Re:Hyper Threading (Score 1)

There was a similar article in the June issue of MaximumPC - (which is like Dr. Dobbs for Gamers - over simplified, but still it did a benchmark, which you gotta admire). The article basically says that until applications are specifically written for dual-core they wont have the sort of speed up that the designers intended. The Intel Pentium D is like a Duplex House. Moving a box from a closet in house 1 to house 2 involves walking out the front door (bus interfaces) of one onto the sidewalk (the front side bus), walking next door and through the ront door of howse 2 (bus interface for the second core). The AMD Athalon 64 X2 has a has a cross-bar interface that acts like a shared front porch which connects the cpu cored via an on die memory controller. Its better, but not perfect. What they expect will happen over time is someone will come up with a way to communicate directly across the cores, analogous to a shared doorway between the bedrooms. In the dual processor world they think that the AMD Opteron beats the Intel Xeon because it has a shared Chipset and dedicated transport links between each cpu and ram. Bottom line: Intel is getting spanked by AMD... And they deserve it.