AMD Undercuts Intel With Six-Core Phenom IIs 361
EconolineCrush writes "As Slashdot readers are no doubt aware, Intel's latest 'Gulftown' Core i7-980X is an absolute beast of a CPU. But its six cores don't come cheap; the 980X sells for over a grand, which is more than it would cost to build an entire system based on one of AMD's new six-core CPUs. The Phenom II X6 line starts at just $200 and includes a new Turbo capability that can opportunistically raise the clock speed of up to three cores when the others are idle. Although not as fast as the 980X, the new X6s are quick enough to offer compelling value versus even like-priced Intel CPUs. And the kicker: the X6s will work in a good number of older Socket AM2+ and AM3 motherboards with only a BIOS update."
Holy crap this is old. (Score:3, Informative)
In short this posting is old and not very accurate. So doubly pointless
I need a new computer (Score:2, Informative)
all these cores and benchmarks...
i still run computer with one core and no modern graphics card
Cores vs performance (Score:5, Informative)
ECC Support (Score:5, Informative)
Depends what you do. (Score:2, Informative)
I have four cores. I run an IDE and an AppServer at all times, which uses up at least two cores. Then there is my bit-torrent app and...
Seems like you can easily use all those cores.
Re:BIOS Update.... (Score:1, Informative)
BIOS updates come out all the time.
Re:BIOS Update.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:re AMD (Score:1, Informative)
Re:ECC Support (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Value for money vs FanboiGasms (Score:3, Informative)
I am running an M4A78T-E with ATI HD 3300 integrated graphics. It does surprisingly well. I have not doled out any money for new high end games for a while, but it easily handles games that brought my previous graphics card to its knees (it was top of the line in 04). I am eventually going to get a modern graphics card so I can play around with OpenCL, but I really have not felt a pressing need for it with my gaming habits.
Re:Value for money vs FanboiGasms (Score:0, Informative)
Re:BIOS Update.... (Score:2, Informative)
Yes. This is far from the first time a new CPU has been supported on older boards by updating BIOS.
Re:Value for money vs FanboiGasms (Score:5, Informative)
It seems Intel doesn't get even a "honorable mention" until page 3. At $120 price point, Core i3 gets a look in. Oh, they also don't recommend anything above about $160 to quote Tom's: "Best gaming CPU for $190: None
and then... you stopped reading.
Best gaming CPU for $200:
Core i5-750
The new Core i5 brings top-of-the-line Nehalem-class performance at a $200 price point. We recently awarded it our Recommended Buy honor after seeing it stand up to more expensive CPUs in games and other demanding apps.
They don't recommend spending more than $200, though.
Re:Value for money vs FanboiGasms (Score:5, Informative)
Your anecdotal stories are really only relevant to you. You'd be better off on /. presenting some sort of statistical evidence for your claim otherwise it's simply FUD and readers are correct to dismiss it as such. We're all here for conversation so if you have a real point bring it.
Re:Apps that sleep (Score:2, Informative)
I've noticed some IDEs are annoyingly more CPU hogging than a lot of other applications I run. Code::Blocks, for example, seems to start eating up CPU usage after being kept open with not even a very large amount of files open. It gets worse with more files open, but I've seen it happen with relatively small projects. I've seen the same with other IDEs, also--I've just been using Code::Blocks with one project I've got going lately, so it's most fresh in my mind. I'm not quite sure what it's doing, but some of them seem to like eating up CPU even when the window is off on another virtual desktop. That seems to affect me more on Linux, though. On Windows, I usually close what I'm not using, because it drives me nuts having so many windows open with only one desktop area to work with. As such, I'm not sure how the comparison goes...
Re:ECC Support (Score:4, Informative)
To get ECC support from Intel, you need to buy a Xeon, at which point they charge you an extra $800-$1000 for the gates to be enabled.
Boy, when you make up numbers, you really reach deep into your ass, don't you?
Core i7-920 [newegg.com] for $280 and the same-socket, indentical spec Xeon W3520 [newegg.com] for $310.
The only issue might be that you need a motherboard that supports ECC, but $270 for this one [newegg.com] isn't a lot more than the $200 or so you'd pay for a non-server board with equivalent build quality. Unless things have changed drastically since the last time I looked at AMD motherboards, not all of them support ECC, either.
Re:Value for money vs FanboiGasms (Score:1, Informative)
Hell I'm pretty much an intel guy and even *I* wouldn't insult amd's reliability that much, even dating back to the socket 5/7 era. With the exception of overheating parts (which AMD was initially notorious for, until intel decided to create the P4 just to say they could technically beat AMD in ALL areas of cpu design (:D), amd parts have rarely been any less reliable than intel so long as the peripheral components didn't fail (PS, video card, keyboard/mouse shorting, etc). Quite frankly out of the myriad of AMD based systems my friends have had, the only ones I've seen dead were due to fan failures, and almost to a T those were Athlon XP era parts from being the on board thermal diode. After that, there hasn't been a single failure I'ev seen that wasn't DOA from the factory.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Holy crap this is old. (Score:3, Informative)
If I R'd TFS correctly, by about $800 dollars. But you mean purely based on dick-swinging numbers I assume. :-P
See, for a lot of people (ie. non gamers and people not doing CPU intensive stuff) being CPU bound is rarely something they'll encounter. Multiple cores have the benefit of making the operating system more responsive since a busy app doesn't make the whole system crawl. My current Quad core has probably never had all four pegged at once, so I don't need faster. In fact, I'm not sure I've needed faster in a bunch of years.
Now, for me, the best way to get the most out of a machine is to put what sounds like an obscene amount of memory on it so it's future proof. You can survive software bloat if you piled on the memory up front. :-P
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Scientific Computing (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cores vs performance - VMware (Score:4, Informative)
Don't doubt for one minute that Intel gets that too.
That's why intel disables their VT instructions on certain CPU's
Re:Cores and AMD (Score:4, Informative)
I even remember back in the early 2000's walking into a local computer shop, I needed a mobo asap, and one of the sales reps told me that AMD CPU's were, "Garbage. We don't even stock any AMD parts."
back in 2003 i ordered a custom built machine at a local shop, they favored intel, but since the northwood 3.0 GHz (only intel chip i cared about at the time) was WAY out of my budget (700 euro cpu, 300 euro mobo), i insisted on an athlon XP. The guy tried to convince me that amd makes unreliable shit and overclocks their own stuff and such, but i insisted.
I got my system, and was happy, but after i while i found out it was running at 100 mhz FSB (as opposed to the specced 166 mhz), they had just upped the multiplier to have the core clock match the specs (yes, my athlon XP 2600+ does not have a multi-lock, none of those chips did until the barton core came about). I asked the guy who built it about this and he claimed that he could not get the system stable at 166 mhz (implicitly blaming AMD). A few years later i found out the stick of ram he had used has errors in it, and doesnt run stable at 166 mhz, causing the instability. Just last weekend i swapped some different ram in there, upped the FSB to spec, and the system is solid as a rock.
moral of the story, people slagging off AMD for stability and such are tools and dont know what they are talking about
Re:Cores vs performance (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, if you are compiling your own software you can get things to work really fast with 6 cores
Compiling doesn't provide a multithreading advantage. You have to be writing your own software, too.
but how many applications really take advantage of multiple cores?
Practically all complex games are multithreaded today. Essentially all multimedia applications are multithreaded. Or in other words, any application which needs to be specially coded to take advantage of multiple cores probably is already.
A single fast core can outperform a few slow cores in general usage
Only for legacy or other non-threaded applications. Both groups are dwindling. In addition most of the heaviest lifters have been multithreaded for a very long time, i.e. Photoshop.
and AMD seems only concerned with getting more and more cores on a single CPU die which really doesn't translate to great performance in the real world for general use.
AMD is concerned with the number of instructions they can retire in a given number of cycles, which is higher than intel's, and long has been... and probably long will be.
Re:Transcoding is common (Score:3, Informative)
So do you think it's only the occasional cinematographer or pirate who uses software based on FFmpeg and X.264
AMD and Slashdot are located in the United States. In the United States, the encoding process that x264 uses is subject to royalty-bearing patents, and royalty-bearing patent licenses are incompatible with the copyright licenses for FFmpeg and x264. So anyone using FFmpeg and x264 is a pirate, except possibly in one or two corner cases that someone is likely to chime in to clarify.
to transcode vids for HTPC or iPod?
Before this discussion succumbs to Layne's Law [c2.com], let us clarify something: Are we referring to major-label video or homemade video?
Re:Cores vs performance (Score:1, Informative)
such as the 'far more' video type, duh.
This is a Great Chip for Power Users (Score:3, Informative)