wtf, anyway, what do you mean so long? k10 this year, summer, late summer, august/september launch.
2nd half 2008 is refering to nehalem(cba'd to go check the spelling) from Intel and it looks to be a loser already. all the current info is that it will have on die mem controller as its main improvement, however as before it sounds a xeon part that no doubt will also make it a extreme edition £600+ part with all the rest of the desktop range being cheaper and no on die mem controller. 12mb, or 16mb of cache and all the ondie mem controller transistors and you'd have a massive and extremely expensive core. amd went with on die mem controller as it hugely hugely reduces latency without using massive numbers of transistors for cache. the core 2 duo has very similar latency to the x2 with on die mem controller and does that through massive and efficient, but expensive cache. its uneconomic and not very feasable to do both, to find both on a £150 bottom end quad core would absolutely kill intel so they just won't do it. theres a difference between making lower cache cores and cores with an without on die mem controller, i really doubt half or 1/4 of the range will have it, just the extreme editions.
it will no doubt get other tweaks but it already sounds like a slight upgrade, nothing like a new core.
penryn is already poopy
, there are official benchmarks out, with sse4 apps its unsurprisingly much faster than its kentsfield counter part, but a 2.93Ghz kentsfield is only about 20% slower than a penryn in most applications, and that penryn tested against had 15% higher clock speed and the newer bus, it was a 3.33Ghz quad core on 1333Mhz bus. so its less than 5% better clock for clock performance over the current design. definately won't get them to the top for performance.
as i've said before, the only thing that will hold amd back will be clockspeed, they've clearly had clockspeed issues, xp's would easily clock to 2.7Ghz, ath 64's would easily clock to 2.7Ghz, x2's would then clock to 2.7Ghz easily, the next 300mhz were possible on all architechtures but rare and its taken 3-4 years for the 3Ghz mark to become fairly easy to obtain. there is a lot of info out there suggesting the agena/barcelona won't be coming out much past 2.5Ghz, and while thats fast enough. if intel can get a 3.33Ghz out fairly early in 2008 then it might beat it. but that will be the extreme edition, if low end quad cores can hit 3.3-3.5Ghz will be, well, unlikely i would think. will a low end amd quad core be able to hit 2.5Ghz easily though, i would very much think so.
EDIT:- every amd launch people talk about server chips first, desktop versions months and months later. don't believe it.
