Quote:
Originally Posted by TheRileyFactor
You're definitely spot on, AMD can in no way compete with Core 2 Quads or the Nehalem i7, and they can barely compete in the dual core market as well, but they are all much cheaper than their Intel-made counterparts. For instance, the Phenom II 240 clocked at 3 GhZ is less than $200 (190 at newegg), while the Q9400 clocked at 2.66 GhZ is around $220+, but the Q9400 kicks the crap out of the 940 on nearly all benchmarks at factory settings, yet its still a good processor. Price has always been the huge selling factor for AMD over Intel. The Nehalem, however, just blows EVERYTHING out of the water, its fast and has an integrated memory controller which makes everything run way faster, and a ridiculous FSB, but its EXPENSIVE (especially the 965 Extreme).
I hadn't heard the Shanghai was going octo-core, thats ridiculous! The Shanghai is still the 45nm process as well though, unless its changed? But by the time AMD comes out with its next newest processors (the Phenom II's came out only a few months ago) Intel will drop prices on the Nehalem and they'll have something out on the horizon... its a neverending process that drives computers to be faster and faster!
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According to AMD, they will be going to 25mn by 3rd qtr 2009 - 1st Qtr 2010, but they closed their fab plant so a contractor would have to do for them. The AMD/Intel battle is a result of the fact that AMD sat on it's laurels with the Athlon for years of kicking Intel, where it hurts in fps with gamers...but Intel wised up and AMD got caught with sitting. The biggest reason a higher clocked AMD is less robust in "some" applications, is due to the fact that AMD doesn't have a decent chipset to take advantage of the on-die Northbridge and separate bus for the I/O. Intel's chipset is amazing right now and albeit they are a little behind on the die design, but they do have AMD when it comes to Chipset and manufacturing process, since they are a bigger company and still has their own fab plants, unlike AMD who closed all their plants down due to the rocky economy and loss of business to Intel when Intel passed them by and kept passing. They are predicting by the time they go octo or even 16 cores, whereas Intel will still be at quad, nearing octo. they will once again take the lead. That's is their optimistic view, at least. The Shanghai took the server market by storm last December with a low price, competitive option as it pertains to virtualization and scaling. So Intel is the one playing catch up in that realm. You're right in the workstation side of things, it is much different, since the Phenom team has not quite "evolved" as the Opteron group has. We assumed, heck even the Opteron team I was talking to, assumed that the Phenom would adapt many of the advances that the Shanghai brought to the market, but to this day, the workstation side of the CPU business, still has Intel very much on top. I think with the economy in the shape it is currently in AMD may enjoy some defacto business due to the lower price of their systems, but it will not stay down forever, if AMD doesn't get something out by 3rd QTR 2009, it will have to live with second string again, when the economy recovers circa 2nd or 3rd QTR 2010 (optimistically).