According to Anandtech, Conroe beats FX-60

TooNice · Post by **TooNice** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 10:16 am

~El~Jefe~ wrote:so, that's why i say SCREW INTEL. force feed us crap, refuse good things because of marketing/businessdeals/pride, leave em be is what I say.

YEA! SCREW INTEL!
... actually, no.
No one forced you or anyone to buy Intel... unless you buy from Dell anyway.
They made some mistake. It costed them our money (unless you bought Intel despite their fault). They seem to have finally fixed it. If they did, and what we saw in those benchmark is real, then I am happy to go back to them (I went Intel, Intel, Intel, AMD, AMD, [who knows]).... assuming they don't charge a super premium for those chips anyway.

Tzupy wrote:As an AMD fan, I would never buy a Conroe, even if it's as fast as these benchmarks showed (I tend to believe them, since the Conroe architecture is impressive on paper).

I am, em, grateful I guess. In the last few years I've been encouraging people around me to go AMD when they build a new PC. But that is because their current chips are very good compared to the competition. I would howeve go back to Intel if the chip is as good as it seems though. Just like I stuck with Intel during the Pentium 2 era. But I am grateful to those who supported AMD when they didn't have the best chips out... I value competition, and without supporters, AMD will go out of business...
Then again, they took my money in the last few years, hopefully it'll allow them to do bring something good against Conroe in the future

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 10:31 am

um if you want to do something called RUN A PROGRAM you didnt want to buy k5 or k6.

those couldnt play a game for their life. only a very few that were built for 3DNow. i called it 3Dnottodaymaybe another day, no wait maybe another year, yeah 3d in 2 years no, never, they wont bother patching your game for it.

Tzupy · Post by **Tzupy** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 1:15 pm

Quote: "um if you want to do something called RUN A PROGRAM you didnt want to buy k5 or k6"

I resent that! Not only I played games on K5-PR166 and K6-2/400, but also did software development on those - some 6-8 years ago IIRC! It's true that there were many crappy motherboards used with those CPUs though...

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 7:13 pm

I had a k6-II 500 and then k6-III 400.

the k6 III was decent but had just severe trouble with certain games, something that it was designed to do.

i had the BEST motherboard possible, p5a by asus. it had the most features and tech by far.

it was terrible too!

However, amd wasn't making the best chips back then, good for other things though. BUT! amd wasnt trying to pawn off crap like p4 when other better chips were around, they did as best they could. Intel has kept amd from developing via monopolies and threats, they waste electricity needlessly, have crap chipsets, and constantly force the user to get new motherboards and new ram in order to upgrade. etc etc.

StarfishChris · Post by **StarfishChris** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 3:05 am

~El~Jefe~ wrote:i had the BEST motherboard possible, p5a by asus. it had the most features and tech by far.

it was terrible too!

Au contraire - I had a PC Chips motherboard

with K6-II 500 and it ran surprisingly well with onboard sound and video. Low resolutions, sure, but it didn't crash every 5 minutes.

TooNice · Post by **TooNice** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 6:14 am

Tzupy wrote:I resent that! Not only I played games on K5-PR166 and K6-2/400, but also did software development on those - some 6-8 years ago IIRC! It's true that there were many crappy motherboards used with those CPUs though...

Still, few would argue that at the time, Intel had chips with better FPU performance. Which is what made them better in 3D games.

As for Intel making crap chipset, I am not sure about that. AMD made chipset because they had to. A great chip like the Athlon wasn't going to sell itself without decent motherboard. But it was hardly their strengths.

Intel had a much better reputation. I am not sure whether they lost that reputation since, but I still consider the BX chipset one of the best ever. I think the 815 was well received after the less successful 820 (who wanted RDRAM?). After that, I stopped following Intel chipsets.. But I'd be surprised if they've been making crap ones all these years.

Tzupy · Post by **Tzupy** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 6:24 am

I never said that Intel made crappy chipsets / mobos, but that AMD CPUs were used on such mobos.
Some 8 years ago I wouldn't afford a decent Intel CPU, so I preferred a decent AMD CPU for a decent price, that's all.

More Conroe benchmarks surfaced, saying pretty much the same, how fast it is. Until now, AMD has been quiet on K8L, which is supposed to bring some performance improvements.

stupid · Post by **stupid** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 6:58 am

I would say forget about the past and focus on the present and future CPUs from both AMD and Intel. Both companies have had crap CPUs in the past, but the good thing is that they have been able to improve upon the design or develop a totally different architecture.

Intel had egg on it's face with the poorly accepted 80286 back in the 80's, and more recently with the introduction with the P4. A P3 could beat the pants off of a P4 in a lot of benchmarks because the P4 had very deep/long pipelines, and relatively poor branch prediction algorithms. Intel has overcome that and the P4 became a very CPU, although the later generation has been a bit hot.

AMD is not without it's faults. Before they released the K7 "original" Athlon, their CPUs were simply dogs compared to Intel's P3. The Athlon marked the turning point for AMD, but that also had it's share of problems. One of them being that there was no heat sensing diode. If you install a Athlon XP CPU on a motherboard without a heatsink and turn it on, then POOF!!! There goes the CPU, it burns itself out almost immediately. That happened to me when my 5 year old cousin turned on my PC that I was in the middle of putting together, almost everything was attached, but not the HSF. I walked away to get a soda at the time.

Personally, I will use whoever's CPU will give me the best balance between cost, heat, and performance. Simply saying "I will never buy AMD" or "I will never buy Intel" is just idiotic. Both companies produces great products, and each have their own faults. In the end it is important that both AMD and Intel continue to exist, because in the end it is the consumer who will eventually win because of competition.

halcyon · Post by **halcyon** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 7:35 am

Can we please stop the fan-boy based bashing and move onto the SILENCE based discussion.

It'll be interesting to see what will be the equivavalent total platform energy dissipation numbers for both Conroe systems and AMDs new systems in the next fall timeframe.

I'm guessing Intel will have an upper hand both idle and at full power, but of course, I'd be happy to be wrong (if AMD puts miraculously even lower numbers on the table).

This is a long time in coming.

I really hope the next industry competition cycle is power/watt.

The GPU chip manufacturers need to jump on the same bandwagon. They have become the worst energy/heat/noise offenders of our systems.

Post by **MikeC** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 8:23 am

halcyon wrote:I really hope the next industry competition cycle is power/watt.

It already is happening. Intel's pronouncements at IDF indicate they're finally accepting this is so. Ashlee Vance of The Register rips into Intel power efficiency revelations with dripping sarcasm in his article Intel's talk starts to match rivals' products. It begins....

"You have to hand it to Intel for talking about power management and the benefits of multi-core processing with such confidence. Using reality distortion, Intel has convinced itself that it pioneered such technology instead of being the lone laggard to catch up with the rest of the industry....." and continues on.

halcyon wrote:The GPU chip manufacturers need to jump on the same bandwagon. They have become the worst energy/heat/noise offenders of our systems.

Totally. One of them has to break off the power escalation race and reverse it... or another make has to make a vidcard just about as good/fast at 2/3 the power, and offer decreased power in future cards. Or maybe they need to be forced into working with power limits in the context of total system power. The new Energy Star spec slated to become effective Jan 1 next year may help do this.

My coverage of this, back when it first came to light.
The latest info, at the EPA.

The gist of the Energy Star Computer Draft 1 Specification, Version 4.0 is this: Current PCs can be certified as Energy Stars if they draw less than 15W in standby (plugged in w/the PSU switched on but the PC not running). The new spec aims to reduce standby power AND, for the first time, define maximum allowable idle AC power. There are many categories, based on form factor (more or less) and intended function. For desktops, two classes of PCs are proposed, basic and high performance.

Standby (Off Mode): < 2 W
Sleep Mode: < 5 W
Idle State – Basic Performance: < 49 W
Idle State – High Performance: < 74 W

Try getting 74W AC idle on a current gaming rig with a high end vidcard or two.

stupid · Post by **stupid** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 8:54 am

halcyon wrote: I'm guessing Intel will have an upper hand both idle and at full power, but of course, I'd be happy to be wrong (if AMD puts miraculously even lower numbers on the table).

This is a long time in coming.

I really hope the next industry competition cycle is power/watt.

The GPU chip manufacturers need to jump on the same bandwagon. They have become the worst energy/heat/noise offenders of our systems.

I'd say it's too early to speculate on Conroe's (and Merom's) power/watt ratio, because there is still time for Intel to improve the process. AMD has done a fine work on their CPUs since a 65nm P4 still consumes more power than a 90nm Athlon.

With regards to GPUs, I think that nVidia is already focusing on the power/watt ratio. The current 7900GT is more powerful than the 7800GTX, but uses slightly less power and produces a slightly less heat (a few degree celcius) than the 7800GT. IIRC the 7800GT uses about 56w of power. It is the real high-end GPUs that sucks up a lot of power, most notably is the ATI X1900XTX which consumes 110w of power. The 7800GTX 512MB consumes less than that, but I don't know the ballpark, figure, but I think it consumes between 90w - 95w. Based on that I'm assuming that the 7900GTX 512MB will consume between 85w - 90w, but that's pure speculation since I'm not really interested in the 7900GTX for my rig.

The move to the 80nm process should help to improve things, but that probably won't happen until next year since nVidia recently shrunk their die down to 90nm. However, it should also be noted that the most powerful GPUs offered by both ATI and nVidia have more transistors than the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU. The ATI X19100XTX comes in at around 321 million transistors, nVidia's 7800GTX has about 302 million, and finally the X2 4800+ has around 233 million transistors. It is generally accepted that newer more advanced chips tend to have more transistors. In ordetr for ATI and nVidia to reduce the number of transistors, they will need to fundumentally streamline their GPUs to process data more efficiently while reducing transistor count, yet increasing performance at the same time. That's not an easy feat to accomplish.

TomZ · Post by **TomZ** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 9:03 am

MikeC wrote:Try getting 74W AC idle on a current gaming rig with a high end vidcard or two.

I think you answered your own question. The vast majority of computers in the US, or the world for that matter, are not used by high-end performance-demanding users. Most are used for ordinary dull tasks like e-mail, Internet, word processing, etc., and that is true for both business and home uses.

As long as you constrain the EPA recommendation to the 90-95% of PCs out there used for ordinary tasks, setting such power-saving targets is pretty reasonable. If applied on a large scale, these efforts can lead to very large overall energy savings.

jaganath · Post by **jaganath** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 10:18 am

the most powerful GPUs offered by both ATI and nVidia have more transistors than the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU.

From that Register article that Mike linked:

But, as much as Intel likes to downplay things like not having an integrated memory controller and not putting multiple cores on the same die, the fact remains that this is what everybody else is doing. Intel is still stuck in the past.

For the moment, Intel seems to have narrowed the performance gap with AMD and others. Although, it will start to see problems crop up again in the four-core and beyond era due to the issues mentioned above, particularly the lack of an integrated memory controller.

"At some point in the future, we will have an integrated memory controller," Crawford confessed. "That's something we are wrestling with."

Very interesting....

TooNice · Post by **TooNice** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 12:14 pm

Tzupy wrote:I never said that Intel made crappy chipsets / mobos, but that AMD CPUs were used on such mobos.

Sorry, the last part of my last post wasn't directed at you but ~El~Jefe~.
I guess I should've quoted it:

BUT! amd wasnt trying to pawn off crap like p4 when other better chips were around, they did as best they could. Intel has kept amd from developing via monopolies and threats, they waste electricity needlessly, have crap chipsets, and constantly force the user to get new motherboards and new ram in order to upgrade. etc etc.

mbetea · Post by **mbetea** » Tue Mar 14, 2006 8:35 am

Kind of strange that they used the RD480 chipset and not a widely used and tested nvidia chipset or even the newer RD580. Hasn't there been performance issues with the 480 chipset from the start? Then again I'm sure a dual G5 Power is 2x as fast as any other platform on certain Photoshop filters

pony-tail · Post by **pony-tail** » Thu Mar 16, 2006 2:03 am

I will probably wind up with one of each - but I have had my share of issues with current generations so I hope they have the bugs out of these before they hit the market . I did not buy into presscott but I have a couple of Northwoods and an X2 Athlon .
My loyalty is to my pocket not to any Multibillion $ U$ company one is as good
(and as bad )as the other . so who cares who makes it if it is good buy it , if not Don't.
my couple of pennies worth.

quikkie · Post by **quikkie** » Thu Mar 16, 2006 3:29 am

pony-tail wrote:My loyalty is to my pocket not to any Multibillion $ U$ company one is as good (and as bad )as the other . so who cares who makes it if it is good buy it , if not Don't.
my couple of pennies worth.

My sentiments exactly, it just happens that everytime I've been on the market for new gear, AMD have been the current price/performance winner.
And yes I'm a cheapskate

TomZ · Post by **TomZ** » Thu Mar 16, 2006 5:39 am

quikkie wrote:it just happens that everytime I've been on the market for new gear, AMD have been the current price/performance winner.

That must mean you purchased all your systems in the past 2-4 years? Because before that, AMD's offerings were pretty lame.

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Thu Mar 16, 2006 6:03 am

Hello Tom,

TomZ wrote:
quikkie wrote:it just happens that everytime I've been on the market for new gear, AMD have been the current price/performance winner.
That must mean you purchased all your systems in the past 2-4 years? Because before that, AMD's offerings were pretty lame.

How old is the Athlon? June 23, 1999 So lessee, almost seven years? Intel had to first wake up, then scramble, then fall down, get up again -- and sometime this coming year, presumably, they will become more competitive again.

It seems to me that when the Athlon came out initially as a 650mHz and then 700mHz, that the Pentium !!! was still at 550mHz. And which one was first to hit the market with 1gHz and above? Then we had the RAMBUS debacle...and the promises of 5gHz and even 10gHz!?

Meanwhile, AMD's "wide" approach, with it's nine-issue design seems to be the better one. They invented the x86 64bit instruction set, and a well set up for dual/quad cores with Hypertransport, onboard memory controller, etc.

I'd say that AMD has been pretty competitive for a while now.

TomZ · Post by **TomZ** » Thu Mar 16, 2006 6:09 am

NeilBlanchard wrote:June 23, 1999

I guess you're right - I didn't think they were that old. The first I heard of anyone buying AMDs was in 2001 or 2002.

quikkie · Post by **quikkie** » Thu Mar 16, 2006 6:13 am

hmm, lemme see If I can remember:
386DX - can't remember if that was the intel chip or the AMD clone
486 intel laptop - a good deal on a secondhand model
233Mhz Cyrix - bargain bin components, my first built-myself machine, I learnt my lesson

7 years ago: 800MHz AMD thunderbird based rig - wasn't the fastest (I think 1.1GHz chips were available) but price/performance was acceptable - 4 years later replaced with a 1.33GHz chip (the fastest one the mainboard supported)
6 months ago: the rig in my sig.

I spent about 2 years getting the funds together and researching what components to use in my lastest rig, IIRC athlon MP, xeon, P4, barton, X2 - finally I had the funds and I went with my current wishlist.

Every time I looked at Intel I was having to pay a lot more for the same sort of performance vs. AMD.

Having said that my next upgrade will be AMD, why? because I want to make the motherboard / memory last a while

After that, who knows...

stupid · Post by **stupid** » Thu Mar 16, 2006 7:18 am

quikkie wrote:hmm, lemme see If I can remember:
386DX - can't remember if that was the intel chip or the AMD clone

Ah, that brings me back to my pre-teen days. Watching my brother struggling to put a PC together.

386DX - Intel CPU with integrated math co-processor
386SX - Intel CPU w/o integrated math co-processor

486DX - Intel CPU with integrated math co-processor
486SX - Intel CPU w/o integrated math co-processor

My user ID is "Stupid" in honor of my brother.

QuietOC · Post by **QuietOC** » Thu Mar 16, 2006 8:44 am

The K6-3/2+/3+ were all great chips for office apps and even server tasks. I had several. The later chips could run at 600MHz, but they were no match for the coppermine based Celerons due to not having a pipelined floating point unit. The later versions of those could run past 1GHz, while the early ones were fine at 850MHz+.

pony-tail · Post by **pony-tail** » Thu Mar 16, 2006 2:59 pm

I would have to start with Apple IIe and Amstrad 6128 - then my first home grown -: an AMD 12mhz XT and DOS 3.x with Norton commander (M.$ - who are they) - AMD have been around for a while , It was'nt till Intel's "Intel inside" advertising blurb that anybody much cared what the Brand on the CPU was . I did not get an AMD again till the Socket 3 586/133 with 1meg pci graphics (Matrox) - this was the best bang for the buck in it's day and seemed to be a lot faster than Intel's DX4 100 - this is when they started the Intel inside program.
I have not had a Cyrix or early IBM chip but they were out there too. I have seen this cycle of Intel the faster then AMD for over a decade - What is happening now is a re-run of the transition from 486 to Pentium - the difference being that this time AMD was first .

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Thu Mar 16, 2006 4:36 pm

cyrix had some severe issues with something called: a game.

and being games are the real reason computers advance for home use and that graphics cards advance at all are games. so, they died fast. too bad really.

THe mention this week of a new math coprocessor to go along with the am2 chips sounds like it would be powerful..

how about a ppu? nah, that would make sense, why release that yet?

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Thu Mar 16, 2006 7:25 pm

Hello,

This might be interesting to some of you:

AMD considers Clearspeed math co-processor

~El~Jefe~ · Post by **~El~Jefe~** » Thu Mar 16, 2006 8:03 pm

yeah, it's a hot idea.

especially if the co processor could be slapped onto a new system at will. that would be super nifty.

like the pci PPU card from BFG/Aegia whatever people. that boosts performance without swapping a chip. love stuff like that. Rare nowadays, nowadays you can only get something like an Audigy 2zs audio card that offloads the cpu and transfers over to a new compy.

Id buy the first month it came out a coprocessor (if i went am2) and definitely, as soon as it comes out, the ppu from BFG.

just be nice if someone released something besides a new l33t kiddie ripoff video card.

dragmor · Post by **dragmor** » Thu Mar 16, 2006 9:20 pm

stupid wrote:
quikkie wrote:hmm, lemme see If I can remember:
386DX - can't remember if that was the intel chip or the AMD clone
Ah, that brings me back to my pre-teen days. Watching my brother struggling to put a PC together.

386DX - Intel CPU with integrated math co-processor
386SX - Intel CPU w/o integrated math co-processor

486DX - Intel CPU with integrated math co-processor
486SX - Intel CPU w/o integrated math co-processor

My user ID is "Stupid" in honor of my brother.

The funny part was that the CO processor you could buy for the SX chips was actually a DX chip that turned the SX chip off.

stupid · Post by **stupid** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 11:53 am

dragmor wrote:The funny part was that the CO processor you could buy for the SX chips was actually a DX chip that turned the SX chip off.

Yeah, you gotta love Intel's marketing. And the co-processor doesn't work if you take out the SX chip which is effectively de-activated.

pony-tail · Post by **pony-tail** » Sat Mar 18, 2006 2:17 pm

I still think that unless AMD screws their die shrink up pretty seriously - AMD will at worst give Conroe a run for it's money - Mind you my old uATX Gigabyte system which is only a 2.8 northy with a 9800xt radeon runs just
about everything out there including the latest games at both reasonable frame rates and reasonable speed all be it without the bells an whistles. My newest build an AMD X2 with all the new B.S - gets a few more FPS - can run with all the bells an whistles - is loud - and has been problematic - although all the issues have been solved They should not have been there to start with.
Are all these "improvements" benifiting the consumer ? I think they need to get their stuff tested BEFORE they sell it ! Hope they get it right this time .

According to Anandtech, Conroe beats FX-60

slight tangent...