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#1
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Budget Solution -- Cheap Core 2 vs Cheaper X2
The C2D is definitely superior, see e. g.
http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&model1=471&model2=433&chart=174 Roy Ah, but will Intel's quad-core solution be superior to AMD's? That is the thousand dollar question. I know next year I'll be able to plug a quad-core Barcelona K8L into the NF-M2, and the optimizations on the evolving K8L architecture will at least close the gap between it and Core 2. The nVidia AM2 solution is alot more solid than anything I'm seeing on socket 775 -- the GeForce 6150+430 reportedly overclocks *stably* to 333x3 and 400x2, while few P965 and 680i can even barely reach 250x4 or 300x3, and I doubt either chipset will really be able to let a Cloverton or Yorktown reach its potential against K8L/Barcelona. What does everyone else think? I'll be building this machine as a poor-man's video-editor/PVR/gaming/folding-rig, to be upgraded to a good quad-core with 4-8 gigs of RAM when DDR2 and Barcelona or Clovertown prices come down. Video card will be a super-cheap X1900 that will fold while the integrated video chipset plays movies to my 22" screen, giving me plenty of DirectX 9 performance out of every game for the next 2-3 years. Final budget for the entire build must be less than $1100. Remember that $133 Athlon + $89 motherboard = $222, while $194 Core 2 Duo + $120 motherboard = $312, which is a difference of $90 -- is the little bit extra performance now worth a hundred dollars, or is it better to go a little bit cheaper now to have a better platform to take advantage of Barcelona K8L later? |
#2
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Budget Solution -- Cheap Core 2 vs Cheaper X2
wrote in message Ah, but will Intel's quad-core solution be superior to AMD's? That is the thousand dollar question. I know next year I'll be able to plug a quad-core Barcelona K8L into the NF-M2, and the optimizations on the evolving K8L architecture will at least close the gap between it and Core 2. The nVidia AM2 solution is alot more solid than anything I'm seeing on socket 775 -- the GeForce 6150+430 reportedly overclocks *stably* to 333x3 and 400x2, while few P965 and 680i can even barely reach 250x4 or 300x3, and I doubt either chipset will really be able to let a Cloverton or Yorktown reach its potential against K8L/Barcelona. What does everyone else think? I'll be building this machine as a poor-man's video-editor/PVR/gaming/folding-rig, to be upgraded to a good quad-core with 4-8 gigs of RAM when DDR2 and Barcelona or Clovertown prices come down. Video card will be a super-cheap X1900 that will fold while the integrated video chipset plays movies to my 22" screen, giving me plenty of DirectX 9 performance out of every game for the next 2-3 years. Final budget for the entire build must be less than $1100. Remember that $133 Athlon + $89 motherboard = $222, while $194 Core 2 Duo + $120 motherboard = $312, which is a difference of $90 -- is the little bit extra performance now worth a hundred dollars, or is it better to go a little bit cheaper now to have a better platform to take advantage of Barcelona K8L later? Please get me up to date You seem to be saying that AMD's quad core CPU's will be AM2? Where can I find out more about this? I've been procrastinating about upgrading that last Athlon XP machine here to either an AM2 X2 or to a C2D. The price differences you described are a factor for me as well. As the other PC's here are all AMD X2, I was concerned that an AM2 solution would soon be superseded by a newer socket and a switch from DDR2 to DDR3 memory. If there are to be quad core AM2 CPU's, that will help me make a decision. |
#3
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Budget Solution -- Cheap Core 2 vs Cheaper X2
Peter van der Goes wrote: wrote in message Ah, but will Intel's quad-core solution be superior to AMD's? That is the thousand dollar question. I know next year I'll be able to plug a quad-core Barcelona K8L into the NF-M2, and the optimizations on the evolving K8L architecture will at least close the gap between it and Core 2. The nVidia AM2 solution is alot more solid than anything I'm seeing on socket 775 -- the GeForce 6150+430 reportedly overclocks *stably* to 333x3 and 400x2, while few P965 and 680i can even barely reach 250x4 or 300x3, and I doubt either chipset will really be able to let a Cloverton or Yorktown reach its potential against K8L/Barcelona. What does everyone else think? I'll be building this machine as a poor-man's video-editor/PVR/gaming/folding-rig, to be upgraded to a good quad-core with 4-8 gigs of RAM when DDR2 and Barcelona or Clovertown prices come down. Video card will be a super-cheap X1900 that will fold while the integrated video chipset plays movies to my 22" screen, giving me plenty of DirectX 9 performance out of every game for the next 2-3 years. Final budget for the entire build must be less than $1100. Remember that $133 Athlon + $89 motherboard = $222, while $194 Core 2 Duo + $120 motherboard = $312, which is a difference of $90 -- is the little bit extra performance now worth a hundred dollars, or is it better to go a little bit cheaper now to have a better platform to take advantage of Barcelona K8L later? Please get me up to date You seem to be saying that AMD's quad core CPU's will be AM2? Where can I find out more about this? I've been procrastinating about upgrading that last Athlon XP machine here to either an AM2 X2 or to a C2D. The price differences you described are a factor for me as well. As the other PC's here are all AMD X2, I was concerned that an AM2 solution would soon be superseded by a newer socket and a switch from DDR2 to DDR3 memory. If there are to be quad core AM2 CPU's, that will help me make a decision. Ah, a comrade in arms! Okay, this is what I've been seeing: K8L (a nomenclature which has largely been dropped in favor of the name "Barcelona" by AMD) will be drop-in compatible with current AM2 boards. Even the DDR3/HT3.0 K8L quad-cores will be backwards compatible and can be plugged into a regular old DDR2/HT2.0 AM2 board. HyperTransport 2.0 provides WAAAAAY more memory bandwidth than an X2 can ever use. HyperTransport 3.0 will provide about double that, or TWICE AS MUCH bandwidth as you already can't even begin to use. HT 3.0 will be great on 16-way servers that have four quad-core chips, but a single quad-core or even octo-core chip will certainly not be wanting on an HT 2.0 bus. So, there's no reason to wait for HT 3.0 if you're only using a single CPU socket. Barcelona is showing 40%-70% performance gains over K8. (someone else please site this with a link) Basically, except for HT 3.0, none of the optimizations implemented by Barcelona will be hampered by inhabiting an AM2 board bought today. AFAIK, Core 2 Duo is currently 20%-40% faster than K8, so this means K8L should be faster than Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad. The following links paint a picture that says "Barcelona Kentsfield" & "Barcelona ! Yorkfield": http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=re...wdO6BfLdn69HFw http://insanetek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4916 http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/articl...50aHVzaWFzdA== http://xtreview.com/addcomment-id-10...class-K8L.html http://discussions.hardwarecentral.c...&mode=threaded http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061206-8363.html http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/20...1229000672.htm http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=19164 http://digg.com/hardware/AMD_AM2_worth_it Some of those threads may disappoint you, but most of them should elate you, as far as K8L is concerned. Of course, you should feel somewhat uncertain, as Barcelona and Yorkfield (Intel's future 8-core CPU) aren't yet on the market. Yorkfield will probably be the only thing able to catch Barcelona, but Yorkfield will probably be a pair of twin dual core processors on a die which again -- drum roll -- will have to go through the FSB to talk to each other, and STILL won't have on-die memory controllers. Add to that that Yorkfield will probably require a new motherboard, and still not soundly crush Barcelona, and, to my wallet, it's (almost) a no-brainer which platform to go with for the long haul (3+ years). Yes, AMD's new 65nm native quad-core CPUs will provide superior core-to-core-to-core-to-core communication compared to intel's multi-core solution (which is two Core 2 Duos kludged together but not really connected, having to communicate to each other through the front side bus, which is way slower than communicating on-die)....not to mention, AMD's got that nifty on-die memory controller, but Intel still doesn't have anything on the roadmap in the direction of integrating memory controller on die, and relying on an external memory controller on the motherboard will hamstring throughput and bottleneck the four cores, which is, of course, the reason for 6+MB of L2 cache on the Intels as compared to AMD's 512x4 MB L2 + 2+MB L3 cache (AMD doesn't need as much cache as Intel). Wait, someone's gonna call me an AMD fanboy now. Sorry, I like to spend my money on the underdog -- (to stimulate the healthy technological-development competition we're seeing now) -- rather than the topdog -- (buying Intel right now, to me, would feel too much like contributing to a stagnating monopoly). You can google "Barcelona K8L AM2" for more, and FYI "Altair" will be the first AMD chip in the "star-named" family (followed predictable enough by more cpus named after stars like "Algol", "Aldabaren", "Procyon", "Vega" (my fav) and "Betelgeuse" (that one's gonna smoke -- okay, I'm kidding, I've never yet heard plans by AMD to name a chip "Betelgeuse", but I bet that'd be teh best CPU evar cuz dat's a RED GIANT, dood!). |
#4
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Budget Solution -- Cheap Core 2 vs Cheaper X2
On Wed, 17 Jan 2007 08:27:58 -0600, "Peter van der Goes"
wrote: Please get me up to date You seem to be saying that AMD's quad core CPU's will be AM2? Where can I find out more about this? The story between AM2 and AM3 sockets is a bit confusing at the moment. The story, as far as I understand it, is that ALL quad core desktop processors from AMD will be socket AM3, *BUT* those socket AM3 chips will work just fine in a socket AM2 motherboard. In other words, socket AM2 and socket AM3 are pin-compatible, but if you want to make use of the more advanced features (Hypertransport 3.0 and DDR3 memory) you need both an AM3 processor and AM3 motherboard. The following link provides this info: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3169 Note that this is by no means guaranteed though! Also, even if it is true it is most certainly possible that *current* AM2 motherboards will NOT support a quad-core, K8L based socket AM3 processor when they are released, even if Socket AM2 boards released 6+ months from now will. We've seen many times in the past that there is MUCH more to compatibility than just the socket! I've been procrastinating about upgrading that last Athlon XP machine here to either an AM2 X2 or to a C2D. The price differences you described are a factor for me as well. I'm also in a similar boat, or if anything worse. I've priced it out and an AMD Athlon64 X2 4600+ and accompanied motherboard is actually cheaper than an Intel Core 2 Duo 6300 and motherboard. When you start comparing these two chips at their stock speeds (I personnaly never recommend buying based on what one might or might not overclock to), it becomes a rather difficult decision. Looking at the benchmarks they are certainly pretty close with the AMD chip winning some and the Intel winning others. The real problem for Intel here is that decent Socket 775 boards seem to be $30+ more than a decent AM2 board. As such I could afford a more expensive AMD processor and still end up with the same overall system cost. Of course, next week Intel plans on releasing their Core 2 Duo E4300 chips which will change the equations again. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...oc.aspx?i=2903 As the other PC's here are all AMD X2, I was concerned that an AM2 solution would soon be superseded by a newer socket and a switch from DDR2 to DDR3 memory. If there are to be quad core AM2 CPU's, that will help me make a decision. No matter what you buy today, tomorrow something newer/better/cheaper will be available. You're chances of having a viable upgrade path for either AMD or Intel processors is VERY slim. Basically all you can count on for either solution is what is officially supported today. Anything beyond that is gravy. -- Tony Hill hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca |
#5
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Budget Solution -- Cheap Core 2 vs Cheaper X2
On 17 Jan 2007 12:03:00 -0800, wrote:
Barcelona is showing 40%-70% performance gains over K8. (someone else please site this with a link) The closest I've come to finding a site that supports your claim of up to 70% improvement are references to claims that AMD's Randy Allen made about the Barcelona in this video here http://virtualexperience.amd.com/ind...re&co=quadcore At about 2:27 into the video, you have a chart showing Barcelona being - up to 70% faster than an Opteron 2200 8E or Xeon 5160 in OLTP - and what looks like 10% over a Xeon 5355. The next slide shows 40% in Spec FP_rate2000 over the Opteron 2200 and 30%~35% over the Xeon 5355. Given that the Opteron is a dual core and the Barcelona is quad core, that's 40%~70% more for twice the cores. It doesn't make Barcelona look like it's much better core for core than the K8. I'm not quite sure what does fp_rate rely on but apparently OLTP is highly affected by latencies so AMD's basically showing off the intercore and HTT connections which has always a weakness given the Intel platform. If 10~35% is the best AMD can cherry pick against Intel's current quad core product at that point, then I would think by the time K8L arrives, Intel would have probably wiped the margin to nothing. -- A Lost Angel, fallen from heaven Lost in dreams, Lost in aspirations, Lost to the world, Lost to myself |
#6
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Budget Solution -- Cheap Core 2 vs Cheaper X2
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#7
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Budget Solution -- Cheap Core 2 vs Cheaper X2
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#8
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Budget Solution -- Cheap Core 2 vs Cheaper X2
xorbit wrote:
Davej wrote: wrote: [...] Final budget for the entire build must be less than $1100. Remember that $133 Athlon + $89 motherboard = $222, while $194 Core 2 Duo + $120 motherboard = $312, which is a difference of $90 -- is the little bit extra performance now worth a hundred dollars, or is it better to go a little bit cheaper now to have a better platform to take advantage of Barcelona K8L later? Is this a fair starting point for today? Rather than an E6300 shouldn't you be comparing the price of a P4 ? Then AMD would have a sizable advantage. Ok, my bad, but maybe an X2 4400+ or 4600+ ??? http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.ht...=433&chart=166 |
#9
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Budget Solution -- Cheap Core 2 vs Cheaper X2
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