Intel slash prices on Core2 Quads to counter Phenom2 *check*

Sxotty said:
Sounds good to me. Maybe AMD will cut prices as well. Nothing beats an ol' fashioned price war.
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The problem for AMD is that the 45 nm Phenom is 258 mm2 and the 45nm Core2Quad is 214 mm2.
Add the complexity of the Phenom2 (More transistors than the i7) to table, add Intel's more mature 45nm process and you have a bleak endgame for AMD.

Intel have been using it's 65nm Q6600 to hold the Phenom(1) at bay while making a killing on the cheaper-to-produce 45nm Quads, giving them a nice possition to counter the Phenom2 now.

A price war will only hurt AMD further.

But I welcome a pricewar in the midrange, can only hope it affects the i7 prices...but I have little hope of that.
 
If I read that right, the Q9650 is coming down to ~$315? Damn, might have to pick one up and go back into the Quad game again. The 9650's are all E0-stepping, and overclock far better on the "older" chipsets like my X38. My 9450 could do 450FSB at entirely stock (not auto) voltages, but I couldn't even get it to POST past about 463 no matter what I did...

This is generally bad news for AMD though; how do you compete with this kind of hardware at that price level? Ouch...
 
For me I would switch to dual core mainly for lower power consumption for SFF PCs with small ~100W PSUs. A C2D at 3GHz is as fast as a C2Q at 2.4GHz while consuming only 65W vs 95W. I have a 1U PC and the external powerbrick is 120W so it makes more sense to go with dual core instead of quad core.
 
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Davros said:
That sounds like you had a quadcore and went to a dual core why would you do that ?
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Because I play games. Because the highest stable clock I could attain on my Q9450 was ~3.6Ghz, and the highest stable clock I could attain on my E8400 E0 is ~4.4Ghz. With a pair of CF'd 4850's, the games that I play performed better on the higher-clocked dual core than the quad core.

I bought the Q9450 for my own curiosity, benched it and then played with it for probably two months, and then took it out. The dual did everything I wanted: less heat pumped into my room from my radiator, less power consumption, and better performance in the grand majority of things I like to do.

If I could get a quad that would clock as well as my dual, then I wouldn't have much to complain about. Which is why, if those new price figures are true, I might be convinced to go back to the quad core world again.
 
Albuquerque said:
Because I play games. Because the highest stable clock I could attain on my Q9450 was ~3.6Ghz, and the highest stable clock I could attain on my E8400 E0 is ~4.4Ghz. With a pair of CF'd 4850's, the games that I play performed better on the higher-clocked dual core than the quad core.
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The power of the mindset that more is *always* better is pretty impressive. I don't think I once recommended a quad last year because no one in my private life used any apps that would truly benefit. So the advice was always a cheaper, higher clocked, cooler dual core. I spent most of last year using a E8500 in my gaming box despite having multiple Extreme Penryn quads lying around.
 
your a strange one alby first playing freespace 2 in retail, then you ditch a perfectly good quadcore for a dual core, when you would of got much more performance buying 2x4870's
 
I already have a pair of 4850's; I have a hard time thinking the $500 cost in upgrading those to a pair of 4870's would net me much, especially considering the 1680x1050 resolution of my LCD.

And much to John Reynolds point, more isn't necessarily better. Quads don't do much of anything for the apps that I use, nor the majority of apps used by the majority of users. One day, many-core CPU's will be the norm and we'll all be happily prodding along with our uber-threaded apps. But that day isn't today, and it probably isn't coming in 2009 either.
 
Albuquerque said:
I already have a pair of 4850's; I have a hard time thinking the $500 cost in upgrading those to a pair of 4870's would net me much, especially considering the 1680x1050 resolution of my LCD.

And much to John Reynolds point, more isn't necessarily better. Quads don't do much of anything for the apps that I use, nor the majority of apps used by the majority of users. One day, many-core CPU's will be the norm and we'll all be happily prodding along with our uber-threaded apps. But that day isn't today, and it probably isn't coming in 2009 either.
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Its true quad-core benefits are fairly application specific.

I've been doing a lot video editing lately - both at work (benchmark capturing) and at home (720p in-car video from my Kodak Zi6) and the difference between PCs is pretty marked.

Over Christmas I was using a Core 2 Extreme X9100 based laptop, and my Core i7 965-XE desktop absolutely annihilates it when it comes to video rendering, more than twice as fast in some situations.
That pales in comparison to my work system though, 8 cores, 16 threads and 48GB DDR3 makes for swift progress! Just replaced a Dual Quad-core Xeon X5470 system with it and it simply flies.

Game wise there are definitely some titles that benefit - GTA4 for example.
Some aren't a quantitive improvement however - Enemy Territory Quake Wars for example would load in high quality sections of the mega textures far quicker when you respawned on a quad-core than a dual-core. Frame rates were similar on both systems but for a couple seconds the quad-core had markedly higher visual quality.
I believe Flight Simulator X did something similar too.
 
Oh, another weird detail I've spotted....

GTA4 running the benchmark side-by-side and comparing video frame by frame, Core 2 Duo vs. Core i7.

Same settings on both systems, but the Core i7 has a higher level of geometry detail in places - I'll try and post up a comparison shot in the next few days as I've got all my source videos.
 
Thorburn said:
Oh, another weird detail I've spotted....

GTA4 running the benchmark side-by-side and comparing video frame by frame, Core 2 Duo vs. Core i7.

Same settings on both systems, but the Core i7 has a higher level of geometry detail in places - I'll try and post up a comparison shot in the next few days as I've got all my source videos.
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Thats certainly interesting, I look forward to seeing the screenshots! It could point to some kind of dynamic geometry scaling based on available performance.
 
Davros said:
ps: alby exactly what games did not have enough performance on a quadcore clocked at 3.6ghz ?
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Crysis and Warhead's minimum framerate was the most noticeable. It was far smoother on the dual core... World in Conflict averaged about 35FPS on the quad and about 45FPS on the dual as well, at least according to their benchmark.

Interestingly enough, I also lost a bit of overclock stability on my pair of 4850's with the quad at full tilt. It wasn't a whole lot, but it was also enough to not help the framerate issues in games that already weren't gaining from the quad.
 
For upgrading for a mere 20% you go into the more money than sense file
but because your rich i have to be nice to you ;)

Davros (who would like a logitech G25 for his birthday) <---- subtle hint
 
Davros said:
For upgrading for a mere 20% you go into the more money than sense file
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I'm not sure that I follow -- "upgrading" to a Q9450 netted me a loss in performance. So I shouldn't have ever upgraded; I kept the processor hoping for a future date where either it would make more sense or I could give it to someone else in the family. By the time I had surely identified that I wasn't going to use it, I couldn't send it back.
 
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