Dragonfly and Hyperthreading....

[EM1897 at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/21/2005 7:11:51 PM Eastern Standard Time, "Freddie Cash" 
<fcash-ml at xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>> From the point of view of cpu power per watt AMD wins hands down. As
>>  I said, this is becoming the #1 concern for anyone running more
>> then a few machines.  Insofar as raw performance goes... well, I
>> think AMD is edging-out Intel in most areas these days.  The story
>> the benchmarks tell is that the cpus are typically within 15% of
>> each other anyway, and Intel can only really win benchmarks that are
>> optimized specifically for its cpus or which are FP intensive.
>> Intel still edges AMD on FP performance, but that's about it.  The
>> real problem for Intel is that producing on-par performance is
>> costing them 20% more power (or even more!), and a lot of additional
>> beefing up of caches, memory subsystems, and so forth.  And
>> consumers have started complaining about the fan noise.
>
>The *really* interesting point of the Opteron vs. Xeon, or Athlon/64
>vs. P4 benchmarks are that the AMD CPUs are within 10% of the Intel
>CPUs, yet they are clocked up to 1000 MHz *slower*.  That right there
>is the biggest indication that Intel has screwed up somewhere in the
>core of the CPU.
>
>Sure, the P4 can be cranked up to 4 GHz, but what's the point if the
>Athlon64 at 2.8 GHz gives you just as much performance, for less cost,
>less heat waste, and less energy??

Intel's Pentium-M has similar performance, which I why I asked Matt
if he thought Intel would use that technology to replace P4s. It appears 
that is in the works to some degree. I have a 2.0Ghz Pentium-M notebook
and it cooks, and I get 5 hours of continuous use on a standard battery 
charge. A 2Ghz Pentium-M is about as fast as a 3.4Ghz P4. Here is an 
interesting article on it:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2342