AMD Dethrowned. Intel Steps up.

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After reading these articles, and seeing the benchmarks, we can conclude that AMD and all of it's current processors, even the FX-60, will be dethrowned by the new Intel Conroe. Despite rumors or speculations of it not being that great, these benchmarks seem to suggest otherwise. So, here you go. :)

TomsHardwareGuide.com said:
Originally Posted by Tomshardware.com
IDF keynotes: Welcome to 'Intel 3.0,' with first look at quad-core CPUs
Wolfgang Gruener
7 Mar 2006 19:58

San Francisco (CA) - Today at the Intel Developers' Forum, chief technology officer Justin Rattner heralded the public introduction of its next generation of 65 nm processor micro-architectures, Conroe (desktop), Merom (mobile) and Woodcrest (server) as representing "the next-generation of Intel," in keeping with the emerging theme of "Intel 3.0." Today, this new architecture has a new name, "Intel Core Microarchitecture, " which may not be as spirited as the "NetBurst" architecture it replaces, but is certain to continue the company's marketing focus on that one central term, "Core."

Calling this week's session "the most memorable IDF ever," Rattner acknowledged his company has been under tremendous competitive pressure lately, in the face of growing consumer market share from chief rival AMD, and a revenue warning last week. "You would think we've lost a lot of enthusiasm," Rattner said, "but that's not true."

Rattner gave attendees the briefest of peeks - only about 10 seconds - at examples of two Conroe-derived quad-core desktop platforms, Kentsfield for desktop packaging and Clovertown for server packaging (Xeon), although their formal product names have yet to be revealed. (It's a safe bet that the word "Core" may be involved.) Both processors will feature a pair of dual-core dies sandwiched together, and supplied with 4 Mb of on-board L2 cache.

Conroe-based products, Rattner predicted, will perform 40% faster than systems running the Pentium D 950 processor, while at the same time consuming 40% less power. At the same time, Woodcrest chips utilizing what we had better start getting used to calling "ICM," will run 80% faster than today's 2.8 GHz Paxville dual-core chips, while consuming 35% less power. And future Merom mobile platforms, he added, will perform 20% faster than today's Core Duo T2600, while consuming the same power.

The new Core Microarchitecture, Rattner said, promises to "combine the energy efficiency of Core Duo with the performance of top-of-the-line processors." With the arrival of the Woodcrest platform for servers, he remarked, new CPUs will now consume only 33% of the power for an entire server. One way the company will be reducing the CPU's drain on power, he announced, is by decoupling display refresh cycles from system memory, enabling them to draw upon dedicated display memory instead. Exactly how Intel would achieve this, or whose heads he would have to pummel at ATI and Nvidia to make this happen, Rattner did not say.

Also in terms of omissions, Rattner didn't say much to sharpen the focus for the company's release timeframe, though he did say that quad-core CPUs should be shipping during 2007. However, it would be unlikely for the company to be shipping eight-core processors during 2008, he mentioned.

The tone of today's keynote speeches was more technical, less business-oriented, than recent IDFs, focused on "achieving industry leading performance," to use Rattner's words. This may be either an indication that Intel is closer to shipping next-generation architecture than it has been, or that it prefers to focus on the side of the company where the news is better, or both. But a keyword left out of today's technical briefings from Justin Rattner and his successor on-stage, senior vice president Pat Gelsinger, was ironically a keyword from last year's IDFs: "64-bit." "I hope everyone will leave this IDF," said Rattner in his closing, "committed to multithreaded software." Last year, nearly that same phrase was used, only with "64-bit" inserted in place of "multithreaded software."

For his part, Gelsinger called the ICM architectures "not just a minor retooling, [but] the biggest leap in micro-architecture for Intel so far...the best processor we've ever built." Look for a new metric, called Efficiency Per Instruction (EPI), which Intel will be introducing to measure the relative performance of new processors, in the absence of the former gigahertz scale. Using this new system, Gelsinger said, "we will be better than any other processor, based on data sheets published today."

As an example of this efficiency, Gelsinger noted that front-side bus speeds may now be cranked up to 1333 MHz for Conroe-architecture systems, while at the same time, power efficiency is being brought down to levels not seen since the 486.

Also today at IDF, a senior HP executive was heard to have said, "Intel may be the most trusted processor in the adaptive enterprise," as part of announcement that HP would be deploying the Woodcrest platform on all its future ProLiant systems. This comment appears to contradict earlier HP statements with regard to AMD's competitive Opteron server processors


And then the article that shows just how good this new processor is, and how much better it could be.

Conclusion from AnandTech.com said:
While we're still comparing to Socket-939 and only using RD480, it does seem very unlikely that AMD would be able to make up this much of a deficit with Socket-AM2 and RD580. Especially looking at titles like F.E.A.R. where Conroe's performance advantage averages over 40%, it looks like Intel's confidence has been well placed.

Also keep in mind that we are over six months away from the actual launch of Conroe, performance can go up from where it is today. We also only looked at the 2.66GHz part, the Extreme Edition version of Conroe will most likely be clocked around 3.0GHz which will extend the performance advantage even further.

AMD still does have some time to surprise us with AM2, but from what we've seen today, they are going to have to do a lot of work to close this gap. We saw performance today in the two areas that we were most concerned about with Conroe: gaming and media encoding, and in both Intel greatly exceeded our expectations. Also remember that Conroe should be lower power than the AMD offering we compared it to, although we weren't able to measure power consumption at the wall in our brief time with the systems.

Going into IDF we expected to see a good showing from Conroe, but leaving IDF, well, now we just can't wait to have it.

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Both articles can be viewed below...

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2713&p=1

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/03/07/idf_keynotes_welcome_to_intel_3-point-0/
 
It will be Socket T (LGA 775). I don't see Intel changing sockets for at least another year or two. They have a new series of processors coming out, not to mention Quad-Core processors coming out at the end of this year, Intel doesn't need to switch Sockets for a long while to come.

But man, isn't that Conroe insane! The Extreme Edition is just going to be INSANE! Can't wait to see what it gets in the CPU Benchmarks!

***Please, fanboys, stay away form this thread. This is to discuss AMD's potential new CPUs, Intel's new Conroe and new Core MicroArchitecture and the like. This is NOT the place to say, "AMD pwnz Intel." or "Intel pwnz AMD." Keep it clean, professional, and a place to learn. :)
 
Yes, they are using a new architecture for their upcoming dual-core and quad-core processors. It's officially called Core MicroArchitecture. Long name, not as catchy to me as 'NetBurst' was, but hey, this is a million times better then the NetBurst, so I'm ok with it. ;)

I'm not familar with AMD's architecture of their CPUs, might someone educate me on this subject perhaps?
 
yeh looks like it :p its gd that its 775 aswell, so dont have 2 change motherboards. and yeh, if them pics r not 4 the extreme 1, then yeh the Extreme Edition well be well EXTREME :D lol
 
r_moore04 said:
yeh looks like it :p its gd that its 775 aswell, so dont have 2 change motherboards. and yeh, if them pics r not 4 the extreme 1, then yeh the Extreme Edition well be well EXTREME :D lol

Yuppers. The future is looking mighty bright for Intel.

With new and far more powerful processors then its predocessors, this is good. But, you can acquire them without having to purchase a new motherboard or new RAM. This is really good news for those who may want to consider purchasing one of these CPUs.

I'm thinking that Intel will decide to do something a bit different with its Extreme Edition line-up. I'm thinking they'll change the name, or perhaps, give it somethign different. I honestly can't say what they'll do as the knowledge of the Conroe core is rather limited, plus, the new architecture isn't very well known, except for the fact that it pretty much decimates anything that came before it, Intel and AMD alike.

But, expect AMD to step their product line up even further. Because with Intel just announcing that they have a new, and extremly better architecture, proof is within the benchmarks, that AMD has to make somethign extremly good. Intel couldn't have made their announcement of their new Core MicroArchitecture any better. With the release of AMD's Socket AM2 to be released in roughly 3 months, June 6th, this throws AMD in a downword spiral so to speak.

If AMD wants to compete they may have to hold back on the release of the Socket AM2. This could upset quite a bit of people. They have a relativly difficult choice to make; Release a product that isn't able to compete with upcoming processors, or, redesign some aspects of it to make it competetive but hold the release back even longer. Whichever decision they choose, it will be difficult, but be sure that their number one goal is to get money, and with die-hard fanboys out there, I'm sure they won't have a problem with that. :)
 
Well, Socket AM2 is basically AMD's switch to the new standard of System Memory, DDR2. Socket AM2 uses this new memory, it will supossedly make your system faster and things of the like. But all the difference from Socket 939 to Socket AM2 is just the use of DDR2 memory. :)
 
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