Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cruzbay who wrote (149216)	1/27/2005 2:37:51 PM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 275872

Dear Cruzbay: We have been down this before, except now Intel needs 2MB L2s to compete with ODMCs with just 256KB. Semperons are winning in games against far larger caches because latency matters in things desktop and in games. 754 pin CPUs with all of the artificial benchmarks for bandwidth losses still beat far larger cached CPUs playing games like HL2. Last benchmarks I've seen place 3.8GHz 1MB P4s on par with 512KB 1.8GHz A64s. And the last time dual CPU systems played games, only special Q3A could have any contribution meaningful for a second CPU and then less than 15% IIRC. 3.2GHz 1MB Smithfield duals would on Q3A get 3.2*1.15 equal to a 3.68GHz P4 which loses to a 512KB A64 3000+. On any other game, it loses by 14-22% to a lowly 1.8GHz 84mm2 core. No its Intel with a big problem. Dual cores don't get it much except for one valuable area, servers. And there it won't have a possible competitor for 9-12 months and it may be like Tejas and not even be viable by then. Intel can't make enough of a ok competitor due to bin splits. It tries a new tactic that will likely lead to another setback. And here you are thinking that they will throw boxcars when they have been throwing mostly snake eyes at their crapshoots. Dual core will go over like a lead balloon when actual benchmarks come out. But, you can see these by looking at both dual socket Opterons or more closely, dual socket Xeon boards. If that leads to a large gaming advantage, most benchmark fests would be using dual socket workstation MBs as the flagship end of the market. Notice how all of the top end rigs use single high performance cores? They'd rather put their money for vapor chilling, dual RAID 1 setups and now top end SLI setups with the fastest GPUs out there. In fact with the new Nvidia MCPs, dual socket with HT and quad dual drive RAID 1 mirrored SATA drives may be the standard for super high end gaming boxes for bragging rights. And notice dual socketed Smithfields are not a possibility and dual core Xeons are over a year out that may be dual socket capable. Certainly 4 socket dal cored Xeons are even further out. Not so for AMD. It already has 8 socket dual core MBs out. And in those useful profitable places like workstation and servers. No Intel needs a 300-400mm2 die to compete and it isn't pretty. And you want it to be true that AMD must follow Intel down blind alleys filled with dead ends. Sorry, AMD at least listens to its customers and they are not clamor'n for DDR2 or dual cores, some do want performance and they are willing to pay for it. Most have less lofty goals and accept 80-90% of the flagships for a whole lot less. But they still want the most performance their budgets will allow. And currently AMD wins both battles. And at times, like now, their budget CPUs beat Intel's flagships. Ain't that just plain sad (for Intel)? Pete