Intel's Q8200: Good news for AMD?

I really think Intels best CPU right now is the Q6600. Its just the best price/performance and overclocks like crazy. Are intels margins on these CPUs bad or something? Because every attempt I've seen from them to replace it hasnt been that appealing.

 

I would disagree with the original post save for this statement -- I suppose it is all relative. Still, I don't see Intel's continued price drops on the Penryn-based chips to be anything but bad news for AMD. To the quoted point, sure, it could be worse, such as Nehalem coming out two quarters sooner than expected.

AMD's CPU division is competing on pretty much price alone for now, and the further Intel pushes their prices down, the more they trample potential AMD marketshare -- especially for big VARs that don't care or support overclocking (ie: the whole "spider" platform.)

I wouldn't hesitate to buy an AMD video card for lots of reasons, but I can't find any redeeming quality for any of AMD's CPU's unless I'm building a rig for a person with a $200 budget for the entire rig. And at that price point, it doesn't even matter IMO.

 

isnt amd loosing money hand over fist at the mo
and didnt it do the same last year
question : this money it's lost where did it come from or do they now owe someone ?

 

At this point, I'd wager that most of the money is borrowed in various ways from various organizations such as venture capital firms, banks, maybe even governments. And while the losses are substantial, it's still technically possible that they are liquidating treasury stock or something like that -- although I doubt it.

I'm absolutely not a financial / stock guru, but I'd say they're on borrowed money.

 

I think AMD's resurgence in the GPU market will help them quite a bit. Perhaps it'll give the CPU division the needed cash infusion to start producing better chips? One can only hope.

 

That's one thing that sucks for the former ATI and is a boon for AMD -- I don't like the idea of the graphics division serving as a liferaft for the CPU division, it feels like the money is being funnelled into the black abyss rather than being used to deliver an even more compelling video experience at the next generation.

I'm not saying that's really what's happening, but it certainly feels like it. And it makes baby Jesus

 

Yeah I just looked at that on newegg. I was just kind of glancing and was quite surprised how cheap the AMD quadcores were. Of course it would require another total swap of hardware, so it would be cheaper to keep my current setup and buy an intel, except my current asus based intel based motherboard is total trash.

 

Q9300 being the cheapest and lowest power penryn quad makes a great CPU to build a cheap, powerful server, or a great lowish power rig. The low use of watts is astounding.
It sucks though that it's 50€ more expensive than the Q6600 which has identical performance but eats more. The Q8200 would offer some compromise but it seems they nerfed the hardware virtualization to fend off people that would build a server on the cheap (though I wonder if the virtualization instructions are any useful)

thus there could be some space for the phenom 9150e (spotted at 154 euros)
to give you what I think of, any of those CPU could easily run a debian or ubuntu image serving desktop and applications to many, many terminals (let's say 10 or 20, made from free, junk ancient hardware and/or $90 SoC PCs) ; for desktop, net and work use, while doing some server duties. A single PC can now run an entire small company, school or computer lab.

 

To be honest, how much power do you need for a home server?

I run file sharing to all the systems in my house, FTP, DHCP, and uTorrent with web access off a Pentium M 1.7GHz which so far has had 270 days uptime, hasn't missed a beat and been flawlessly reliable.

The Q8200 is just there to compete with AMDs low-end Phenoms, and a pair of 3MB L2 cache cores are around 2/3rds the size of a single Phenom, and can still potentially have 1MB of dead cache each, so they should be fairly cost effective to make.

 

I know, while they're a minority, lots of people like building cheap folding rigs with Intel quads just because they turn out such fabulous PPD. We were having a discussion about it elsewhere in this forum about how a Core 2 Duo + a single cheap 320mb 8800GT's can crank out around 8-10k PPD. Throw another two cores at it and another cheap 8800GT and you've got the ability to do 12-15k PPD depending on work units and overclocking luck.

Not to say that's going to be common, but that's at least someone who could use that kind of grunt on a home box.