For $196 retail we enter what I would describe as professional level pricing, at this price you can easily grab an i5-750, which presents possibly the best value per dollar in the CPU market right now, or the newly revised Phenom II 955 BE C3 stepping, which has been shown to overclock to upwards of 4GHz with just a tick of the multiplier. Don’t forget this is their mid-range i5 dual we are talking about here. What market could Intel possibly seek to grab with a dual core here? Both the i5-750 and the Phenom II 955 handle even the most intensive games with relative ease, and both can overclock to 4GHz+. Perhaps Intel is seeking to carve out a dual core niche as it did with its previous E8600 or perhaps it is simply preparing for the projected pricing wars ahead.
What is most interesting is the i3 lineup. The blue-boxed, blue-collar hero really does bring the heat, figuratively speaking of course. With the top-end i3 zooming along at just over 3GHz, and more importantly a starting price of $113 we begin to see AMD’s product losing traction. We have an Athlon II X4 alternative, a Phenom II X3 killer, and it may even be able to cut into weaker Phenom II X4 territory. How can a lowly dual core usurp the hierarchy of the multi-core elite?
Hyper-Threading.
Up until now Hyper-Threading was used mostly as a marketing gimmick. Today, for most daily and even moderate to heavy gaming use, dual cores are just starting to be pushed to their limits so it’s easy to see why introducing Hyper-Threading in the Pentium 4 era showed little to no improvements. Using Hyper-Threading on a dual core processor, today, to enable four virtual threads, effectively adding two additional processors, has shown to have real world applications in traditionally quad core dominated benchmarks. From 3D rendering to video encoding, the i3 540 keeps up, and rarely bests, Intel’s famous Q6600 while its higher clocked i5 siblings compete with the Q9400.
Another unexpected surprise of the unpleasant variety that marks Clarkdales’ christening is its gaming performance. With all its improvements and new technology it’s still, clock for clock, not that much of an improvement and in some cases shows no improvement at all over the steadfast E8000 Wolfdales. It seems no matter how hard Intel tries it simply cannot outdo its Core2 line with the potency it needs to. Socket 775 owners should sleep easy knowing that though they are outdated, they are not yet obsolete. The E8500 holds the dual core front and the Q9550 holds for the Core2Quads. That doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.
What does all this mean?
Crack of dawn, all is gone except the will to be
Now they see what will be, blinded eyes to see
AMD was the Cinderella story, the underdog, the one everyone loved to root for against the big, bad Intel. However, given the introduction of Clarkdale, AMD is nowhere near the value per dollar Intel is right now. Sure, AMD still has good processors in the Phenom II 550 BE and Athlon II 620 but I can’t see anywhere in the $120 to $160 range where an AMD would be a better choice over Clarkdale. Of course, there are always exceptions, but for the majority of mainstream users, the choice is clear.
All is not lost. AMD still remains a promising long-term cost-effective solution. AM3 will live to the introduction of the fabled Bulldozer, and possibly beyond. That means owners of AM3 motherboards can upgrade to 6 cores and possibly 8 cores without changing sockets while the Intel roadmap currently shows Socket 1156 as essentially dead as it is hitting the glass ceiling imposed by Socket 1366. Even for the high-end Socket 1366, all 2010 promises so far is a $999 hexacore, the i7 980X.
What’s AMD’s next move?
I’ll answer it this time. It needs to hit back and it needs to hit hard. There are no new quad core introductions for AMD, at least until Bulldozer comes out in 2011, which leaves 2010 riding on the success of the hexacore, Thuban. Thuban is essentially built on the current Phenom II 45nm architecture, just with two additional cores. That in itself really spells disaster when pitting it against the 32nm Intel i7 980X. However, it also provides a silver lining in the cloud. If Thuban is based on a tried and true architecture, yields should be higher, and manufacturing costs should be lower than Intel’s 32nm counterpart. If AMD is able to achieve this, retail prices should be much lower than Intel’s hexacore. This, coupled with much more affordable high-end motherboards, shows promise to keep the initial price of an AMD Thuban system lower than the stratospheric i7 980X.
Though Intel seems to be succeeding in stealing market segment from AMD the one problem I see with its strategy is that AMD has the capacity to manufacture its processors at very, very low cost. AMD is currently producing single socket processors that are backwards compatible: AM3 / AM2+; and two architectures: Deneb, Propos. Intel on the other hand is producing processors for three sockets: 775, 1156, 1366; and three architectures: Core, Nehalem, and Westmere. However, Westmere is just a 32nm shrink of the 45nm Core architecture and may prove to be cheaper in the long run.
Intel just continues to bury AMD in terms of performance and each time AMD stick one foot out the grave another wave just pushes it down. Even if Bulldozer is a huge success, it’ll have to deal with Intel’s 22nm Sandy Bridge.
For whom the bell tolls
Time marches on
For whom the bell tolls
