Comments on: Early tests give advantage to Intel's Conroe

Preliminary results back up the chipmaker's boasts, but AMD fans point out that Intel built the PCs used to compare the chips.

[Earl Benser]

What an opportunity for a troll contest....

Intel is perfectly justified in building their PC for testing Intel
processors, particularly if AMD processors are not
interchangeable with Intel processors - which I think is true -
memory management and all that.

I'm sure that AMD builds their own PC's to test AMD processors.

So, people, cut the BS and make your claims based upon
recognized and accepted third party benchmarks. Self
promoting in-house technical claims are not worth the effort to
repeat.

Maybe we can get an actual performance comparison rather than
a noise contest.

[RayGentry]

i don't quite agree

i think the bias is not that intel built the unit, but that intel put the conroe on an newer MB and what-not, while the mb used for the AMD was an older model. the two MB used need to have as similar specs as possible and if the RAM used is optimized for one, it should be adjusted to the approprately optimized settings for the other, rather than optimized for intel and using the same intel settings on the AMD. of course one will out perform the other if one it set to do well and the other is just tossed in there. i'm not explicitly saying that's how it was done, but that's the bias i think people use when they excercize caution regarding intel's stats.

[Earl Benser]

Curious....

... for all the furor the Intel/AMD processorcontest seems to
arouse, it just maybe most irrelevant. As claimed by another
poster, 98% of the PC buyers don't care which processor they buy.
If so, that makes all the competition just a matter of price to the
OEM's, nothing else.

Curious, indeed.....

[Dachi]

You can buy an Athlon 64 FX-60 today.

I don't blame the skeptics for not handing over the performance crown just yet.

You can surf to TigerDirect or whatever and buy an FX-60 today but the Conroe is not out till later in the year.

With that said the IDC AMD system was not running the latest and greatest MB and BIOS, but the Intel system was 5-5-5-15 memory timings instead of 4-4-4-15 which gave it a slight disadvantage.

So the benchmark itself ended up being a pretty fair comparison.

Anandtech posted updated results here:
http://anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2716&p=6

By launch I am sure AMD will have closed in the lead some, but also notice that Intel did better with games but AMD still took media encoding. (and many benchmarks are just not listed)

By launch deciding which is the "better" may just depend on the types of applications you use.

[indrakanti]

I think you misunderstood..

the bench markes. For media encoding, shorter bars are better. Looks like..for now conroe has overall better benchmarks. And just for the record, I am not a fan of either processor maker (though I personally think AMD chips are better value for the money you pay ;-).)

[amd_ace]

Conroe outperforms by more than 20%

in many benchmarks. The article is very conservative in saying 20%.

[trecooldc]

Price/performance is what matters

What matters to the vast majority of users isn't the speed of the processor, but the processor's price/performance ratio. After years of only buying Intel-inside products, I switched this year to an AMD Sempron laptop that's priced about 20-30% less than a comparable Intel-inside product -- and am extremely happy with my decision. I haven't noticed any significant performance penalty, and I often run several applications simultaneously.

[microsoft slayer]

Only 20% , *BIG YAWN*

And of course 20 degree celsius hotter. Intel, go back to the drawing board.

[Lindy01]

Umm read the reviews again

The conroe tested was clocked at 2.67ghz compared to the FX60 at 2.8ghz (overclocked)

Not only did the conroe beat it performance wise but the conroe was cooler and only using 65watts of power compared to the FX60 at over a 100watts.

The conroe 3.3ghz is supposed to be a 85watt CPU...and I would bet alot faster.

[aabcdefghij987654321]

20% is 1/5th, that's not trivial

But it would be more informative if someone ran a benchmark of the *current* best Intel chip vs the new one. That's the figure I'd like to see.

[jzsaxpc]

Look, Intel will catch up

Look, I am an AMD fan all the way, but guess what, everyone knew that Intel would catch up, for a while they didn't do so well on their chips, and they are JUST now starting to get back onto the playing field.

But it doesn't matter, how many people do you know with $1000 CPU's, just because you have THE fastest chip doesn't make you the king of the world.

Heck, just buy "the cell" and win over everyone, might cost $15000, but hey, who is counting.

The point is, perhaps intel now edges out AMD by perhaps 5% (which is large in the CPU market) for one chip. I am assuming this is later, after AMD gets their chips on the market too. HOWEVER, AMD kicks butt in benchmarks for their midrange processors. 80% of their duel cores still outpreform Dells of the same price, and the Athlon 64 is by far the best chip for your money. Show me a $120 Dell chip that can do anything close to the 64. That is how AMD works, its all about power per dollar, and AMD is the firm winner.

I'll give Intel some credit, they didn't just do nothing, their gains will come later, they built up their manufacturing process, when they make their chips, currently they are about 6 months ahead of AMD, in terms of 65 nano chips and the such.

One last point, AMD is not making major changes this year, it is the major changes that give you the large boost in preformance, just wait. Intel will sell you a chip before its even designed, AMD is very quite, who knows what they have up their sleave, new memory, but preformance wise, no instant payoff, give it 8 months. So we don't know where AMD is going.

Quad core, yeah, but other then that, where is AMD heading? Who knows?

[Bryan Bartlett]

Of course it outperforms the current AMD CPUs

Conroe is basically the Pentium 5. It would be rediculous for Intel or AMD to come out with a brand new chip architecture that didn't outperform the previous chips.

This just goes to show how GOOD competition is!

What am I getting at? When intel pushed out the pentium 4 the performance gain compared to the pentium 3 was an embarrasement and I believe that the early pentium 4s were slower then the P3s.

But this time around AMD is actually in the game and everyone views them as a big player. It really doesn't surprise me that Intel actually got off their butts and put in some decent work into their new chip architecture before pushing out the door. They couldn't afford to push out something new and it NOT have a big perform increase.

From the previews I read about the new AM2 socket, the change to DDR2 isn't supposed to show that much of a performance increase due to the slow timings on DDR2 (Which is why they've waited for DDR2 @ 800Mhz).

Like others have said, what will be really interesting to see is the comparison between performance and price! This new chip may give a 20% increase in performance over AMDs fastest chip, but is that their low-end Conroe or one that's going to cost us $1000+.

What I would like to see is Intel be smart and actually take advantage of the situation and turn the tables on AMD by offering this 20%+ increase cpu at a nice low price, since low price high performance has been AMDs strategy in the past.

Hopefully with both Intel & AMD going to smaller processes and the CPUs going to be 20%+ faster then current CPUs things will heat up quick and the money they are saving from the smaller processes are actually PASSED ON TO THE CUSTOMER!

My 2 cents...and then some. ;)

[thedevilbegone]

I guess...

Intel would continue to take the lead. However this would in no way affect the market share of AMD significantly. In fact I expect it to continue it's increase in marketshare based on current trends. Mainly due to the prices maintained by AMD. However other players such as VIA which supply mobos with builtin processors may loose in the pricing v/s performance...