My look at the future
07.29.06 - 02:05pm
Monday Intel officially unveiled its newest line of processors, the Core 2 Duo. It looks like Intel will also be launching Merom, the mobile variant of Conroe, during the middle of August. If I remember correctly Merom was about 25% more efficient, clock for clock, when compared to the Core Duo. With healthy price cuts, strong performance, and great overall value it looks like Intel’s new line of processors not only plan to compete with AMD but are willing and able to completely bury AMD. The fall will probably be very bleak for AMD fanboys as Intel processors start crushing all previous world records held my the faithful K8 from AMD but just remember your time will come. It took Intel nearly 3 years to catch up, I am sure the young guns over at AMD will have something fresh to serve up in about 6 months.
Over the next few months you will begin to notice a few things. First major OEM manufacturers will start pushing dual-core processors for nearly every price bracket. Intel and AMD both have very competitive pricing structures which feature great “budget” processors. The Pentium D 805 from Intel and the x2-3800+ from AMD both are great bang for buck processors. Currently both are selling for prices near the mid-range single-core processors from each respective companies. From now on I can’t imagine why anyone would purchase a single-core processor, even in the budget realms of computing. While $35 Celerons sound like sweet deals, these neutered chips lack the electronic balls to actually perform unless all you plan on doing is word-processing and web-surfing.
Now those ~$100 dual-core processors might sound like sweet deals but remember those are last generations budget processors. For a computer enthusiast those two processors still make sick deals as you can wind the clocks up past 50% of stock and still retain stable performance. I’ve noticed that not many people are comfortable voiding warranties for you guys I’ve got a whole new line of toys to check out. In the last 6 months the E6600 and E6700 processors have been in the limelight with their 4+ GHz overclocks and sub-10 second Super Pi 1M runs but the real deal with Conroe is the budget E6300 and E6400 chips. With prices below $300 they don’t hurt the wallet while maintaining acceptable clockspeeds. The only thing you lose is 2 megs of L2 cache but with Conroes intelligent pre-fetchers benchmarks have proven that this only equates to a 10% penalty when compared clock to clock with a 4 MB part. Now if these sound like great processors just wait for the next bombshell I’ve got to drop.
The 975X chipset from Intel has been around for a few months now and it is considered the performance chipset for Conroe. The 965 chipset doesn’t have support for Crossfire, only supports a single x16 PCI express lane, but what it does have is FSB speeds and a lot of it. I have already seen screenshots of the Gigabyte 965 DS3 hitting FSB speeds of over 500 MHz. There are rumors floating around that the Allendale chips which are the 2MB variants of Conroe (E6300 and E6400) actually can pull higher overclocks than the 4MB variants due to the smaller cache. This seems to have a bit of truth in it as this forum thread shows. With proper cooling 100% overclocks on the E6300 and E6400 processors should easily be possible.
I cannot stress anymore how much a waste of money Extreme Edition and FX processors are. The X6800 Conroe is currently retailing for $1299 from various e-tailers. Unless you absolutely require the highest possible clockspeeds you will be better off with an E6600 or E6400 as I doubt many people have the cooling to seriously push an E6700. Hopefully I will have a E6300 or E6400 in my possession in the coming weeks and I’ll have my chance to throw some pain at Conroe/Allendale. A little plug for my side business, I will start building Conroe equipped systems in middle August once the retail channels have sufficiently stocked up, so feel free to drop me a line if you need a system built. Now it is back to the grind, I will be taking a break till Monday as I need to study.
Well its good to see Intel is finally catching up, I am a big fan of the Core Duo and have been looking forward to the 2 Core Duo.
It seems that Intel took great advantage of its new processors line. We could also say “at last” … because Intel didn’t show any signs of great evolution since the introducing of the Netburst architecture.
Now let’s just hope that AMD will compete as it did before, since however innovant Intel might have been with the Core Duo 2, AMD must nonetheless stay in the market to challenge Intel and to lower prices :D
Intel is growing like crazy, but AMD is not staying with there hands crossed. Just remember all this competition only benefit us the customers.
It’s hard to say what AMD might have with which to respond. IMO they want to offer a processor with perhaps a single powerful core with good overclocking potential. It might be cheaper to manufacture and still wreck intel chips in the majority of apps that arn’t multi-thread which is ALOT of programs at the moment.