Re: Re: Intel AMD
Originally posted by tortoise
... Clock-for-clock, they school Intel chips.
True, as is the case with the G5 - still, this only really matters if you're competing clock-for-clock rather than chip-for-chip. IBM and AMD get more done per cycle, intel traditionally offers higher numbers of cycles.
AMD floating point performance has been superior to Intel's for some time now, which has made them popular for supercomputing clusters.
Again a similar situation to the IBM chips. Unfortunately, for an awful lot of applications its integer performance that really counts, which is why intel's poor specFP showings have never really hurt them outside the research and supercomputer setting. Moving to 64-bit will make this even more critical, as some applications that currently use floating-point will be able to move to integer-based designs, which are generally more accurate.
For most intents and purposes, a 2.0 GHz Opteron wipes the floor with Intel processors that are clocked much higher. AMD chips not only some of the fastest you can buy per clock, they are also among the very fastest you can buy in absolute terms as well.
That's a better comparison. Comparing power per clock is like looking at two engines are comparing Horsepower-per-liter -- of great interest to engine builders, pretty much irrelevant to most people/companies.
Intel chips are only fast in narrow domains, and even then at insane clock rates.
Well... again, nobody really cares about the clock rates being high. And the "narrow domains" are those that matter the most to a lot of consumers and businesses (integer processing).
The G5 is generally a bit slower than an Opteron clock-for-clock, but it will make a better general purpose processor than Intel's current lineup and has a much better architecture than the P4 in its various incarnations.
I'm interested in seeing how the PM's replacement does - these are built from the old PIII lineage, remember, and the current sets in Centrino laptops are remarkably powerful, seemingly performing clock-for-clock with the G5 in the tests that I've seen and done. I don't know what kind of yields they're getting of these chips, but can't help but wonder what a high-power version would be like. Still, right now intel can churn out very fast P4s for very little money, which is probably the best solution for most consumers. Even businesses, once you get out of the rendering type environments are better served with their historically strong integer performance. This is the area where I'd really like to see IBM and AMD make some strides.
-Richard
