DRAMatisation: The Brummie Shakespeare's guide to memory
|
|
|
AMD sparks six-core desktop price war
CHIP DESIGNER AMD has sparked what could become a price war with Intel in the six-core x86 processor market.
The six-core desktop Phenom II X6 processors that AMD announced yesterday are substantially less pricey than Intel's latest six-core Core i7-980XM desktop processor.
The Phenom II X6 1090T processor runs at 3.2GHz and will hit the shops at $295, while the 1055T, which runs at 2.8GHz, is priced at $199. Intel's Core i7-980XM desktop processor is priced at $999.
Mike Kreiten, product marketing manager for desktop processors at AMD, said that the Phenom II X6 chips are the fastest yet in AMD's desktop processor lineup and are targeted at gamers and buyers looking for high-performance desktop CPUs. He said, "It's a clear rival for Core i7."
Intel's Core i7-980XM chip will be faster on some threaded applications, however you can't really complain if you have paid only a fifth of the cost.
AMD said that the six-core part is going to be faster, but what it's really about is the "value equation".
It is not likely that Chipzilla will take much action to drop its prices. The high end of the market is small and not really worth Intel doing too much over.
However with rumours that Apple is thinking of switching some of its chips to AMD this price cut might make a bit of sense.
AMD flogs six-core Opteron chips for servers code-named Istanbul and 12-core server processors code-named Magny-Cours.
The Phenom II X6 is based on Istanbul and will have 6MB of L3 cache and draw up to 125 watts of power.
It also has AMD's Turbo Core technology, which speeds up processor cores by up to 500MHz. When that kicks in the 1090T processor could run at up to 3.6GHz while the 1055T will be able to run at up to 3.3GHz. µ
Share this:
Share
I will update all my engineers' PCs next month, probably with the X6. Because we run tools that can use all the cores you throw at them (better than they use more megahurtz) and my boss won't splurge $1k per proc for intels, but $300 is ok. At this price and power, 3.2G x6 beats quads. I won't get the fastest rigs on the planet, but if I wanted those I'd have to wait another year to get funding.
I'm a happy minority.
I have to say, you have the defragmentation thing horribly wrong.
In defrag process, hard disks do much of the work (of course) and they are very stressed by it, meaning they have no time to do anything else.
Thusly doing anything else intensive (gaming, ripping video etc.) will totally kill them. Even if the disk is only for storage and has no other data or installed programs on it.
The only thing anyone could recommend when defraging is something that does not use disks often, like reading or typing, music, watching movies (no, not blueray when the whole machine is working just to show it).
Don't want to get too deep in explaining, there is a lot of info online about it.
Personally I like the idea of more cores per chip.
More cores mean I can run more SETI stuff while gaming and having Windows defrag my four discs, instead of having to schedule a defrag for night hours and wake up in the morning to find that the PC is still on because the defrag failed or the shutdown command simply didn't shut the darn thing down.
More cores also means that, for apps that cannot multi-thread properly, I can assign one app to one core and use the other cores for something else.
Now what would really be fine and dandy would be if XP could remember the damn settings over a reboot. That way I wouldn't have to do so much micromanagement core-wise.
"6x now? Sheesh, how many people even max out 4 cores? Or 2? Even the best of desktop OSes barely utilize multiple processors."
You're absolutely right, and AMD took this in to consideration with their turbo core technology, if you are only utilizing 3 cores or less, it adjusts itself and kicks up 3 cores by up to 500mhz while reducing the remaining 3 to a slower speed, therefore speeding up the operations you're running.
I'll definitely be buying a Phenom X6 within the next 6 months. I'm running a Phenom X2 550 unlocked to 4 3.1ghz cores and I can pin the CPU easily at 100% when x264 encoding. Even Starcraft 2 runs at 70% on 4 cores with Custom AI @ 1920x1200x32Bit. I'm also still using an AM2+ board so 18+ months later I can still drop in AMD's latest processor. Hopefully when AM4 rolls around they go with triple or quad channel memory to catch up to Intels memory bandwidth....
6x now? Sheesh, how many people even max out 4 cores? Or 2? Even the best of desktop OSes barely utilize multiple processors. It's just hard to parallelize code, and most applications hardly take advantage of multiprocessing. This is going to become another lame Mhz war, only with cores.
I hate this attempt to compensate poor single-core performance by carpet bombing many small inferior CPUs. Give me more cache, or better controllers or something, but even 4 cores is more than most people will ever need on their desktop.
Until more applications take advantage of multi-cpu, the advantage of cramming more cores onto a chip are wasted.
A product without purpose is marketing smoke.
Major was kidding of course ;) That's why that 'i'm crazy' comment in the end... ahhh...
But, I am excited about the new X6, especially for that price. I just hope AMD is prepping a faster model by adding more cache. It will push the price higher, but it'll still be competitive compared to 1000$.
Intel absolutely is the best. Otellini walks on water. And, yes, maddoctor is an idiot.
@ Maddoctor.
WT* is wrong with you man? I mean I respect you opinion but you are the real rubbish here. AMD cpu's are great (My Mobile Athlon 4000+ on DFI Lanparty NF250GB still alive) - yeah I agree that they need to shape up but still imagine if Chipzilla didn’t had any competition? And still the 6 core 980 Core 7 is worth $999 and thas a LOT of mula for a piece of silicone that will only last maybe 6 months as the "Bleeding age" of CPU's! Ahh maybe you are a very Rich fanboy that was born with a silver spoon on your !@#$ jeje - Just in case My current setup is INTEL Q6600 (G0) on 790i (EVGA).
Regards boy and INQ
you are full of s.... as always
Maddoctor your an idiot.
Yeah, as usual AMD threw something rubbish to market. Gladly that the AMDiots will buy that. AMDdiot is the perfectt example of fanboy stupidity at its finest. But, AMD is counting its day for bankruptcy 2012. But, when Paul Otellini is the US President those AMD's idiotic fanboys will be cured by using Intel's implanted chip.
i'd gladly pay triple intel's price for a chip half the speed because i associate quality with price!
...is my medication ready yet nurse? and can you undo this jacket? i can't move my arms