[citation][nom]quicksilver98[/nom]Complete failures? Last time I checked this review is comparing 2+ yr old technology to brand new architecture. I think for its age that the Phenom II is hold up. I would say keep ignorant comments like that out of discussions until it's apples to apples. Don't forget when AMD released the Athlon 64 and it stomped the Pentium 4, it was the same thing then and people were trashing the P4 (which at the time was a 5yr old tech) Give AMD a break until they release their new offerings.. You wouldn't want to look foolish if Bulldozer beats SB in a review like this again.[/citation]
You're wrong on so many levels. Pentium 4 wasn't an old technology at all, Prescott was a huge redesign compared to Northwood, much more than Athlon 64 was compared to the Athlon XP. In fact, Sandy Bridge is in many ways a Pentium 4 merged with the Nehalem, if anything being slightly more Pentium 4. For old technology, it's kind of funny it was used so extensively in the new architecture.
Pentium 4 failed because of one thing - power use and heat. It would have killed the Athlon 64 except it was limited in clock speed by this. Intel's big mistake was they didn't consider this a limiting factor, and, ironically, at 45 nm it would have been much less of one.
The reality is, Barcelona got stomped the day it came out by Intel's 1995 based architecture. It can't compete with Intel's generation previous to the previous generation. Yet, it was out well after it, and is larger. It's a complete failure.
It's comical to see people say they want to wait for the Bulldozer, and how it will compete with the SB. What do you base this on, it's new? It has NO CHANCE of being a better gaming processor, overall, because it's not designed that way. If you look at the design, you'll see AMD gave up competing with Intel on single-threaded performance, and as you can see from these benchmarks, going more than four threads yields nothing. Of course, that can change. BD will excel at multi-threading per watt, and will, AMD hopes, handle many threaded workloads more efficiently (meaning, per watt), than Intel's processors. For servers and such, where energy use is a big deal, this could make the processor very attractive for certain workloads. As is, AMD is worse at everything, and being better at this element is not trivial or unimportant, and I'm not in any way implying it. It's just not going to beat, or be close to, SB in games or other applications like that. Unless you can take advantage of the extra execution unit, or power use is critical (after all, a 2 core BD should be able to outperform a 2 core SB, if you're using four threads aggressively, since the BD will have two full execution units, compared to the virtual solution by Intel, and if you go to four core Intel, well, you're probably using more power), SB will almost certainly offer better performance. For gamers, power isn't important, and nothing seems to be capable of using 7+ threads, and you'd probably need 9-12 threads before a six core/12 execution unit BD would really flex its muscle over a six core SB. The test shown on this article don't show that's even close to reality right now.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram