Eliot said:
When people say conroes will be great etc, exactly how much better is it than what is out now, i mean, is it so much better that the cheapest conroes willl rival the most expensive amd processors? And how much is the cheapest conroe, how much better is it?
It isn't out yet and there haven't been any benchmarks on systems other than those set up by Intel, so your question can't be answered with certainty.
It does look very much like Conroe (a) has a significant performance advantage over current A64 cores at the same clock speed and (b) will be available at the same clock speeds and higher. There are sound architectural reasons to think that is genuinely the case, even if you dismiss the benchmarks as biased hype. Conroe can handle more instructions simultaneously than A64s and it has much better cache handling for dual cores when the two cores have an unequal requirement for cache (i.e. nearly always).
So it looks a fair bit better on paper and it looks a fair bit better in preliminary benchmarks...I'd say it really is a fair bit better. Not enough to have the bottom-end Core 2 beat the top-end Athlon64, definitely not, but probably 20% difference on comparable models and that's a hell of a lot.
Core 2, even in the 1st desktop core version (i.e. Conroe) probably has a lot more clock speed headroom than A64s have left, too.
Intel's kit has been worse than AMD's for a while and they've weather it OK. AMD are going to be behind for a while unless they pull something surpising out of their secret hat, but I think they'll weather it OK too.
The P4 architecture is like a sprinter who was going to run a 100m leg in a 4x100m relay but who has been left to run all 400m instead...overstretched and not keeping up any more. Good show, but pushed too far. Conroe is Intel's sprinter quivering on the start line ready for the next race and it's a cheetah to the A64 lion.
I'll be sticking with my S939 system, because it's good. If I was buying a new PC or I had money coming out of my ears and wanted a new toy to play with, I'd be looking very hard at Core 2 when it's available. It looks like it will give the best performance available at reasonable prices with a lot of scope for overclocking to get even more performance that you want even though you have no actual use for it. What more could you ask from a CPU?
