It was only two or three years ago that AMD had the workstation solution of choice, over the bigger Intel.\u00c2\u00a0 AMD’s Opteron series was the first to\u00c2\u00a0offer many features that were especially important to video editors, from native 64 bit processing and\u00c2\u00a0multiple cores, to hypertransport frontside bus and integrated memory controllers.\u00c2\u00a0 Opteron’s with these features were\u00c2\u00a0 released about a year before Intel’s Xeons could catch up.\u00c2\u00a0 By the time Intel released Nocona core Xeons with 64bit support in mid 2005, AMD was selling Opteron’s with dual cores, and so on the race went.\u00c2\u00a0 The only advantage the\u00c2\u00a0Xeon’s were able to hold onto was their higher clock speed, but it was well known that Opteron’s were far more powerful\u00c2\u00a0at a given clock speed.<\/p>\n
Then in the summer of 2006, Intel released two major processor upgrades back to back.\u00c2\u00a0 The Dempsey cores (5000 series) were a maxed out variation of the Pentium 4 “Netburst” architecture, and finally brought dual cores to the Xeon line.\u00c2\u00a0 The 3.73 Ghz was well above AMD’s 2.6 Ghz and the 1066Mhz FSB final topped AMD’s\u00c2\u00a01Ghz.\u00c2\u00a0 Only one month later, Intel released its entire new line of CPUs for all platforms, based on their totally new “Core2” design.\u00c2\u00a0 The Woodcrest series of Xeon’s (5100 series) were clocked lower, were supposed to be much more efficient per clock cycle, along the lines of the Opterons.\u00c2\u00a0 Woodcrest had everything to finally close the gap between Xeons and Opterons, with dual 64 bit cores runnning more efficiently and already at higher clock speeds, with a 3Ghz model available.\u00c2\u00a0 AMD had very little in the way of improvements in their response, and were totally unprepared when Intel released their next update less than 6 months later.<\/p>\n
The Clovertown (5300 series) CPUs were simply two Woodcrest chips in a single socket, making it a Quad Core CPU.\u00c2\u00a0 This allowed a regular Xeon motherboard to support 8 discrete processing cores, clearly doubling performance in high end applications.\u00c2\u00a0 I had the privilege to use a Clovertown system for about a month when they were first released, and it was without\u00c2\u00a0question the fastest computer I have ever used, by a long shot.<\/p>\n
AMD’s response was a new line of CPUs with a new numbering scheme, but no new major features.\u00c2\u00a0 Then recently, a year after Intel brought Quad Core CPUs to market, AMD released their long awaited Barcelona line, which were native quad core CPUs.\u00c2\u00a0 I have yet to see any version of those for sale nearly a month after release, and almost every review and benchmark has been negative.<\/p>\n
We are now a month away from Intel’s next refresh of their CPU line, and are looking forward to more L2 cache, 1600Mhz FSB, and much lower prices.\u00c2\u00a0 AMD seems to have nothing in sight with which to compete with, which is unfortunate for both Intel and AMD users, since competition usually drives prices down for all users.\u00c2\u00a0 On the positive side, Intel doesn’t seem to be using their monopoly on the ultra high end to dramatically inflate prices.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Xeons are still lacking\u00c2\u00a0AMD’s integrated memory controller and Hypertransport link, but those are scheduled to be\u00c2\u00a0included in Intel’s next major redesign, “Nehalem” in late 2008.\u00c2\u00a0 It will be interesting to see what AMD brings to the table by then.\u00c2\u00a0 Stay tuned for details when Intel releases their new line of CPUs\u00c2\u00a0next month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was only two or three years ago that AMD had the workstation solution of choice, over the bigger Intel.\u00c2\u00a0 AMD’s Opteron series was the first to\u00c2\u00a0offer many features that were especially important to video editors, from native 64 bit processing and\u00c2\u00a0multiple cores, to hypertransport frontside bus and integrated memory controllers.\u00c2\u00a0 Opteron’s with these features […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[26,25,28,27],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}