Intel Core 2 Duo Vs. AMD AM2

ThinSkin writes, "ExtremeTech has an extensive performance roundup across the entire line of Intel Core 2 Duo and AMD AM2 CPUs, from the cheap to the ultra-high end. Both companies bring five processors to the table, ranging from $152 to $1,075, with the mid-range CPUs boasting the best in price/performance. From the article: 'It's clear that Intel's Core 2 Duo lineup offers superior performance across the product line when compared with AMD's Athlon 64. In some applications, even a lower-cost Core 2 Duo can outperform some of the higher-end Athlon 64s.'" The ExtremeTech article is spread over 10 ad-laden pages. You can read it all on the printer-friendly page, but you'll miss out on the pretty graphs.

A consumer win!

[jellomizer]

Ah, Competition at its finest. Although it seems right now AMD is a bit behind Intel in speed I am glad it is there. Without head to head competition with Intel and AMD Intel will probably still be pushing higher GHZ with little consideration of performance/heat and power usage. I will not be to surprised if in a year or so AMD will be faster then in a couple years Intel will be faster. As well with these to guys fighting it out the consumer wins, as the companies compete for performance and price. I would say it is best not to be in love with either Company because if this processor war is won, we the consumer will loose.

No 64-bit benchmarks

[David Jao]

I'm disappointed to see that as usual the review contains no mention of 64-bit performance. Does anyone know any place that provides 64-bit benchmarks for core 2 duo?

As much as it's done for us in the last 20 years, 32-bit x86 is not the future. Linux was AMD64-ready three years ago and Windows Vista which is just around the corner already puts more emphasis on the x86-64 platform than x86. Reviewing the 32-bit performance of core 2 duo is like reviewing Pentium processers based on 16-bit performance. Let's get some forward looking reviews instead of backward looking reviews, please!

Isn't this a bit old?

[LIGC]

Weren't there about 20 Core 2 Duo reviews/comparisons with Athlon 64 X2's on July 23 when Core 2 officially launched? We've known these results for longer than a month.

Re:Note to Slashdot...Nobody cares

[tempest69]

Processors have become a commodity. You buy as much processor performance as you need or can afford. The Intel and AMD processors are all great right now...well all except the old Intel P4 and Celeron stuff but that will be mostly gone in a few months anyway. Move along...there's no story here.

ok, I'll bite....

This is slashdot. We look at specs and drool. We crave machines with 64 gigs of ram, and a solid state hard drive in the petabyte range. If there is some way to make things blinky or shiny, someone is wondering how much longer their kids can put off braces. If someone comes out with a way to make IE 7 beta 4 load pages 3% faster, someone is going to be running tests all night long. It's news for nerds, stuff that matters. Go troll on digg or break.com and you'll have a point, but not here.

All in all I'm glad that Intel has decided to retake the lead in the price/performance war, AMD needs a new kick in the pants.

Storm

Re:A consumer win!

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

-10 Insightful
Every stinking intel/amd article has this same goddam statement. Who the hell is this insigtful to?

Re:Why even bother?

[Lehk228]

competing companies often take turns being the technological leader; rick romero reports at 11

Re:crypto work

[qbwiz]

That depends on if all the data is in cache, and if the speed of the cache increases at the same rate as the speed of the processor.

Re:No 64-bit benchmarks

[David Jao]

64bit benchmarks???!? how many 64bit applications are you running/ are there in usful production?

everyone's got the 64bit crazy Ive had 64bit technology a long time can you say risc?

This is clearly a troll post, since you denigrate the availability of 64-bit computing in your first paragraph and then contradict yourself by claiming you jumped on the 64-bit bandwagon before everyone else, but I'll squash your post anyway.

Only a windows user (or possibly a Mac user) would treat 64-bit computing as useless or unavailable. Linux has been available in 64-bit versions since the days of the DEC Alpha, or since 2003 if you count only AMD64. Almost every Linux application benefits from recompiling for AMD64 as opposed to x86, because of the increased register space, and the nature of open source guarantees availablity of such versions. Compute-intensive applications such as cryptography (ssh/scp over gigabit ethernet) and media encoding (ogg, mp3, mpeg) exhibit performance gains of over 100% with 64-bit operations owing to the quadratic nature of block multiplication.

Scientific applications such as Mathematica and Maple, which I require for my job, have been available for AMD64 almost from the beginning days of the hardware platform, and gain rather a lot from AMD64 not only in terms of CPU performance but also from the larger virtual address space.

Even if all of these things weren't true and Linux didn't exist, the fact is that Windows Vista (vaporware jokes aside) really is coming out in five months and really does spell the end of 32-bit computing for mainstream performance applications. Windows Vista isn't some half-unfinished 64/32 bit mixture like Windows 95 was a half-unfinished 32/16 bit mixture -- Vista is 64-bit through and through.

The fact that your elitist risc platforms had 64-bit addressing some 30 years ago is not relevant to this discussion. Like it or not, x86 has "won" the platform battles, and x86-64 (unlike Alpha, IA64, Sparc) is the first and only 64-bit computing platform that will be relevant for general purpose computing.

Screwed up comparison

[Jerry Coffin]

Quite a few people seem to have missed what seems to be a pretty obvious problem: the choices they've made as to what Intel processor to compare to what AMD processor just don't make sense. Look at the price table:

Intel Frequency Price AMD Frequency Price
E6300 1.83GHz $190 3800+ 2.0GHz $152
E6400 2.13GHz $230 4200+ 2.2GHz $187
E6600 2.40GHz $360 4600+ 2.4GHz $253
E6700 2.67GHz $559 5000+ 2.6GHz $346
X6800 2.93GHz $1,075 FX-62 2.8GHz $825

In every case, the Intel processor more expensive than the AMD to which they compare it. The Intel E6700 is over 60% more expensive than the AMD 5000+ they consider comparable. The Intel E6300 is not only more expensive than the AMD 3800+, but also more expensive than AMD's next step up, the 4200+.

Given their prices, the E6300 should obviously be compared to the 4200+ rather than to the 3800+. Looking at this particular pairing, rather than the nearly clean sweep for Intel, they each win some and lose some. If you simply count wins, the Intel wins more than the AMD -- but to mean much, you need to look at what they win at, not just how many different benchmarks they win. Just for example, PCMark05 goes 3:1 in favor of the E6300 -- but quite frankly, none of PCMark05 really means a thing.

Unless money is no object to you, the two lines look pretty closely matched. In video encoding and rendering tasks, Intel wins quite easily. In the ScienceMark scores, AMD wins pretty easily. Elsewhere, a lot are really too close to call based on the data provided. There are a number of cases in which each wins by less than 2%. It's impossible to say for sure without knowing things like the standard deviations on these scores, but there's a pretty fair chance they have no statistical significance at all.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:crypto work

[Wavicle]

Seems to me you have an odd comparison. You took the lowest end Core 2 Duo with the smallest L2 cache and pitted it against a high end AMD offering. And they about tied. What does this tell us?

The E6300 costs about $230. How much does the Opteron 885 cost?

Re:Why even bother?

[MrNemesis]

Many of the reviews I've seen show that the AMD systems consume significantly less power at idle than the equivalent C2D system. Whilst the C2D is pretty much undoubtedly the faster of the two arches, I'm still pretty staggered by the energy efficiency of the AMD64. As anothe poster pointed out, AMD's cherry picked ADD chips (well, the 3800 X2 ADD anyway) consume utterly tiny amounts of power, even on an appallingly stone aged 90nm lith process ;) I can't wait for AMD's 65nm to start shipping once their process is all sorted out, since 90nm SOI has worked so well for them. That said, since the ADD series are cherry picked they're expensive and hard to come by - last I heard they were of limited availability in Germany.

Since most computers I own spend 90% of their time idling away at 1-5% load, I'm sticking with my AMD's for the time being - I'm not a gamer (although I do alot of video endocoding and have been contemplating a C2D system for my main workstation) so balls to the wall performance is not my highest priority, and keeping the costs of running my PVR's down is quite important to me.

As an aside, has anyone seen any benches for a Merom chip outside of a laptop? I've been thinking abut using one of these as a new Myth frontend, but the chips are like rocking-horse poo at the moment and I'm not aware of any UK stockists.

Anyway, like I said last time - yay for competition! For the first time in years both CPU companies are releasing some pretty interesting kit. Prices for both chips are incredibly low, and given that you can grab an X2 (i.e. more than enough CPU grunt to run anything quickly, including vista, except the latest games at max settings) for less than £100 makes this a great time for customers.

Anyway, enough rambling, time to drool over more CPU specs... :D