AMD Cleaning Intel's Clocks 6720

On Mon, 05 Dec 2005 07:26:22 -0800, John Bailo

This is not really surprising. They only tested the older Smithfield (Pentium 8xx) cores. Intel released those as a stopgap. They're little more than two dies on a single chip with little optimization.

Pressler (Pentium 9xx) will be released very soon, and while that still probably won't beat the Athlon it will probably match it or close to it. Pressler is 65nm and more optimized for dual core operation.

The REAL person will be second half next year when Conroe is released, this will be a shared L2 cache 45nm chip that will likely blow the doors off the Athlon, *AND* use very little power in the process.

Intel is also prepping Quad and 8-core CPU's as well. Intel has basically resined themselves to having second best performance for the time being while they work on leapfrogging AMD.

I actually like the Athlon, and have on in my home system. I like that I can upgrade to an X2 without a new motherboard, and will probably do that soon and stay with AMD for a while. However, they're slow to support DDR2 (and 3), and Intel is really pushing some cool stuff. I may switch back to Intel in 2 years or so.