April 20th, 2005
Does AMD Have a Surprise Up Its Sleeves for Tomorrow?
By David Johnston
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews.com
The Inquirer is reporting that AMD may be releasing more than just some new speed bumps and dual-core Opteron server chips tomorrow. Apparently they were shown a document that claims the Athlon 64 X2 dual-core series will be launched at the same time (tomorrow) and will boast ratings up to 4800+ though the true speed of the cores is not given.
Intel and AMD have recently entered a race to introduce the first x86 dual-core CPU and, until now, it had looked like Intel would win the race on the desktop front while AMD would win on the server front. Intel had already moved up its dual core release date to beat AMD’s expected release date. Now, however, it’s beginning to look like we may see AMD dual core chips from desktop to server before Intel has its chips out the door (HP listed dual core Opteron servers on their website already though the pages were quickly taken down).
One other nice thing about the AMD dual core chips is that they will be pin-compatible with current socket 939 and 940 motherboards and will only require a BIOS upgrade if all goes smoothly. Intel’s dual core solution, however, will require you to get a new motherboard. This will be a great win for AMD if it manages to get a successful dual core launch off before Intel, making them both the first to 1Ghz and the first to offer dual core. On top of all of this, Microsoft’s Windows XP Professiona 64-bit Edition should be coming out any day now (MSDN subscribers already have access to the final version in fact).
Things are looking interesting. Source: The Inquirer
deww says:
Woohoo! This will be a damn exciting year! Glad I held off on buying the Athlon64s for now.
I am just dying to see how these and Intel’s will run.
April 20th, 2005 at 12:38 pm
David says:
There are already previews of Intel’s dual-core chips…which are technically “launched” though nobody can get one (whereas HP is already shipping dual-core Opterons). I thought that Anandtech did a very good job of showing off the strengths of Intel’s dual core chips, but you have to watch out and see what tests they’re running and what tests they leave off. For example, this is how they conducted one of their “gaming” tests (which are vastly underrepresented in my opinion):
“The first test basically performs all of the tasks from our first Multitasking Scenario, with the exception of DVD Shrink. We have Firefox loaded, but with all 12 tabs from the third test, iTunes is running and playing a playlist, and Newsleecher is downloading headers. We kept Newsleecher in this test simply because it’s the best way for us to be able to have a fairly CPU/disk intensive downloading task running in the background while still maintaining some semblance of repeatability. So, replace Newsleecher with BitTorrent or any other resource-consuming downloading that you may be doing and you’re good to go.
Of course, Norton AntiVirus 2004 and Microsoft’s AntiSpyware Beta were also running in the background.”
I don’t know who would play a game with 12 tabs of Firefox open, using BitTorrent or something similar, and playing music from iTunes. Anyway, the dual-core does seem to blow single-core away when running many things at once at least.
Check those reviews out:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2388
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2389
April 20th, 2005 at 12:58 pm
David says:
I’d also like to point out, in regard to those reviews, that Anandtech *did* run non-multitasking tests. They just stuck solely with applications that are already optimized for Hyperthreading and the P4 architecture in general. They ran a grand total of 2 different game tests while they tested what seem like dozens of HT-optimized applications without “multitasking”.
…Basically, I think the review is very biased and gives you a very poor overall perspective. That’s why I like sites such as this which do not get paid for any reviews done so they aren’t influenced in that sort of way.
April 20th, 2005 at 1:19 pm