Fyo, Re: "One final comment… the ExtremeTech review uses an AMD-based motherboard - this is far from the fastest solution available today. Even if you don't want to count the KT266A (since it's only been out for a short time), e.g. the SiS735 still significantly improves upon the performance of the AMD760 chipset."
Well, if you are going to compare Best of Breed configurations, then from Anand's article, it does appear that the Athlon XP 1800+ has the lead by a fair enough margin. However, it will take a few months for these solutions to become available and en masse. But I think that AMD has regained the performance race temporarily until Northwood arrives. If Northwood gets a decent performance gain (>5%) and the Brookdale DDR chipset ends up performing within a few percentage of the i850, Intel may have a closely performing and closely priced equivalent to AMD's. Admittedly, AMD's performance is important to them in succeeding, but it's certainly not going to win them the war. They need to execute their marketing much better, and start advertising. I saw another Intel commercial yesterday. Clearly Intel is not going to rest on the laurels of the 2GHz Pentium 4. There is much more work to be done. AMD needs to get their .13u process working, SOI, Hammer, Hyperthreading... there is a lot they must still prove of themselves that they can execute on time. Much more slippage, and the gains they get now still won't matter much 6 months from now.
wanna_bmw |
