Re: Anandtech 65nm AMD Review
Sarmad, the E6600 doesn't just beat the new 5000+, it completely slaughters it. And not just by a little bit, but by sizable margins in every available benchmark. And all while dissipating less than or equal power. The performance/watt graphs say it all. Intel is ~30% ahead of the best AMD can offer on the same process.
It's also nice to see overclocking tests confirm that there is little headroom left in the core, failing to reach 3.0GHz, even with a voltage boost to 1.475V (high for a 65nm core). I'll remind everyone that my Conroe E6600 is running at 3.3GHz at default voltage, and has been for months. I don't even bother to reboot. It just runs flawlessly for weeks and months at a time.
Anand also made this quote:
Power consumption is definitely reduced compared to its 90nm offerings; in our tests we saw an average reduction in total system power consumption of 14.6W thanks to the new Brisbane core.
It's funny that Anand rejoices, since the delta in TDP would have led people beforehand to expect more. 89W - 65W = 24W. So why is 14.6W impressive? The core still ended up dissipating more power than Intel's in the majority of test cases. Idle power is really AMD's only advantage they have left, so it's no wonder that they are crowing over it so much. IMO, Intel ought to enable more mobile power sleep states on their Conroe parts and get them into the same range.
But either way, it's clear that AMD has fallen far off the cliff in terms of competitiveness. Anand could have been more cruel and used an X6800 in his performance review, but he is being nice and sticking to the same price range.
Of course, even if a rabid AMD fan were in desperate need of one of these chips, they couldn't even get one! They are complete vapor, and according to Anand:
AMD just introduced and announced shipment of its first 65nm cores: codenamed Brisbane. Availability is another story entirely, as it's looking like we won't see any real quantities of these things until Q1 2007. Right now AMD's Brisbane chips are strictly OEM only and AMD wasn't able to give us an indication of when to expect retail/channel availability.
Oops. AMD misses the Christmas season, and their goal of shipping 65nm products in Q4 seems questionable. Of course, while Anand seems to suggest that these parts are going to OEMs, none have yet to come up on OEM websites. It's a pitiful launch of a pitiful product, and AMD is clearly desperate to spin it as leadership.
I'm hoping that Intel's sales teams have a renewed interest in taking back market share. This is Intel's best window of opportunity. If they don't do it now, there won't be a better time in the near future.
AI
