Does anyone think K8L will bring the crown back to AMD?

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coldpower27

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Jul 18, 2004
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Originally posted by: StopSign
I doubt K8L will win back the crown. The lead Conroe has right now is just too big to overcome. When K8 came out it only beat the P4 by a little margin in performance. However it was a vastly superior architecture due to efficiency. The performance lead K8 had on P4 was nowhere near the kind of lead Conroe has on K8. I think the best K8L will do is match Conroe in certain applications but still trail behind it in overall performance.

Originally posted by: munky
I know Conroe is the latest and greatest cpu, but it's not powered by magic dust, and AMD engineers aren't stupid.
But Conroe is powered by magic dust, and then some. The kind of performance lead it holds on K8 is absolutely ridiculous. It is also a tremendously better value because a $180 processor, when overclocked, absolutely blows the top AMD chips out the water. There is nothing AMD can do right now with the K8 architecture to overcome this. K8L will definitely close the gap but don't expect it to dominate Conroe and all of a sudden everyone hops back on the AMD bandwagon.

A lot of people have forgotten how AMD took the crown with K8. The performance was actually head to toe between Barton and Northwood for a long time. It was 2.4C vs XP 2500+. AMD then came out of nowhere and released the K8 which set new standards for efficiency and offered a healthy performance boost. It didn't blow NetBurst away like Conroe did to K8 in both performance and efficiency.

It took awhile for AMD to build a large performance lead over the Pentium 4. At launch the Athlon 64 didn't blow the Pentium 4 out of the water, with Core 2 Duo the difference is that Intel has a considerable lead right from the get go.

Well the actuality was that the Athlon XP and the Northwood Pentium 4's were trading blows during the 400FSB/533FSB stages, with each architecture having it strengths, AMD was priced much cheaper during this time though, since AMD wasn't well known and had a lack of confidence.

When we reached the 800FSB Northwood they took the lead, a Pentium 4 2.4C equaled a Athlon XP 2800+ in performance, with the 2.8C equaling the XP 3200+, the 3.0C and 3.2C were basically untouchable, and then AMD released the Athlon 64's in September and that equalized things again, each architecture had it strengths, and slowly from that point forward Intel had issues so they slowly fell behind, Intel was only able to extract 400MHZ more from Prescott, while AMD was able to extract 600MHZ from Athlon 64. So it slowly turned more and more to AMD's favor. Once we shifted to the X2, where AMD dropped only 200MHZ and Intel had to drop 600MHZ, Intel fell alot more behind and that was the time when AMD started dominating on performance, but unlike Core 2 it wasn't a consistent domination more like really strong on some suits, mildly better in others.
 

Regs

Lifer
Aug 9, 2002
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I hope AMD will be able to continue to grow. If that includes regaining the performance crown or at least move on from the K8 then good.
 

StopSign

Senior member
Dec 15, 2006
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The only P4 in that article is a single core Prescott at 3.2 GHz and it's getting beaten by Pentium Ds and X2s. What does that supposed to demonstrate? Dual core is faster?
 

Yellowbeard

Golden Member
Sep 9, 2003
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Intel, New transistor materials and die shrink:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16839253/

From the article:

Intel said new materials help provide a 20 percent boost in transistor performance. IBM did not release specifics of its project.

?This gives the entire chip industry a new life in terms of Moore?s Law, in all three of the big metrics ? performance, power consumption and transistor density,? said David Lammers, director of WeSRCH.com, a social networking Web site for semiconductor enthusiasts and part of VLSI Research Inc. ?It opens the door to some pretty rapid improvements.?

Intel appears the farthest along in bringing a product based on the technology to market.


AMD is tied in with the IBM crowd on this one. However, it appears that Intel is farther along. This can't be good news for AMD. I don't see the "crown" changing hands any time soon.

 

nrb

Member
Feb 22, 2006
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Will K8L be able to match the performance of existing Conroe chips? I'd be very surprised if it didn't. However, Conroe has a lot of headroom for clock speed increases. They're regularly clocked past 3.5GHz without even breaking a sweat. If Intel wanted to make a high-performance (high-price) part with a much higher offficial clock speed, it quite easily could. Whether K8L would be able to perform on a level with that is harder to say. I hope so, but I don't know.

Once Penryn comes along (with the combination of 45nm and high-k dielectric, etc.) I suspect things will swing back in Intel's favour. AMD won't be making the transition to 45nm any time soon. And by the time it does, it will have Nehalem to deal with.
 

Yellowbeard

Golden Member
Sep 9, 2003
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Originally posted by: nrb
Once Penryn comes along (with the combination of 45nm and high-k dielectric, etc.) I suspect things will swing back in Intel's favour. AMD won't be making the transition to 45nm any time soon. And by the time it does, it will have Nehalem to deal with.

Seeing as how AMD has only recently gotten 65nm to market I don't see 45nm for them anytime soon. My impression is that Intel has put themselves into position to "1-UP" AMD for quite some time to come. They are not "showing their hand" just yet. I suspect that for everything AMD releases for the next 2 years+, Intel will trump it.

It's like Admiral Yamamoto said after Pearl Harbor about awakening a giant (with Intel being the giant) and he will be filled with a terrible wrath.
 

StopSign

Senior member
Dec 15, 2006
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Another major problem was that AMD revealed too much information too early. Word about K8L already got out before anyone has even heard of Conroe. At the time AMD still had the crown and people expected great things from K8's successor. Then all of a sudden Intel released that mysterious E6700 w/ Bad Axe 2 benchmark in spring that dominated the FX-60 (which was a god-like chip at the time). After that people were banking on K8L to simply overcome the performance deficit.
 

PetNorth

Senior member
Dec 5, 2003
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Originally posted by: StopSign
The only P4 in that article is a single core Prescott at 3.2 GHz and it's getting beaten by Pentium Ds and X2s. What does that supposed to demonstrate? Dual core is faster?

well, PD is P4 after all (netburst)
 

coldpower27

Golden Member
Jul 18, 2004
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Originally posted by: StopSign
Originally posted by: PetNorth
Originally posted by: StopSign
The performance lead K8 had on P4 was nowhere near the kind of lead Conroe has on K8.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2410
If I'm not mistaken, that's a review for Athlon X2. Were you around during the days of Clawhammer?

StopSign, I think the solution is simple just clarify what you really mean.

The performance lead Athlon 64 had on the Pentium 4 HT was nowhere near the kind of lead the Core 2 Duo (Conroe) has on the Athlon 64x2.

Am I right? Or do you mean something else?
 

coldpower27

Golden Member
Jul 18, 2004
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Originally posted by: SparkyJJO
I don't know but we'll find out.

What I find interesting is how ever since C2D it seems that the prediction is AMD has no chance to keep up now. Why not? AMD did it once, and pushed intel to #2 performance-wise for 3 years. So intel took the crown again (took them long enough to ditch that P4!) and people act like AMD is a goner now. Hasn't even been a year with intel on top yet.

People were disappointed with AM2 in comparison with C2D but AMD never said it was going to be that much better performing than s939. It was just a step towards something bigger (K8L). So far I haven't seen AMD release anything hyped up to be something it wasn't, they didn't hype up AM2 or the new 65nm chip. I haven't seen AMD fail to live up to what they said yet at this point.

I think that while Intel obviously hates AMD with a passion they still don't want AMD to totally go away. If they forced AMD to go under (not likely its gonna happen, just saying IF) then intel would be in trouble for monopolistic practices. I'm sure that if it wasn't for that intel would have pulled some stupid stunt to force AMD out and then charge us that $500 for a P2 ;)

The reason that some people think AMD has no chance is because Athlon 64 success largely came from that fact that Intel made a misprediction with where to drive their architecture allowing AMD to take the lead over time. The fact that the K8 architecture was designed well also helped.

Now that Intel has seen the error of it's ways, it is not likely Intel will mispredict on the architecture front again. With Intel focusing on developing good products from a engineering standpoint instead of a marketing standpoint, Intel is pretty much a very tough opponent to beat.

It is actually expected that Intel stay in the lead considering their sheer manpower and resources available as their disposal.

Though there is some chance that Intel might get complacent if AMD isn't tough competition, but that isn't likely to happen just yet.

Also if you consider overall performance Athlon 64's didn't garner the lead till the X2's arrived, so they had the overall lead for a little over a year as the Pentium 4's with HyperThreading still had tasks they excelled at over the Athlon 64's.
 

Rottie

Diamond Member
Feb 10, 2002
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Believe me AMD is not going to touch crown. AMD has been underdog for life.