FYI: At this time the Intel is hoping to reclaim the performance crown that AMD has held on to for a while with the Core 2 Duo (Conroe) CPU. The CPU has been previewed outperforming AMD's cream crop (the A64 FX-60) by a handful of enthusiasts.
On this one, Intel again went against the MHz grain by using the newer core microarchitecture over the existing Netburst technology, with the aim of delivering better performance at lower clockspeeds much like AMD has been doing in the past. At this same time achieving this with a fewer number of more efficient stage pipeline and lesser heat dissipation.
Yeah, but don't look for Intel to hold the crown for long, because from what I was reading AMD's new architecture on the 65nm platform is going to put Intel back in second place until Intel comes up with a newer architecture then the one they are about to debut soon.
A hint towards how powerful the new architecture from AMD on the 65nm will be is the new Opteron 64 debuting soon on the socket F which outperforms the new Xeons coming out. A lot of that technology from the new Opterons will be on the new Athlon 64's on the 65nm as well.
Consumers will benefit from this the most considering the second generation technology is dropping in price like a rock now. I have seen the Intel Pentium D 9xx drop nicely and now even the AMD Athlon 64 X2’s are also starting to take a dip in the price. Pretty soon the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ will be below 250 dollars.
Saber, thanks for the link. Though dated, it helped explain part of my question. It seems as always, the processor debate is more personal preferance as much as performance. One last thing, I have read both cases (good and bad) for dual core processors where gaming is concerned. What do you guys think? Thanks for the input. electrk369
Dual cores for gaming is still in a distant future. 99% of games are still programmed for single core processors. By the time the majority of games are made for dual core the dual cores out now especially the Pentium D series will be outdated to the point where they will be the minium for dual core support for dual core games. It's better to wait another year because by then quad-cores will be out and it will be a safe bet that your quad-core processor will stand have a long lifespan ahead of it vs dual cores.
Single core processors are going to be pushed down to the budget processor line in the next couple of years, while dual cores start to become cheap to the point where they will take over the the mainstream processor line while quad-cores will take over the the highend processor line.
"By the time the majority of games are made for dual core"..............................there'll probably be the quad core and not very long after that the 8-core emerges and so on and so forth. My point being you can only plan so much ahead when it comes to CPUs, I'm not sure if you recall but few years back, Intel predicted CPUs clocked at 20GHz by 2010 (we now know better).
Now, a couple of days ago, news surfaced that Intel is now focused on multiple cores hoping on a performance 15x faster than existing processors, and this multi-core processor project by Intel is codenamed Keifer.
The 32-core processor project that should be ready by 2010 is called Gulftown & it is to be based on a 32nm process and will include eight processing nodes with four cores each. Each core will run at 2GHz but time will tell.
My upgrade philosophy has always been to get the most package for my money when I do it and this strategy so far has worked pretty darn good for me as I always make a profit any time I upgrade my components.
I reacall intel bragging about how "netburst" on the pentium 4's push the processor 20ghz. I didn't believe it then. now back in 2003 when a better report (I think it was from toms hardware claiming that the pentium 4 with "netburst" with will reach speeds upwards of 4.5ghz, that was a lot more beleiveable. That story is true though, if intel wanted to they could push the pentium 4 on the Ceder Mill core to 4.5ghz, but considering the Pentium 4 is in it's twilight stages there really isn't a point to do so. consider the Core 2 Duo is 3x better then the Pentium 4 out today.
The way I see it is single cores will be dead in the water by the next couple of years. AMD is phasing single cores out by the end of 2007 and Intel is phasing the Celeron single core out by Q2 of 2008 and all that will be left is dual-cores, quad-cores for the mainstream public to choose from. I don't see 8 or 16 cores making an impact of any kind for the mainstream public for a while to come, because these processors will be very high-priced I can imagine and the only reason for these types of processors would be for servers. I mean 20% of software out there now for the puiblic is compatible with dual-cores and gaming companies are just barely starting to take advatnage of it. We aren't even talking about quad-cores yet. It's going to be a couple of years after they come out for software companies to start taking advantage of these processors.
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