Very interesting article

[Jedakiah]

This article is very interesting for anyone wondering what the current status of AMD and ATi is.

As you all know I gained a profound trust in AMD during their glory years and have not built an Intel desktop since.  But I still try to be very fair when recommending parts to people.  And I clearly remain eternally optimistic about AMDs future releases.  All that aside, I thought this article was a fair one that helps put the company and their tech in perspective.  And it touches on Intels strengths as well. 

[Fuzzeh_Panda]

So I'm confused. AMD is coming out with a new processor soon? And something about spiders? I haven't really built my own computer to know if AMD is better than Intel. From what I can tell, in similar processors, AMD overclocks better with a slightly lower price than Intel, but Intel innovates new processors more than AMD.

On a side note, if you get an AMD motherboard, do you have to buy an ATI graphics card? I don't really know what's going on.

[KYLE]

no.

[Jedakiah]

AMD is equally compatible with ATi and Nvidia.  Nvidia is still a large manufacturer of AMD based chipsets.  I actually prefer Nvidia chipsets on my AMDs. 

AMD released a new processor today for the high end gamers.  And a new chipset dubbed Spider.  This new processor could literally mean the death of AMD if it ends up performing badly.  Or it could completely turn the tables again.  Especially if Intel's next release ends up like Many of Intel's brand new architectures. 

Currently Intels processors own AMDs in almost every way.  The really low end processor market is still competitive, but from a gamers standpoint C2D is always faster and has great overclockability.  The reason there is no competition is because AMD hasn't released anything significant in a long time.  Which is why AMD as a business is doing so bad. 

Both Intel fans and AMD ones have a lot of interest vested in AMDs latest processor.  If it turns out badly AMD could eventually go under and Intel will have no competition and thus not be competitive.  Think Microsoft. 

[Jedakiah]

Holy mother of **** these things are cheap.  When Intel released it's quads I believe they were $999.  I was expecting to spend something like that on my next processor, but DAMN BABY.  I am so glad I own an AM2 system right now. 

I'm going to wait a little bit and read what critics have to say.  But I am going to try and beat the Christmas shoppers to my X4. 

I might even take the ATi plunge pending an investigation of their latest technology.  It is ahead of Nvidia in terms of Directx and OpenGL support and considering how cheap they are it might be time for me to give them a test run. I never had any problems from my old ATi cards.  Then again I never had problems with Nvidia either.   

[Labyrinthine]

After reading that article and a few others it looks like we have a budget CPU that doesn't perform as well as intel's quadcores.

I know that's a sweeping generalization, but it's good enough to put my interest in these CPUs on the backburner for a while.

[Jedakiah]

Yup, so far the news does not look good if your shopping for a high end system.  Buuuuuut I'll wait to judge until I see some good/fair application benchmarks.  Intel's cache is practically designed to increase CPU benchmarks but is not as efficient at real world performance tests. 

I generally take everything a company says about their up and coming product, then cut it in half.  That did set the bar considerably higher than it hit (as of yet). 

[Labyrinthine]

Yup, so far the news does not look good if your shopping for a high end system.  Buuuuuut I'll wait to judge until I see some good/fair application benchmarks.  Intel's cache is practically designed to increase CPU benchmarks but is not as efficient at real world performance tests. 

I generally take everything a company says about their up and coming product, then cut it in half.  That did set the bar considerably higher than it hit (as of yet). 

See the tom's hardware article on this, it's around 42 pages with all sorts of good real world tests.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/19/the_spider_weaves_its_web/

[Latro]

Ouch.. They found a bug that is present in the 2.2ghz model chips... 

And it reminds people of Pentium 60.

Comparing anything to a Pentium 60 bug is not good.

[Jedakiah]

Roger that.  At least the "bug" is not in the 9700, the only one it would have affected.  It's interesting that they even mentioned this bug if no one, including many AMD employees knew about it before. 

I was actually surprised by this comment "We should mention that bugs like these are nothing extraordinary and are a comparatively commonplace occurrence." it then went on to mention Intel's glitches.  Considering how many years they spend developing these things how can a bug slip by them? 

It's interesting how low their core voltage is and how cool this thing runs.  Overclocking potential?  They did not have time for thorough testing, but using over drive and AMD's completely unlocked Phenom they did get it up to 3 Ghz and ran 3D mark without a glitch.  15% performance boost. 

I will however wait for some fair benchmarks.  f***rying out loud they didn't even put the Phenom on an AM2+ board and at least some of the processors they compared it to were overclocked. 

Either way for me to slip into a X4 from AM2 will be significantly cheaper.  Plus AM3 is the next step.  And upgrading to it will also be cheaper.  AMD has it figured out on how to drop prices without actually lowering them.  The last line in the article summed it up "In the end, if you're looking to make the most of a long-term investment, AMD is without a doubt the better platform choice". 

[Jedakiah]

[Labyrinthine]

I'm tempted to trust those benchmarks, but I can't.

#1 They don't list their testbed
#2 They test at 10x7, which is not useful. It's understandable that they are testing CPU performance here, not GPU - CPU performance, but a useful benchmark would bother to do both. Especially considering the recent pairings between GPU and CPU companies.

Still, though, they show more or less what the other article did. The phenoms cost less and perform worse than the intel equivalents. Although, the difference is minimal, so there really is no benefit in paying the hundreds more for the intel side of things right now.

[Jedakiah]

I guess I took special interest in the Crysis benchmark since future games are probably going to be designed a lot like it.  Which gave AMD an edge.  And what the test as a whole showed me was AMD's processors performed roughly equal (at times better at times worse) to those of Intel's at the same clock speeds.  But when you factor in that AMD is hands down cheaper and makes for far cheaper upgrades, you'll be tempted to switch. 

As for running games at those resolutions, I think doing it at a small resolution and at a standard res like 1680x1050 would have been nice.  But maybe we'll see something like that in the future. 

I will also be keenly interested when AMD releases it's FX processors.  So far people have often been comparing AMD's highest desktop processor to Intel's gaming ones.  Obviously not a fair comparison.  I'm also interested in the final version of the Phenom 97 and 98.  Right now people have prerelease versions that might not be full performance.  And of course it will be interesting to see how much ass the QX977x kicks. 

BTW Laby, here are the system specs they tested it on:
CPU:      AMD Phenom 9900 (2.6GHz)
AMD Phenom 9700 (2.4GHz)
AMD Phenom 9600 (2.3GHz)
AMD Phenom 9500 (2.2GHz)
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 (2.66GHz/1333MHz)
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 (2.66GHz/1066MHz)
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.40GHz/1066MHz)
Motherboard:    ASUS P5E3 Deluxe (X38)
MSI K9A2 Platinum (790FX)
Chipset:    Intel X38
AMD 790FX
Chipset Drivers:    Intel 8.1.1.1010 (Intel)
AMD 790FX Launch Drivers
Hard Disk:    Western Digital Raptor 150GB
Memory:    Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 4-4-4-12 (1GB x 2)
Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1066 7-7-7-20 (1GB x 2)
Video Card:    NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX
Video Drivers:    NVIDIA ForceWare 169.09
Desktop Resolution:    1920 x 1200
OS:    Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit

[Latro]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/04/237248

Seems the bug is getting more serious.. I'd avoid these chips for a few months at least.

[Jedakiah]

Very interesting.  What is most interesting to me is that the issue was originally thought to only affect virtualization but not it is said to rarely effect other types of high work loads. 

In comparison though, every Core 2 Duo sold up through April '07 also had a very serious erratum (if you consider these types of things serious). 

You can toggle the fix for this problem on or off with AMD's next update.  And if you're running RedHat Linux don't work about.  You can get a penalty free fix.