10 years ago, Intel was king. Until the first Athlon was released, AMD was nothing more than a bargain brand CPU for people who balked at the high cost of Intel processors. With the release of the Slot A Athlon, AMD hinted at what was to come, although that processor’s release was hindered by heat problems and buggy chipsets. Their quality improved with the Athlon XP: although heat was still an issue, these processors essentially were faster and more efficient, clock-for-clock, than the Pentium 4 was. It was only with the release of the Athlon 64 series processors that AMD was able to take advantage of Intel’s flawed NetBurst architecture, with its extremely long pipeline and inefficiencies. AMD, once the bargain brand, was now outperforming the king. No longer were their processors less expensive, in fact in most cases they were more expensive simply because the public has always demanded performance at all cost. As the Athlon 64 nears its 3rd birthday, Intel finally is on the verge of regaining the performance crown. I say it is about time.
Whether the recently released Conroe benchmarks are 100% accurate or not, anyone who doubts that Intel has the ability to completely redesign their architecture and come out on top after 3 long years is delusional. They have the resources and capability, and after losing so much market share in the desktop/server areas, you can bet they better do something soon or risk falling on their bloated ass.
I must admit, I am a fanboy of performance. I don’t care about brands. I used Intel processors exclusively until around 2001, purely because they were faster, more efficient and less problematic (though AMD’s problems weren’t of their own doing). I currently have AMD processors in the majority of the machines on my home network. My most recent purchase was an Opteron 165, which is an amazing chip. I don’t think I could’ve spent my money in a better way. It replaced an aging A64 3000+, which itself was an amazing processor. The only non-AMD chips I have in use now are a P4 Northwood 2.8C and a Pentium III 500, and they perform their job fine. Ironically enough, I bought the P4 2.8C as a bargain processor. The tables had now turned.
As much as I look forward to Conroe, as well as all of the other goodies on the horizon, I must say the most exciting thing I look forward to now is the competition between Intel and AMD. This can only mean one thing and that is better products for us. When Conroe is released, if it is indeed as fast as Intel claims it to be, that can only mean AMD will be working that much harder towards keeping up…..which benefits us all.
Whether the recently released Conroe benchmarks are 100% accurate or not, anyone who doubts that Intel has the ability to completely redesign their architecture and come out on top after 3 long years is delusional. They have the resources and capability, and after losing so much market share in the desktop/server areas, you can bet they better do something soon or risk falling on their bloated ass.
I must admit, I am a fanboy of performance. I don’t care about brands. I used Intel processors exclusively until around 2001, purely because they were faster, more efficient and less problematic (though AMD’s problems weren’t of their own doing). I currently have AMD processors in the majority of the machines on my home network. My most recent purchase was an Opteron 165, which is an amazing chip. I don’t think I could’ve spent my money in a better way. It replaced an aging A64 3000+, which itself was an amazing processor. The only non-AMD chips I have in use now are a P4 Northwood 2.8C and a Pentium III 500, and they perform their job fine. Ironically enough, I bought the P4 2.8C as a bargain processor. The tables had now turned.
As much as I look forward to Conroe, as well as all of the other goodies on the horizon, I must say the most exciting thing I look forward to now is the competition between Intel and AMD. This can only mean one thing and that is better products for us. When Conroe is released, if it is indeed as fast as Intel claims it to be, that can only mean AMD will be working that much harder towards keeping up…..which benefits us all.
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