Intel Core 2 Duo Vs. AMD AM2 197
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.
Nice, but... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Nice, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Obvious (Score:4, Funny)
The floor's construction is obviously tongue in groove.
And I'm so ashamed, I'm posting as AC. *sigh*
A consumer win! (Score:3, Insightful)
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Loose what? The hounds?
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I second that. I've been waiting for today's keynote in the hopes of the core 2 duo update...but all we got were more iPods and Disney movies. Woo! I'm about to give up the wait if nothing changes by next week...anyone got any ideas?
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Re:A consumer win! (Score:4, Insightful)
Every stinking intel/amd article has this same goddam statement. Who the hell is this insigtful to?
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Me... I was thinking by moving to a single payer, government sponsored chip manufacturer we could eliminate wasteful overhead, advertising, executive salaries, and that irritating itch to upgrade every 6 months.
You damn Libertarians need to realize the free market isn't for everything...
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Re:A consumer win! (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually when you calculate performance per dollar, it is closer than most think right now. This article is comparing a $200 Intel processor to a $150 AMD processor. When you compare the $200 AMD to the $200 Intel, not only are they neck-and-neck, but in certain benchmarks, the AMD comes out on top.
Imagine that.
Perhaps those that read articles and think for themselves will see such things. Those that only read headlines and troll won't.
Intel does have a very good processor line on their hands with the Core Duo 2. Even the AMD fans admit that. No one has said otherwise. It is the Intel fans who refused to acknowledge how far they were behind for 4 years. Now both are striving to be the top-dog. AMD claims they will be the best with the 4x4 line soon, and no doubt Intel will respond with a new line of their own.
Meanwhile performance is going up considerably, and prices down at the same time. I built my AMD 3000 system two years ago, and I can't believe what you can build now for the same price.
Re:A consumer win! (Score:4, Informative)
with DX 10 "regulating" what features can go into the cards, MS wins.
Uh, DirectX is free. Writing DirectX problems with the free DirectX SDK [microsoft.com] is also, you guessed it, free.
Microsoft doesn't profit directly from DirectX. Instead, by making Windows a better platform for game development they, shock, get more game developers on Windows.
Also note that Microsoft doesn't decide what features can and can't go into a DirectX 10 card - it sets a minimum featureset for cards that want the sticker. How horrible that a card being marketed as supporting DirectX 10 has to support DirectX 10 functions. (Remember that DirectX emulates hardware functions your videocards lack, allowing games written for it to transcend specific videocards. If the videocard doesn't support any advanced texture, lighting, and whatever else features, you really have a DirectX 10 complaint CPU.)
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That has to be the BEST description of the resulting multimedia applications developed by using Microsoft's API.
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Typos aside, have you played a game recently?
A real game. Like Half-Life 2. Oblivion. Fear. Practically every PC game you see on the shelf in a Gamestop / Best Buy / Walmart / Wherever is written for DirectX.
The few exceptions are games that don't need the graphics power (rare; even PopCap games use DirectX with the "Hardware Acceleration" option) or some mostly older ones that use a version of OpenGL (another standard video cards try to support.)
Now, unless you're saying the past 10 years of vide
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Not only have played some really good (as in well developed) games but I have also used (programmed) on DirectX and OpenGL enough to know that DirectX is a really good achievement of Microsoft. I am completely aware, for example, that DirectX > OpenGL in that it provides a complete multimedia SDK (Solution is the buzz^Wkeyword), whereas OpenGL provides only the 3D component.
I have worked also with the Linux equivalents, say SDL and Allegro and in my opinion no o
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Second microsoft maintains a stranglehold on ATI and Nvidia by being in charge of the directX featureset.
Third directX programmers tend to use microsoft editors.
Not really... (Score:2)
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Oh yeah...that's right. The billions of dollars it would require. I knew there was a catch.
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And sure, IBM's chips are popular in consoles, but that's mostly because IBM is the only major chip house that will offer to develop custom chip designs. The game console companies help fund th
Ummm... (Score:2)
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AMD's 386DX 40 Mhz pushed Intel to release faster 486 chips...otherwise Intel would have ridden their overpriced 486DX 33 forever.
AMD and Cyrix produced Pentium clones which pushed Intel and forced them to reduce prices.
AMD's push to revive Socket 7 (Super 7) with the introduction of the 100 MHz bus and the K6-2 forced Intel to release the Mendocino Celeron. With on-die cache, it was one of the best budget gaming processors ever r
crypto work (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems core2 is closer to Opteron but not quite there.
Tom
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That said, this is Intels
The results show that Intel is finally catching up in ops/cycle performance. Which is nice for a change...
Tom
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These benchmarks you see on the web where they run "media creation tests" or whatever are not really indicative of the technology. At least with my test you know what MD5 or AES is. So when you see it double performance from Pentium M to Conroe you know Intel did something right for a change.
In pure ALU performance I'd say Core 2 and the AMD K8 core are on roughly equal footing. AMD still has faster multipliers (see the ECC/RSA benchmarks) but the Conroe has a decent ALU othe
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The E6300 costs about $230. How much does the Opteron 885 cost?
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I'd be far more convinced if I saw an actual benchmark. Until we're running real code on real data and measuring the wallclock on it, we have, as I said, a synthetic synthetic benchmark. A lot of fluff. It seems kind of odd that ne
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The code all fits in either the L1 or L2 (the test program is less than a 1MB) so it doesn't matter that I used a low end Conroe. The 1.83Ghz conroe has the SAME CORE as the expensive 2.9GHz conroe...
Tom
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Tom
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The results are very stable over multiple runs.
The point of my test is to see ALU performance over anything else. And you can see from this test that the ALU performance has gone up considerably since Pentium M [and probably the first Core processor].
Tom
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Tom
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I tend to buy whatever speed CPU is at the knee of the price/performance curve. I usually just calculate this based on the clock speed, which isn't perfect and somewhat naive but works quickly when all the chips are based on the same core. For example:
$0150 $75/GHz Athlon64 X2 3800+ 2.0GHz
$0187 $85/GHz Athlon64 X2 4200+ 2.2GHz
$0240 $100/GHz Athlon64 X2 4600+ 2.4GHz
So for the above example, the $85/GHz is probably what I would purchase. This graph u
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[hint hint]
Tom
No 64-bit benchmarks (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:No 64-bit benchmarks (Score:5, Informative)
crypto work done in 64-bit mode on the Core 2.
Tom
Re:No 64-bit benchmarks (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Sample benchmarks? (Score:2)
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Gaming is about the only mainstream Joe Consumer application that cares about hardware speed, and even that is mostly dominated by the video card not the CPU.
So if you're going to bother making benchmarks, you migh
Fucking hilarious. (Score:2, Offtopic)
I take it back. (Score:2)
Shame on them. This article is a troll.
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1) Some things make sense to be split to multiple pages. Such as cases where you have 10 images for each of the benchmarks that you ran and you put them on multiple pages to make life easier for dial-up users.
Isn't this a bit old? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Overclocking... (Score:3, Interesting)
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2
The Core 2 Duos are tremendously and easily overclockable. I upped my performance 25% by changing the FSB from 266 to 333. While this sounds like a significant overclock, for the Core 2 Duo it is actually rather conservative. You juse switch to DDR-667 memory. I'm using the stock Intel cooler and my chips are running just fine temperature wise. People who are more ambitious are going for 400+. When you combine the inherent performance and value in the line with the ease of significant overclocking, AMD isn't even in the same ball game anymore.
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I'm glad I had a dual core pentium d at work (ie that I didn't pay for so didn't have to rationalize) to see that the vast majority of the time the extra core doesn't get
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As to the value of dual cores, I'm a huge fan. I assume that for most games it doesn't make much of a difference, but if you are power using your computer (i.e. doing development work or running other CPU intensive applications, its a godsend).
Interesting enough
Where are they pricing these chips? (Score:2, Informative)
Looks to me like AM2 starts a little lower than [newegg.com] $152.
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so what if the site is ad heavy.... (Score:2)
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Screwed up comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Screwed up comparison (Score:5, Informative)
At the low end, the E6300 at $190 beat the $187 AMD 4200+ in all tests, and also beat the $253 4600+ in 3 out of 4 (with the 4th test extremely close).
At the midrange, the $360 E6600 beats even the $825 FX-62 in all 4 tests. That is bad, bad, bad for AMD.
At the high end, AMD simply has no answer to the $559 E6700 or the $1075 X6800.
Granted, none of their graphs shows the ScienceMark. But overall the results seem pretty one-sided to me. I'm surprised AMD hasn't dropped prices more.
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The AMD chips did do well on the ScienceMark 2.0.
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Also in part because the CPU has to go into a motherboard. If the chip is $60 less but the motherboard is $120 more the amd solution is cheaper perfomance wise. Once Intell gets supply up on the motherboards this factor fades fairly quick however.
Mycroft
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Their manufacturing costs have been cut drastically by these two factors.
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Fortunately for AMD, they have managed to start their own 65nm manufacturing now.
http://amd.vendors.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/ 09/12/0159259 [slashdot.org]
That should allow them to reduce their own manufacturing costs and afford the price cut.
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There were articles about 2 weeks ago about how they're having issues with 65nm. They can't get the voltages as low as they want, which is requiring increased power requirements. Dunno if they've got it sorted out yet.
They do have some technical advantages over Intel once they get 65nm working (such as SS and SOI which I don't think Intel uses).
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Any price drops outside of those 2 months or on chips other then Sempron/Turion would be news.
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- SysMark, a $230 E6400 performs nearly as a $825 FX-52.
- PCMark05, $230 E6400 similar to $346 5000+.
- ScienceMark, $230 E6400 similar to $187 4200+.
- 3DS Max 7, $230 E6400 between the $346 and $825 Athlons.
- Cinebench, $230 E6400 a little better than a $253 4600+.
- 3DS Max 7 (rendering), $230 E6400 between $253 and $346 Athlons.
- LightWave, no Athlons are close to touching even a $190 Core 2 Duo.
- POVRay, $230 E6400 as $825 FX-
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Huh? At 2.4GHz and below, the price difference is about equivalent to a nice dinner for two with a good bottle of wine. Stay in for a night and you've saved enough to get the better option. It certainly shouldn't put anyone off.
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Socket consideration (Score:2)
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made to use new memory technology the cpu (and socket) must change.
In the case of AM2 it appears that DDR2 and the proposed DDR3 will
be compatible enough that these two cpu/socket designs will allow
some backward compatibility. However you can't use DDR memory on
AM2 cpu's, nor can socket 939 processors use DDR2.
However ths situation is the same for other memory technologies.
PC133 memory can't be used on a DDR motherboard, nor visa-versa
eve
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Then again, I sympathize with you - especially since socket AM2 has 939 pins!
Intel is very open source friendly too (Score:5, Interesting)
However, another interesting thing is that Intel is very open source friendly. Intel's new top of the line graphics adapters (found on some core2duo motherboards) have _FULLY_ open source Linux drivers! That is a _BIG_ thing! You can find more information HERE [intellinuxgraphics.org]. Imagine! Now you can have fully open source OS without any binary drivers messing up your system. These on board graphics adapters are also very fast and capable, so it's a big thing to many of us.
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See: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=115 536806403908&w=2 [theaimsgroup.com]
That being said, this thing is completely optional. And the message hints what the Intel policy is on things Intel can't release (I got the exact same impression from intels ipw3945 wireless driver) -
Paid by Intel (Score:2)
64bit is a completely di
I need some performance/price ratios (Score:2)
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You need a motherboard for these cpu's and really should consider the cost of that as well, much else can be retained from the system being upgraded, but not Mb's and in many cases the ram.
Last I heard Intell wasn't shipping to meet demand on MB's such that what you save in cpu cost you loose in MB cost.
This will probablly change for the better, but with the rate at w
Re:Note to Slashdot...Nobody cares (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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All in all I'm glad that Intel has decided
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I'd agree with you if this was actually new news but it's not and I don't. It was news a few months ago when Intel came out with the Conroe and enlarged the hardware performance envelope a little bit but it's not news now and so it doesn't matter. Software is waaaaay behind the silicon. It's the software news that matters right now and ther
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6502, biznatch! (Score:4, Funny)
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I'm not sure about dollar for dollar any more, AMD stuff is going cheap now because they've lost the lead, especially if you don't mind relatively poor performance.
dB for db? since when did processors make noise? If you're talking about their respective heat output for equivalent performance, again it seems intel are now ahead. The core 2 runs
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This brings up the general issue - why aren't reviewers covering all power efficiency
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I'm a PC gamer in need of an upgrade. I'm seriously considering going back to consoles since online gaming with them has really taken off. In that case, I probably would not upgrade my computer anytime soon.
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Buying a PS2 was actually what clued me in that it was time to upgrade my computer. Some PS2 games are incredible and totally irr
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I just wished I could wave the same magic over my 0.001 Gig Internet connection. A super fast system that can render full motion video is fine as long as the video isn't Buffering 02% Complete Buffering 03% complete....
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Not denial, ignorance. (Score:2)
This will still be necessary as long as there are AMD fanboys out there still living in denial.
Without 64 bit benchmarks, you can't make up your mind [slashdot.org], unless you are some kind of Wintel fanboy who's ignored the Vista hype and does not think 64 bit will be practical for years.