Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Ixse]

Wbmw, HailMary, I've seen some unsubstantiated rumors claiming that Conroe will debut at 2.93GHz:

Yeah but as you know x86-secret's among the utmost unreliable sites out there. Here's a quote from another albeit only slightly pro Intel site THG that strongly implies differently:

Presler, however, is unlikely to live long enough to see any significant upgrades, since Intel's next-generation processor architecture "Conroe" will already debut in the second half of 2006. Consuming less power than the current Pentium 4 architecture and carrying up to 4 MByte L2 cache, the chip will enable Intel to lift processor performance to a level of a comparable 3.6 GHz dual-core Pentium D with Presler core at debut. Conroe will merge into the Pentium D 900-series as 940, 950 and 960 models, actual clock speeds have not surfaced yet.
http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/07/14/more_clock_speed_for_pentium_d_with_arrival_of_900/index.html

Another angle somewhere in between, possibly a bit more in the direction of x86-secret, is from yesterday's preview of Yonah (part 2): Honestly, as it stands today, if Intel can get clock speeds up, the only area that they will need to improve on is gaming performance to be competitive with AMD. We wouldn’t be too surprised if the comparisons we have shown today end up being very similar to what we encounter at Conroe’s launch: with AMD and Intel performing very similarly at the same clock speeds, but with AMD’s on-die memory controller giving it the advantage in gaming.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2648&p=14

Anyways for the moment I think it's unlikely that Conroe debutes at ~3GHz.

For comparison Merom was said to debut at 2.33GHz which I believe is reasonably realistic. My WAG for Conroe isn't more than 2.7GHz at intro.

Regards,

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