[Pc_Support] Are "Core Duo" and "Dual Core" synonymous terms? <EOM>

[Bryan J. Smith]

Ozzfest wrote:
> I recently saw some benchmarks for the new quad cores from Intel.
> For the first time in a long time, Intel has something that can smoke
> AMD on performance.

Should probably clarify that as "CPU-bound performance."
Intel still doesn't have AMD on "I/O-bound performance."
But for anything sort of large database/file servers, Intel now wins.

> AMD will always smoke Intel on price...

Not true!  Intel has AMD beat 12-18 months on fab technology.  Now
that NetBurst/P4 is _dead_ and Intel has its first _real_ re-design of
IA-32 in over a decade, Intel is signficantly smaller than AMD, with
better yields.

That translates directly into _lower_cost_, at least on Intel's end v. AMD.

Back in the original NetBurst/P4 v. x86-64/Hammer days, it didn't
matter how much of a lead Intel had, AMD was smaller, cooler and way,
way faster per MHz than Intel.

> I'll post the URL to the benchmarks if anyone is interested
> (I don't have it handy right now).

There's tons out there on how Intel bests AMD.  Although some of the
benchmarks aren't good at showing price v. price, but more MHz v. MHz.

Right now Intel costs a bit more MHz because Intel charges it.  If
Intel actually charged equivalent for what AMD costs, there would be
no contest.  But Intel's gotta feed all that advertising and Tier-1 PC
OEM R&D, so they offset it by charging more.

But even then, Intel now at least "just as good" in the bang-for-the-buck.

About the only place Intel slacks off is in the portables.  Turion x2
seems to "hold its ground" versus whatever Intel is doing to the
Core/Core2 when it comes to mobile.  I think it's the L2 cache size --
Turion x2 doesn't need much of a large L2 cache (thanx to its 2x128KB
L1), whereas Core/Core2 Duo still wants 2x4MB of L2 for good
performance.