That's too bad, since AMD controlled most of the vague and unclear reviews.
Coincidence?
Well, what a brilliant stroke it was for AMD to "control" these reviews to the extent that all of the reviewers were supplied with handy engineering samples of pre-production 45nm Core 2 cpus. Your contention is, then, that it was AMD's idea to contrast the 65nm cpus they were launching today with the 45nm cpus from Intel which have yet to ship? Your position is that this was all AMD's doing?....
That should tell you something.
The product is days away from supposedly shipping in quantity, and the platform is in shambles.
It's a repeat of the Athlon days when Intel pressured motherboard makers to not make Slot A motherboards.
Only this time, the board makers would kill to make an AMD board, only AMD's failed execution has stopped them.
So your contention is that when AMD is ready to ship them that nobody will ship them? I mean, if they'd "kill" to ship the motherboards this week, I see no reason that attitude might dramatically change next week, do you?
There is no way in hell that a final product that is shipping for real money should be in that position.
Opteron and A64 had running boards and near full-speed processors months prior to launch.-/
Opteron was by some accounts a year late. By others it was two years late. And after launch, Opteron ramped up in MHz and yields--just like Core 2 did after it shipped at ~1.9GHz. Regardless of the lateness of Opteron, which could be debated from here to eternity, the delay did not prevent the chip from being a smash success when it shipped, did it? Some might say that Core 2 was 3-4 years "late"--which hasn't detracted from its commercial success in the slightest. When new cpus ship--and this is true for everybody including AMD--what is represented at that point in time is the beginning of the cpu's lifespan, as opposed to the end, right?
Phenom's status--as a product people pay real money for--is unacceptable, and the fact that AMD and partners are going through with it is indicative of desperation.
Let's not forget that the lousy chipset situation and motherboard issues really hurt AMD's gains with K7.
Well, then--what about 45nm Core 2 in terms of "status"--in terms of product people pay real money for? (I didn't know you could buy products with play money, but that's beside the point...
) Regardless of that status, that didn't prevent users from using the results garnered from essentially the cherry-picked 45nm Core 2 samples Intel sent out to people expressly for the purpose of diluting Phenom's launch, did it?
About the K7's initial chipset/motherboard problems--don't forget that Intel was directly behind many of those problems, as we've known for quite some time.
No, Phenom's status is significantly worse.
There are questions about stability and functionality days prior to launch.
How often have either Intel or AMD ever admitted that there is a critical show-stopping crash bug that basically limits CPU clock speed to less than the top bin of chips from two process generations before?
Questions posed without answers are merely speculation--gossip, if you will. As far as your remarks about clockspeed are concerned, you are aware I'm sure that Phenom does not share the architecture of earlier AMD cpus, and therefore direct comparison with the clockspeeds of earlier architectures is likely to tell us absolutely nothing...?
Memory results on a number of programs (including AMD's) do not correctly detect the memory controllers.
Which seems to dramatically illustrate the point that Phenom is indeed a new architecture. Should we expect that utilities written for the P4, even if written by Intel, should always work with Core 2? I would never make such an assumption.
That being said, AMD's greatest success didn't come when its products ran AMD-optimized software best.
Remember K7 vs P3 and K8 vs. P4?
AMD made money by making processors that beat Intel at its own game.
They ran Intel code better than Intel did.
I guess that here your supposition must be that nobody ever optimized for AMD cpus, and that AMD did nothing to push its optimized compilers/optimizations out to anybody? If so, I'd have to disagree. It's well known that Intel optimized for the P4 in all these respects--and of course there is absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. It seems only logical, however, since the P4 and the A64 were and are entirely different x86 architectures, to expect that like the P4 benefited the A64 would benefit from AMD optimizations of various kinds. I think that is beyond argument. In some cases that I can clearly recall, P4 compilers placed flags designed to clearly disadvantage non-P4 x86 cpus like the A64; in other code, for instance some benchmark code, the degree of P4 optimization was so heavy and pronounced that A64 was automatically disadvantaged when running it.
While I might say that sometimes the A64 ran rings around the P4 when running certain types of generic x86 code, not even counting 64-bit code, I would never say that that the A64 could run highly optimized P4 code better than a P4, for obvious reasons. IE, there's a big difference between "x86 code" and "Intel code," as one need not necessarily be the same as the other at all.
Now, AMD is having a hard time making a chip that beats K8 in some situations.
I guess we should blame Sandra for being K8-centric.
Interesting observation, because I also noticed that in a few of these benchmarks the Phenom tested ran all over the Q66/6800's...
So I guess what the Phenom is either slower than or faster than is highly dependent on the software being fed to Phenom, isn't it? Sandra, as I said, is mostly Intel-centric, and always has been. Efforts to better represent the differences between the P4 and the A64 inside Sandra always came long after the fact--with the OOB Sandra experience being very sympathetic to Intel architectures. Accordingly, Sandra is a program that I have installed, and then uninstalled, at least four times over the years--always being unhappy with how the software had difficulty in even correctly identifying the hardware I was running at any given time.
Just how long from now is "too late"?
Let's decide on a date, and we'll mark it on our calendars.
When that date comes to pass, we can all get together and then we can discuss things over tea.
For a successful product, the degree of lateness would seem not to matter--as I pointed out above with respect to both the A64 and Core 2. If Phenom proves itself unsuccessful in comparison with Core 2, it will not be because Phenom was late, it will be because Phenom was so inferior that no amount of price disparity could serve to make it attractive in volume. If Phenom otoh proves itself a successful competitor to Core 2, then the fact that Phenom was late out of the gate will simply not matter, because it will succeed on its merits as opposed to its calendar release date.
Phenom has been released in 4Q 2007, with a top bin half a GHz below the originally planned speed on a motherboard a revision back from what it should have been.
It has chips that cannot be trusted to overclock, because even if they did clock high, they'd freeze the system.
Which is part and parcel of all overclocking, isn't it? You can take a Core 2 cpu and if you overclock it enough you can "freeze" the system, too...
This was especially true when Core 2's first shipped at ~1.9Ghz, but really, it is true of all cpus. Some of them can be overclocked to a great degree, and some of then cannot be, but the fact is that *none of them* has been validated by the manufacturer to successfully run in all situations at clocks higher than those at which they are sold.
I'm sure the one Phenom AMD manages to build in the next quarter will be there for you to buy.
Heh...
Yup, right along with the "one" 45nm Core 2 Intel manages to build next quarter...
That's a bit of a ridiculous comment, don't you think?
So AMD's latest and greatest can't even trump its old value lines?
Sounds fantastic.
Again, how does this statement square with the fact that AMD's latest and greatest easily walks all over a Q66/6800 when the two cpus are fed the appropriate benchmark software--and even when the Intel Q's are clocked half a GHz higher than the Phenom? The fact that Phenom is inconsistent in that regard seems to me entirely consistent with the fact that Phenom is a new architecture which has not yet been properly optimized for or supported by much of the benchmark software that pretends to be able to measure its performance potential. I think these inconsistencies will sort themselves out in time as the Phenom architecture becomes better known and supported.
I'm sure Phenom-optimized programs will come out.
Going by the current crop, the primary optimizations will be to downclock the chip to 2.3 GHz and only run on one core.
Either that or enable the hidden time machine to bring the Phenom release up 6 months, or do you really think (edit: not) beating a (edit: lower bin of) chip that is been out for over a year a staggering accomplishment?
Again, you are ignoring the benchmarks in which the Phenom easily bests the Q66/6800's as well as older Athlons. Sparse though such examples may be at present, they do indicate dramatically that the situation is nowhere near as consistent as you represent it.
I'm also somewhat unsure as to where that 30-50% factor is coming in.
Seriously, I haven't seen anything to indicate that a decent motherboard and processor from either platform has that large a disparity.
I've seen prices quoted for the top-end Core 2 cpus in excess of $1,000. It was to those that I was referring, the price of the motherboards at that point being moot.
The contest they're declaring over right now is Phenom versus 65nm Core2.
And given Intel's schedule for production, they're pretty much right.
I fail to see why they'd declare it "over" since Intel isn't yet shipping 45nm Core 2's at any level that could be considered comparable to the volume of 65nm Core 2's it is shipping, if Intel is shipping 45nm Core 2's in any volume at all...
As is evident in this industry, a company's production plans for a product do not equal actual production of the product itself, as often even the best-laid plans of mice and men go awry...
IE, it isn't wise for any company to do too much of counting its chickens before they hatch. I'm sure you know that Intel has wound up with egg on its face many times in the past for doing just that.
The basic thrust of what you seem to be saying here is that you regard Intel as a perfect corporation always manufacturing perfect products, perfectly on time according to its pre-announced schedules. Of course, I would energetically disagree with any such characterization of any hardware company, AMD and Intel included. OTOH, you don't seem to be able find anything approaching perfection when it comes to your assessment of AMD.
