[Pc_Support] Intel's back! Core chucks Netburst, gold'ole PPro updated ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

>From the looks of it, Intel's Core 2 Duo processor due to arrive
later in the month (at least in Tier-1 PC systems, retail boxes will
be later), is the new desktop champion.  Although many will debate
back and forth who is more efficient MHz for MHz -- and one can argue
the ALU of AMD and Intel are "on-par" with each other at the same
speed.  This is clearly the result of Intel chucking the highly
inefficient NetBurst architecture and going back to the original i686
design -- only with a full redesign at the processor-level.

Some benchmarks are skewed however, so one needs to be careful.  Most
synthetic and clearly memory benchmarks are _not_ actual. 
Furthermore, there is still the precision issue of Intel's SSE versus
AMD's leveraging its full FPU for SSE.  But for the most part, the
"real-world" benchmarks don't lie -- from using the ALU for desktop
operations to compiles down to the overall performance for any
entertainment title out there, it's very likely Intel will take the
price/performance crown by month's end when the Core 2 Duo makes its
general availability debut.

The big difference, in Intel's favor, is that Intel is launching
units with speeds up to 2.93MHz/4MB-L2, with even 2.4GHz/4MB-L2 Core
2 Duo units being very affordable against the estimated price drop of
the AMD Athlon x2 of only 2.0MHz/1MB-L2.  To make matters worse for
AMD -- the size reduction of the core versus the P4 means more yields
for the same wafer real-estate.  It was easier for AMD being 12-18
months behind Intel in packaging when the P4/Netburst was easily 50%
larger than the Athlon/Hammer.  But now that Intel is just as
"proportionally small" transistor-wise, while already being at 65nm
and almost a full 18 months ahead in packaging, AMD is in even more
trouble on the desktop without a redesign.

But on the server front, AMD still has a clear advantage in I/O. 
Although a number of articles are coming out on the new Woodcrest and
other LGA-771 processor with dual-FSBs -- from the I/O MMU and full
x86-64 instruction set -- I/O still does not scale, especially not
beyond 2 processors.  AMD will have the lead for several years to
come -- especially at 4+GB with the significant difference in I/O
control and "safe" memory mapping.  Woodcrest is going to make a nice
cut into Opteron's marketshare for sub-4GB web and other Internet
servers, but AMD is still hard to beat for scalable database and file
services.  As such, this will continue to off-set AMD worsening thin
margins on the desktop versus the Core, so AMD is not going anywhere
yet.

But for 2GB or under desktop and server systems, Intel Core 2 Duo on
the LGA-775 platform is definitely looking far more advantageous than
AMD.  And that's not likely to change before 2008, which is probably
the earliest entry-point for any new AMD design.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2795
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/07/14/core2_duo_knocks_out_athlon_64/


-- 
Bryan J. Smith            Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org             http://thebs413.blogspot.com
-----------------------------------------------------------
Americans don't get upset because citizens in some foreign
nations can burn the American flag -- Americans get upset
because citizens in those same nations can't burn their own