I must admit, Intel's Core Duo is quite possibly the coolest name to come out of Intel in at least a decade. As you can probably guess, part 2 is up and I think it's a pretty complete look at what Yonah is and what Conroe/Merom could be.
At this point, I'm fully expecting Conroe to be competitive with the Athlon 64 but not a significant improvement in performance. There is obviously a lot of time between now and 2H 2006, so there may be things to change my opinion, but I don't think AMD is necessary making the wrong move by keeping their architecture fairly stagnant next year. The only negative aspect of AMD's policy of standing still in 2006 is that it will allow Intel to play catch up, rather than allow AMD to maintain their performance lead.
I do wonder if AMD is just betting on Intel not embracing an on-die memory controller anytime soon because of the aftermath of the Rambus situation, as you will see, Yonah can pretty much do anything the Athlon 64 X2 can do but without an on-die memory controller. If Intel were to integrate one, they may be able to do to the Athlon 64 what it did to the Pentium 4 (to a lesser extent obviously).
I am also curious about how much of an impact the wider 4-issue Conroe core will actually have on performance. Intel has been talking about how ILP is dead and TLP is the future of extracting processor performance, but I would say Conroe's existence is proof of the opposite. Or maybe it's just that Conroe's improvements are the last major ones we'll see to ILP for the foreseeable future.
This week ATI will hopefully be releasing their Catalyst 5.13 drivers and there may be another launch or two from the folks in Canada. Despite what you'd think, we're actually told that they will have product available at these launches before the end of the year. Only time will tell, but at least ATI is admitting to and talking about the availability problem in the sense of fixing it these days.
I've got to run and tackle a lot of errands around the house and town today before we leave tomorrow. Enjoy the day and I may chime in later today about some Xbox 360 stuff.
Take care.
At this point, I'm fully expecting Conroe to be competitive with the Athlon 64 but not a significant improvement in performance. There is obviously a lot of time between now and 2H 2006, so there may be things to change my opinion, but I don't think AMD is necessary making the wrong move by keeping their architecture fairly stagnant next year. The only negative aspect of AMD's policy of standing still in 2006 is that it will allow Intel to play catch up, rather than allow AMD to maintain their performance lead.
I do wonder if AMD is just betting on Intel not embracing an on-die memory controller anytime soon because of the aftermath of the Rambus situation, as you will see, Yonah can pretty much do anything the Athlon 64 X2 can do but without an on-die memory controller. If Intel were to integrate one, they may be able to do to the Athlon 64 what it did to the Pentium 4 (to a lesser extent obviously).
I am also curious about how much of an impact the wider 4-issue Conroe core will actually have on performance. Intel has been talking about how ILP is dead and TLP is the future of extracting processor performance, but I would say Conroe's existence is proof of the opposite. Or maybe it's just that Conroe's improvements are the last major ones we'll see to ILP for the foreseeable future.
This week ATI will hopefully be releasing their Catalyst 5.13 drivers and there may be another launch or two from the folks in Canada. Despite what you'd think, we're actually told that they will have product available at these launches before the end of the year. Only time will tell, but at least ATI is admitting to and talking about the availability problem in the sense of fixing it these days.
I've got to run and tackle a lot of errands around the house and town today before we leave tomorrow. Enjoy the day and I may chime in later today about some Xbox 360 stuff.
Take care.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
12 Comments
View All Comments
Questar - Tuesday, December 20, 2005 - link
Lamer than Athlon? Not.Furen - Thursday, December 22, 2005 - link
Really? I kind of like "Athlon" and "Opteron", though I must say that "Sempron" sucks big time. The problem I have with "Core" is that though the word itself is not bad it's got nothing on "Pentium" or "Itanium". Also, the Duo/Solo thing is pretty lame, too.