Momentum, Please
On Sunday before Computex (it starts Tuesday, June 6th), Hall 1 looks more like a construction site than a fancy exhibition hall.
2006 is a special year for the IT business. Although Intel still clearly outnumbers AMD from a business point of view, the Athlon 64 family has been superior in both performance and efficiency over the last two years. For these reasons, more and more users bought an AMD64 solution rather than "Intel inside". But at the same time, there has been little innovation and so there is a large number of users that would hesitate to invest in a new system.
On the one hand, AMD recently introduced its next-generation Athlon 64 platform based on Socket AM2 (940 pins). It will seamlessly replace the current Socket 754 and Socket 939 platforms and move all desktop processor families from DDR400 to DDR2-800 memory. All upcoming processors, whether these are Revision G Athlon 64s or the following K8L processor (Q1/2007), will be released for Socket AM2 only. On the other hand, Intel has been silently working on its next micro architecture that shall re-conquer the performance and the efficiency crowns. Core 2 Duo will launch at up to 2.93 GHz (Core 2 Extreme Edition) soon. It is safe to say that is capable of decapitating the Athlon 64 FX-62 for the time being, because it is the more advanced (65 nm vs. 90 nm) and the more sophisticated processor core: Think of its shared 4 MB L2 cache, its wide execution pipeline, 128 bit SSE and micro and macro ops fusion. But AMD is working on 65 nm products itself, and we expect these to be available in Q4.
Let The Quad Core Games Begin
Whether you favor AMD or Intel: It was not until now that you could shop for a motherboard that would support your favorite processor - both today (Athlon 64 or Pentium D) and tomorrow (Rev. G 65 nm Athlon 64 or Core 2 Duo), or maybe even in the more distant feature: Neither AMD's quad core K8L nor Intel's double dual core (quad core) Kentsfield should technically require a new platform. Whether this comes true or not remains to be seen.
The approaches of both companies could not be more different. Intel (again) decided to pair two pieces of 65 nm dual core silicon (two Conroe-type Core 2 Duo chips) into one package. This results in a quad core that consists of two dual cores, each with its own 2 MB or 4 MB shared L2 cache, and each communicating via the processor's Front Side Bus. AMD, on the opposite, favors single-chip solutions. Hence the K8L will be one big 1+ billion transistors die with four cores. While AMD agrees on the principle of having a shared cache, it does not believe that it should be the L2. As a consequence, each core has its dedicated 32+32 kB L1 and 512 kB L2 cache, and an additional, globally shared L3 cache.
Not only are the processor architectures entirely different (shared L2 vs. dedicated L2 and shared L3, integrated vs. Northbridge memory controller, Front Side Bus vs. HyperTransport, single vs. dual die), but the quad core implementations also are different and make performance predictions rather difficult. We will have answers in Q1/2007.
