AM2 slated....

[cavemanoc]

Ah... the voice of reason - it's so easy for us to get overexcited about a couple of % here and a few extra 3DMark there, but the bottom line is that the chips are not made for us - they're made for the mass market with a *few* enthusiast chips chucked in because someone is always willing to spend ridiculous sums of money to buy their way to the top of the w***y -waving tree

Does the consumer care that Conroe does Superpi much faster than the best opteron - SuperWhat now?

Always cracks me up when the reviews go on about benchmarks like they are the be all and end all of the CPU's existance - I always skip the artificial ones and have a quick look at the Doom3 and HL2 scores - and hey - even my old XP-M could put in a reasonable showing on all but the very latest of games with the right tweaking!

AMD will not live/die based on whether the enhusiast market thinks it's the only way to 3DMark WR's - it'll survive on large OEM support and aggressive pricing as it always has (and if the server side thrives because they offer a better bang/buck without raping the planet of it's energy resources then us enthusiasts can rejoice because we can cherry pick the best they have to offer and continue our waving!)

As with all business, simply producing a better product does not all competition kill (how would you explain the death of Netscape then?)

Amd will be around for many years and even if Intel do take the crown for the next couple of months - it'll change hands again!

 

[HangTime]

I think AMD need to move to 65nm as swiftly as possible and, somewhat ironically, use the die shrink to 'do an intel' and ramp up the clock speed aggressively. Only a dualcore 3ghz A64 at a reasonable price point can save them now, assuming they don't have anything else up their sleeves.

Of course, it remains to be seen what Intel has in mind for the budget/mainstream sectors. AMD may still be able to retain market share in those areas with the dated but cheap sempron/venice lineup.

 

[Kamakazie!]

I feel AMD should have kept making 939 cpus untill AMDs new 65nm. I think a lot of amd loyal users will be anoyed with the new am2 cpus with them not being much better than 939. AMD could have brought out 5000+ and FX62 on socket 939 I'm sure. They could have saved money on not creating a pointless new socket cpu too and put it towards the development of the 65nm cpus too.

it's not a pointless socket change. DDR2 is the way forward. Why will loyal AMD people be annoyed? Everyone knew there was only gonna be a small performance advantage. Its a sidestep for the benefit of the market, it was never meant as anything else.

As for AMD being dead if they don't do this or that or the other... what a load of rubbish. AMD have never had more market share, more makret acceptance or more exposure. Life has never been so good for AMD and it will continue to get better and better. 4 months of Intel being ahead in the desktop arena is going to do nothing to combat that. The Turion X2 is liekly to increase their market in the notebook sector as it is a solid platform and in the Server space they are way out ahead of Intel for the next 6 months atleast. No ones gonna be using Woodcrest in critical systems because the platform and CPU have not been certified and wont be for quite a while. Where they will take ground back is in the 1U and 2U servers but still.... AMD is going no where. Even Dell has accepted this and is getting their supply channels in place with AMD. First off by offering 4U+ servers with opterons (where Intel will not be at all competetive for a few years) and then probably with others when K8L launches.

Conroe looks amazing for us lot, but its not spelling doom for anyone, least of all AMD. Hell, it's not even been released.

 

[Gashman]

same as you above, i am just damned right sick of all the garbage being said here, conroe fanboys dooming AMD because there 5% down in performance. its utterly ridiculous how exited everybody is getting exited about conroe, its all god damned hype cause by a chip that scores at the max 10% above its current AMD counterparts, and the conroe isn't even around yet for god sake. again everybody is drooling over 1M calculations in superpi in 11 seconds, why do you care about this so much, i mean seriously give me a reasonable reason why its so mind blowing to complete that in 11 seconds, without mentioning its faster than AMD and its faster than current systems? its truely ridiculous, like if i compaired a ford escort mark 1 with a modern day ford focus, what do you expect is gonna happen, you think as technology progresses things aren't gonna get faster? i don't want to offend or anything but conroe is turning everybody into a bunch of kids in a sweetshop arguing over whose lolly is bigger than whose.

please, please for the love of god stop this ridiculous rubbish about 'AMD is doomed' or 'AMD can't beat conroe' because im sorry to shock people but why should AMD give a monkeys about loosing 5% in performance to a brand new architecture from an enormous company with about twenty times more research ability to them? AMD, opterons, AM2 aren't going anywhere fast, there sales aren't going to go down, AMD isn't going to plummit and the company isn't going to go bankrupt like half you people are preaching. AMD is doing better now than it ever has and there becoming a larger company all the time, finally recognised by the mainstream PC market, there systems in No competitor talk please!, No competitor talk please! and others, they've never been doing so well. theres no way anyone on this forum is going to affect AMD in the slightest way, enthusiasts make up a tiny part of the market and thats not going to change. i noticed a comment above about power usage, forgive me but how many people go into PC world and say 'hey mister does this system draw over 300 watts of power?' or 'hey mister, is this intel system better for my electricity bill than this AMD system'. i have never in my life heard anyone ask that in PC shops or any other highstreet computer retailer in my life, people don't care as much as enthusiasts do whether a computer draws 300 watts or whether it draws 301, if you find this hard to believe look at intel sales, using there netburst (powerhog) processors, did they sell badly in highstreet shops, did intel go bust and vanish because AMD blew them out of the water in performance. don't be ridiculous, intel pentium IV was a blinding success, sure it wasn't as fast as athlons but it dominated the mainstream market and it was adequete for any task.

1) 95% of the market doesn't care about an extra 3FPS in there favourite game, since it makes no noticable difference when the games already running fine

2) again most people don't care if one system draws 15 watts or so less than the other, why would they give a damn? you can save that money simply turning off lights and rubbish like that

3) someone buying a computer from a highstreet store doesn't give a damn about superpi, 3D mark, aquamark or what other benchmark tools reviewers use, niether do they care if one system can run a game at 3FPS more than the other, they'll go for the one they want for the best price and thats pretty much a fact of life

4) AM2 is far from demolished by conroe, i mean identical system core duo vs. AM2 with identical low latency DDR2 ram, identical graphics cards, identical chipsets, your only realistically gonna see a 10% improvement at best otherwise there pretty even in most cases

5) AM2 is a stragetic move by AMD not a performance based move, so stop looking at it like they have failed to improve performance, AM2 processors are identical to 939 ones only they use different memory controllers

just my opinion and i know im gonna get critisised to next week for questioning the 'almighty' power of conroe but hey i don't care because 90% of you have already made up your minds, just please stop talking rubbish about AMD being dead and other complete crap, and before anyone says it im not trolling or anything. just voicing an opinion on the bizarre attitute of people basically on there hands and knees waiting for conroe

 

[Tooks]

One of the more interesting threads I've read since I've been lurking/posting on here, congrats guys!

I've purchased mostly intel over the years, but purely on price, as I've never been that concerned about being at the cutting edge of performance PCs, but more the trailing edge!

I have had AMD chips in the past though, and I've been very pleased with them.

One thing that this AMD vs Intel 'war' has brought though, is much better products for us consumers.

Intel needs AMD like AMD needs Intel and without each other, there would be no pressure to develop ever better products for us guys, so surely that's a good thing?

Yes, Conroe looks good, but you can bet that AMD will be having a very close look at what Intel have done with that processor, and be working on their own response as we speak.

The result will be either cheaper chips, or faster chips, or hopefully both!

I for one celebrate the two companies and will happily hand over my cash to whoever seems to offer the best value chip for me at the time I'm in the market to purchase.

Chill dudes!!

 

[pumpman]

im looking forward to AM2 quad core I think thats where the benefit will be to amd from moving to AM2 might not be so apparent now but the ddr2 and when it arrives ddr3 bandwidth will be needed for quad core cpus

 

[Angilion]

Most people I know who have bought PCs don't have the faintest idea what CPU (or any other component) is in them unless they vaguely remember what the shop staff told them was the really good one to buy. The mass home PC market doesn't work on performance - it works on advertising.

Which is why Conroe might well knock AMD - the performance advantage, while utterly irrelevant to most people, can feed advertising, both formal and the informal advertising of shop staff and word of mouth.

Never mind that the cheapest budget CPU is more than adequate for most home or office PCs. Conroe is the best, don't you know?

There's one interesting possibility I haven't seen mentioned in this thread. AMD are intending to bring out Athlon64s on AM2 that use only 35W at stock speed. These will obviously be a reworked design, a refinement and tweaking. I would very much like to see what clock speeds those A64 models can be ramped up to, as I suspect it will be a fair bit higher than the current models.

It's all academic to me. I have my A64 Venice running at 2250 and it does the job well. Sure, some games are probably CPU-limited on it (I have a heavily overclocked 7900GT), but they are limited to "more than fast enough", so I don't care.

 

[WatchTower]

-

Just thought I'd say something before you get told off mate you might want to edit out fully them two companys you mentioned as it's against the rules to mention competitors.

 

[Jokester]

5% down in performance

It isn't 5% performance, it's 20% between Intel's mid range processor and AMD's top range processor. We're not talking just "benchmarks" either, we're talking real encoding programs and real games like FEAR (where 20% is a lot). Intel's top end part could be anything upto 50% quicker than AMD's!

Conroe isn't just a slight improvement over old architecture, it's a step change. I for one can't remember the last time a mainstream CPU made such a jump in performance.

Jokester

 

[4Qman]

AMDs existance is to make profit. Intel's existance is to make profit. Me? I just want fast chip at the lowest cost possible. No saint nor evil here

Well said, Ill hold out and get some GPU power as thats whats needed for me anyway.

 

[kdd]

I for one can't remember the last time a mainstream CPU made such a jump in performance.

Jokester

True, the original athlon was lauded as a major gaming cpu breakthrough yet was only about 5% faster than the p3 at best, slower on occasion. The first a64's including the fx 51 weren't that much faster than the contemporary p4's, again only about 5% at best. Conroe is unprecedented in its all round uber 1337ness.

 

[Durzel]

Ah... the voice of reason - it's so easy for us to get overexcited about a couple of % here and a few extra 3DMark there, but the bottom line is that the chips are not made for us - they're made for the mass market with a *few* enthusiast chips chucked in because someone is always willing to spend ridiculous sums of money to buy their way to the top of the w***y -waving tree

Does the consumer care that Conroe does Superpi much faster than the best opteron - SuperWhat now?

Always cracks me up when the reviews go on about benchmarks like they are the be all and end all of the CPU's existance - I always skip the artificial ones and have a quick look at the Doom3 and HL2 scores - and hey - even my old XP-M could put in a reasonable showing on all but the very latest of games with the right tweaking!

AMD will not live/die based on whether the enhusiast market thinks it's the only way to 3DMark WR's - it'll survive on large OEM support and aggressive pricing as it always has (and if the server side thrives because they offer a better bang/buck without raping the planet of it's energy resources then us enthusiasts can rejoice because we can cherry pick the best they have to offer and continue our waving!)

As with all business, simply producing a better product does not all competition kill (how would you explain the death of Netscape then?)

Amd will be around for many years and even if Intel do take the crown for the next couple of months - it'll change hands again!

You almost did a good job of masking your pro-AMD fanboyism there, good job!

I hate to shatter your dreams but SuperPI, etc are CPU benchmarks that aren't skewed a great deal by what memory or graphics card(s) you've got. Proving that one CPU is empirically faster at solving the same mathematical problem than another proves that it would be faster by definition in games, assuming the other hardware (gfx, ram, etc) were identical.

The problem with 3DMark as a rule is that you introduce graphics card overclocking and memory overclocking into the equation, which will skew the results one way or the other - and you end up comparing the power of a given system against others rather than the CPU inside it.

Incidentally, a moderately overclocked Conroe scored over 20k more in 3DMark2001 (which is largely regarded as being CPU bound as its so old now) on a X1900XT Xfire system than Gibbos own AM2+7900 GTX setup. I suppose theres a alternate reason for that too isn't there....

 

[Durzel]

whining

I read this and had the mental image of you stamping your feet in your room with your fingers in your ears. Am I close?

 

[Angilion]

I read this and had the mental image of you stamping your feet in your room with your fingers in your ears. Am I close?

You appear to have a bizarre bug in your browser that changes what people have written, as your last two "replies" have had no relevance to the posts they are in "reply" to.

Or perhaps you just aren't reading the posts. You see "AMD fanboys" the way that McCarthy saw Communists - everywhere. It's quite amusing, seeing how you are cheerleading one brand of CPU while jeering at people for doing the same thing when in fact they aren't.

When people ask my advice on PC hardware, in most cases the answer boils down to "cheap". Most people don't need the power of a modern budget CPU, let alone high-end. Most people don't even need a CPU upgrade path, as they'll be using that CPU for several years and then buying a new PC. They'll see damn all difference between Sempron and Core 2, let alone Athlon64 (or X2 or FX) and Core 2. The enthusiasts here are not the majority of the market. I'm still suggesting waiting a couple of months if they don't need a (new) PC right away, though - maybe the lower models of Core 2 will be about the same price as Semprons or Celeron Ds.

 

[cavemanoc]

I hate to shatter your dreams but SuperPI, etc are CPU benchmarks that aren't skewed a great deal by what memory or graphics card(s) you've got. Proving that one CPU is empirically faster at solving the same mathematical problem than another proves that it would be faster by definition in games, assuming the other hardware (gfx, ram, etc) were identical...

Riiiiiiight... That must be what I was doing wrong: trying to improve my superpi scores by tweaking my Ram timings - how silly of me - thanks for the heads up

Incidentally, a moderately overclocked Conroe scored over 20k more in 3DMark2001 (which is largely regarded as being CPU bound as its so old now) on a X1900XT Xfire system than Gibbos own AM2+7900 GTX setup. I suppose theres a alternate reason for that too isn't there....

My point exactly (believe it or not) If you run the newer 3DMarks you will realize that they (like the newer games) are limited mostly by your GFX card NOT by your CPU - that's not to say that a slow CPU won't have much of an impact on your Framerate - it just won't be as marked as the effect of the GFX card:

Example:
My old system (2002ish) was an XP-m with a 9700pro
New one: Opteron 165 with 7800GT

If I were only allowed to upgrade one bit - which would have the biggest effect to playing oblivion? (ignoring the obvious issues of mobo and pci-e )
Over the last few years biggest difference has been made by upgrading the GFX card - not the processor!

Not to say I have my head in the sand (Thanks TBirdUK!) - I did sell my beloved XP-M after all - but I'll be the first to admit that I use my machines primarily for gaming - and so for me the upgrade to conroe would have very little impact - I'd be better placed spending the cash on a better GFX card.

That's not to say I'm not jealous of the boys that get them - they are awesome chips and I'd love to have a play - but for me it's not a viable upgrade path at the moment

(And by extention - neither would AM2 )

 

[Durzel]

Riiiiiiight... That must be what I was doing wrong: trying to improve my superpi scores by tweaking my Ram timings - how silly of me - thanks for the heads up




My point exactly (believe it or not) If you run the newer 3DMarks you will realize that they (like the newer games) are limited mostly by your GFX card NOT by your CPU - that's not to say that a slow CPU won't have much of an impact on your Framerate - it just won't be as marked as the effect of the GFX card:

Example:
My old system (2002ish) was an XP-m with a 9700pro
New one: Opteron 165 with 7800GT

If I were only allowed to upgrade one bit - which would have the biggest effect to playing oblivion? (ignoring the obvious issues of mobo and pci-e )
Over the last few years biggest difference has been made by upgrading the GFX card - not the processor!

Not to say I have my head in the sand (Thanks TBirdUK!) - I did sell my beloved XP-M after all - but I'll be the first to admit that I use my machines primarily for gaming - and so for me the upgrade to conroe would have very little impact - I'd be better placed spending the cash on a better GFX card.

That's not to say I'm not jealous of the boys that get them - they are awesome chips and I'd love to have a play - but for me it's not a viable upgrade path at the moment

(And by extention - neither would AM2 )

Agreed.

I said that SuperPI wouldn't be affected a great deal (those words exactly) by memory timings, not that it wouldn't be affected at all. Pretty much every benchmark going is affected to some degree by memory timings.

I don't actually think that Conroe is necessarily a good upgrade for people already on the bleeding edge with a S939 setup, but it definitely is for people that are looking to upgrade their entire system (motherboard, memory and CPU). If I already had a S939 system I'm not sure I'd go for a Conroe (or AM2) upgrade straight away, but as I don't and I have the choice of either a full upgrade to a S939/AM2 system or a Conroe - I know what I'll be choosing.

I don't think anyone is saying that Conroe makes everything else out there obsolete, just that architecturally speaking it's a big step forward (as Jokester already mentioned).

I have no bias at all one way or the other in terms of manufacturers - I'd quite happily buy AMD or Intel, NVidia or ATI, etc without the pointless self-defeating attitude that one manufacturer is somehow more "holy" than another. I was skeptical of Conroes performance when I saw the initial report on Anandtech (in which Intel provided the hardware and set up the machines), but I've since seen the same results being shown over and over again from people who have no reason to have an agenda, etc.

Bottom line - for people looking to do a big upgrade this year, I personally think Conroe is the only viable choice. It remains to be seen whether it is a worthwhile upgrade for people already on 3Ghz+ AMD X2 setups.

 

[NathanE]

I don't think anyone is saying that Conroe makes everything else out there obsolete, just that architecturally speaking it's a big step forward

Retaining an ancient FSB is a big step forward is it? There's nothing specifically amazing about Conroe's architecture, but that's what makes it work. Intel just doubled or tripled up on everything. It has 3 vector logic units whereas all other x86 CPUs only have 1, for example. They improved parallelism - a particular variable in CPU design that hadn't improved substantially since the Pentium Pro. I believe it is the latter of which is causing most surprise. Most people here don't understand what ILP really is and why it is so important.

I don't believe Intel will be "safe" until they've got their "CSI" Hypertransport clone working, in conjunction with a Conroe-derived chip.

 

[Angilion]

It's a big step forward in one sense - it gives a far higher performance per clock cycle than P4, so it has far better prospects given that P4 has hit practical limits on clock speeds. It even gives significantly higher performance per clock cycle than Athlon64/Opteron. Intel realised that the high clock speed/low IPC approach had come to a dead end and reversed. Conroe/Merom/Core 2 is, in a sense, Intel out-Athloning AMD.

A radically new architecture would have taken much longer to develop. That would have left Intel with very little scope for improvement with the P4 and the prospect of AMD sailing merrily on ahead while Intel were becalmed. Conroe appears to be just the job for Intel - they developed it quickly enough, it has good enough performance to stand out and it probably has quite a bit of scope for speed increases over time.

I don't think either Intel or AMD will be "safe", but Conroe looks like it will pull Intel out of the doldrums and whizz them past AMD.

 

[MikeTimbers]

It's a big step forward in one sense - it gives a far higher performance per clock cycle than P4, so it has far better prospects given that P4 has hit practical limits on clock speeds. It even gives significantly higher performance per clock cycle than Athlon64/Opteron. Intel realised that the high clock speed/low IPC approach had come to a dead end and reversed. Conroe/Merom/Core 2 is, in a sense, Intel out-Athloning AMD.

The P4 was a backwards step in terms of performance per clock cycle from the P3. Now that Intel has accepted that NetBurst isn't going to get them to 10GHz, they've gone back to the P3 design and improved it. Now if only they'd done that in the first place

 

[Turbanation]

i was thinking of getting AM2 so thanks for that!