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By William Van Winkle |
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What crazy times. While most summers tend to be a bit bland on foundational PC tech news, this season has been one of the most sizzling on record. With the Core architecture, Intel has blown away its NetBurst doldrums and resumed its former spot at the fore of processor technology and performance. AMD is now bowing its long-awaited AM2 socket, which will soon blur the lines between workstation and desktop platforms. And don't discount VIA, the little chipmaker with a big value offering for the notebook space. |
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the timing for late summer is significant. As we see interminable Windows Vista delays, an increasing number of buyers are heading into the fall thinking that they could log in many more months with Windows XP—or longer for those conditioned by hard experience to wait for the SP1 release—while enjoying the benefits of a faster, better system. Also, some reviews of Vista Beta are appearing saying that the new OS is good but not the sweeping sea change we saw from, say, 3.1 to 95 or 98SE to 2000. There is plenty of innovation buried in Vista, but the infrastructure needed from third-party providers to leverage that innovation may not come for many more months after the official launch. So when the need is felt for better performance, why not buy now? For businesses in particular, there is financial incentive not to wait for Vista. Historically, the upgrades between processor models, even processor families, was incremental at best. (As we've seen more than once in the NetBurst era, SKUs from a new core might even underperform their predecessor.) Buried in the cost of a new PC, buying a new processor technology offered dubious overall value at best. Now, though, there's more reason to get excited. We seem to be in a rare spot where CPU vendors have us on socket platforms with long road maps ahead of them and compatible SKUs with mountains of performance to offer. "Look over the last five years or so," says Todd Garrigues, North American channel marketing manager for Intel, "you see a 5%, maybe 10% difference between the new high-end part and the previous high-end part. But now, you're not only talking a 40% jump but price points that are equal to or less than what they paid last time. So customers might have bought a single-core, maybe non-Hyper-Threaded workstation three or four years ago. Since then, we've gone through Hyper-Threading to dual-core to now Core 2. Whether we're talking about a multi-tasking environment or a multi-threaded environment, the capability of today's machines is significantly better than what was available three or four years ago."
Without sinking into the discussion of what constitutes an evolution versus a revolution, suffice it to say that the bigger the technology jump in processors, the better the sales opportunity. Not only do you have the benefit of improved performance, but you also tend to gather new features and other secondary benefits along the way. As we'll see, the hot button topic of 2006 has turned out to be low power consumption, and both Intel and AMD have made landmark progress on this front in the last few months. Every product category has its season, but this is no deep freeze period for CPUs. This is hot, hot summer, and we brought a magnifying glass. And just maybe, we've got the info you can use to help set your sales on fire. AMD: Now Nobody's Underdog Being first to market can be a risky affair. On one hand, pioneers get the benefit of concept association (think Xerox for photocopiers and Kleenex for tissue) and loads of media attention. Then again, those who lead the pack in a new direction are generally the ones who get eaten first. Back when AMD was the first to cross the 1.0 GHz line and people were shocked to see an Athlon chip besting a Pentium in benchmark tests, AMD's technical superiority was considered an anomaly, a passing curiosity sure to fade under the horizon. After all, this was the company that had eked out a living making x86 Intel chip clones and undercutting its titanic competitor on pricing. But AMD didn't fade. Instead, it embarked on a marathon race with Intel, see-sawing up and down in the battle for performance bragging rights. Fast forward several years. The many generations of Athlon have been able to keep pace with Intel's Pentium lines. AMD stepped into the workstation/server space with the bold and risky, 64-bit-enabled Opteron at roughly the same time that Intel was mid-way through the NetBurst architecture. By 2003, NetBurst was showing its first signs of not being everything Intel had hoped while the Opteron leveraged the integrated memory controller and HyperTransport bus advantages of the Athlon line, provided higher speeds than the Athlon counterparts, and implemented a crossbar architecture that allows multiple CPUs to intercommunicate directly without resorting to a shared front-side bus. The more CPUs one added, the more glaring the performance advantage became over Intel's NetBurst- and FSB-based Xeon competitor. Once the SMB world figured out that Opteron wasn't going to trip over its laces and fall flat on its face, the Xeon expatriates started appearing. Now, AMD promises it will hit 30% server/workstation market share by the end of 2006.
This is a prettier story than that of Turion, AMD's latest mobile processor. Unable to fight on all fronts simultaneously, AMD pushed hard to win enthusiasts on the desktop and lasso the server chip cash cow but lacked the corporate bandwidth to mount an equal offensive on the mobile side. Intel unleashed the Centrino blitzkrieg and, not coincidentally, mobile Athlon sales evaporated. When Turion first arrived, there was considerable anticipation as the market wondered if this was another Intel upset in the making. However, the Pentium M's forsaking of NetBurst proved the right choice. Turion, essentially a low-power repackaging of the Athlon 64, either met or slipped behind the Pentium M in reviews, had no marketing platform, and, more importantly, showed almost zero whitebook presence in the channel until just recently. Turion boasts many design wins, but its share gains remain relatively low. In retrospect, AMD's moves have been largely ingenious. Integrating the memory controller into the CPU resulted in far lower memory latencies—a key factor in cementing the Athlon's place in enthusiast's hearts. As concerns about heat and power consumption mounted, AMD delivered its Cool'n'Quiet functionality, which is similar to Intel's SpeedStep, only AMD did a much better job of promoting the feature as a desktop technology. AMD's devotion to supporting 64-bit x86 extensions have, truth be told, been fairly irrelevant in the market, but that didn't matter. AMD made 64-bit a marketing football, and the more Intel tried to tell people that the world didn't need 64-bit yet, the less the world listened. When Intel was forced to follow suit with EM64T, AMD got to gloat that the industry giant was now following its leadership. The irony is that if Intel had led with 64-bit extensions on the desktop first, critics likely would have called the move unnecessary and arrogant. What's Hot With AMD First up, we have a new CPU socket, the long-awaited AM2, which succeeds Socket 939. AM2 is a 940-pin socket, but this should not be confused with the Socket 940 of the Opteron and early Athlon FX lines. The respective 940-pin sockets are pin-incompatible, so you can't mistakenly plant an Opteron in an AM2 board. At launch, AMD revealed AM2 processors across all four of its desktop lines, capping the Sempron at 3600+, the Athlon 64 at 3800+, the Athlon 64 X2 at 5000+, and the Athlon 64 FX with the FX-62, the only AM2 SKU in the FX line and the one AM2 candidate we reviewed for this article. The key difference between AM2 and 939 is that the new AM2 chips integrate DDR2 support, at last leaving original DDR behind. "DDR1's time is coming to an end, so we're making the transition when it makes sense," says AMD spokesperson Damon Muzny. "DDR2 prices are down, performance is up, availability is good, acceptance is across the board for everybody. The most critical thing is that when you net it out across our platforms, DDR2 vs. DDR1, performance stays the same or goes up. Before, we didn't have low enough latency or high enough frequency with DDR2 to have that transition make sense." There's that. There's also the fact that it's much harder to transition to new memory technologies when the controller is built into your CPU rather than the chipset. AMD's architecture choice reduces latency but makes the company less nimble to memory technology changes. Other changes inherent to AM2 include a new heatsink retention module that is incompatible with all of the Socket 754, 939, and 940 designs that preceded it. This is of particular note if you're selling third-party heatsink products as some may not include the proper mountings for AM2. AMD now follows Intel in adopting hardware-based virtualization support (AMD calls this "Pacifica"), the HyperTransport channel now reaches 8 GB/sec, and the new format also supports AMD's just-announced energy efficient SKUs. These same memory and virturalization updates are also expected to hit the Opteron line with the new "Revision F" by the time you read this.
The point about power consumption in particular is worth noting. While details on how exactly AMD was able to drop the Vcore and wattage numbers in their Energy Efficient series has been sparse, the bottom line is that the greener parts generally sacrifice nothing in performance and only cost an average of $25 to $30 more per chip. Clearly, the older Socket 939 parts, still landing in the 89W to 110W range, fall prey to the same criticisms as the Pentium D line, but the Energy Efficient AM2 models come in with the same 65W spec (with presently one 35W exception for the 3800+) as the mainstream Core 2 Duo parts. Now, both companies list 65W as their maximum TDP spec, but we have engaged in numerous conversations with AMD wherein the company points to independent reviews indicating that AMD max numbers are in fact maximum while Intel max numbers are closer to averages. Intel refutes this vehemently. Suffice it to say that power testing falls beyond the scope of this article, but we hope that past power fudges under the NetBurst architecture will be greatly minimized if not eradicated under the new Core designs. As you've no doubt heard and our numbers below will demonstrate, Intel's Core architecture has leapt far ahead of the Athlon line, even the mighty FX-62. This is a serious blow to AMD in the performance segment where so much of its reputation is based. Countless thousands of enthusiasts who don't hate Intel simply for the sake of hating the market leader are likely to switch sides if AMD can't come up with a suitable counterpunch—quickly. Enter "4x4," the unofficial name for AMD's next-gen desktop platform aimed at keeping its enthusiast audience and perhaps picking up some more adherents in the process. In a nutshell, 4x4 aims to plant two dual-core processors into two AM2 sockets on one motherboard. AMD's Direct Connect architecture plants a dedicated channel between each CPU core and system memory as well as between CPU cores. This approach was the dominant factor in Opteron's trouncing of the Xeon, and now AMD hopes to apply the same tactics against Core 2 Duo. "With our architecture, every time you add a processor you add a memory controller, so you're adding memory bandwidth," says AMD's Munzy. "We're using that to our benefit and getting four cores into a single box quickly. You might say, ‘Well, that's brilliant, Damon. You just reinvented Opteron. Good for you.' But one of the things about 4x4 is that you surgically extract the things that are not enthusiast-friendly or conducive to somebody wanting to build their own PC. First and most obvious is registered memory. You don't want that for your desktop, so we made sure the memory controller supports unregistered DIMMs. Then we have to work with the motherboard vendors to make sure that the BIOS is enthusiast-friendly. We're not supposed to say ‘overclocking,' but that sort of thing. And like even if you can find a workstation board with two graphics slots, they tend not to allow for the extra spacing you want for wider high-end consumer cards. So you take what's good for Opteron, like multi-socket—which is not a penalty for us—and then you make it enthusiast-friendly." Those prone to hindsight may recall that AMD derided Intel's decision to pursue multi-threading on the desktop because virtually no desktop apps integrated support for anything above one thread. In the all-important gaming sector, single-thread is still the norm, although most developers are in the long and expensive process of migrating to multi-thread. Just as with DDR2, AMD will emerge as the golden child of PR once again, getting to claim that it waited until the market was ready (largely because of Intel's considerable investment) to make the jump to multi-thread. But lest you think that four threads on one board is the last word for 2006, anticipate hearing a lot about quad-core processors in the fourth quarter. AMD's 4x4 is due to go public before the end of this year and paves the way for a "true" quad-core processor in 2007, although specifics on the quad launch date are still under wraps. We use quotation marks here because AMD will be integrating four discrete cores into one chip, all of which leverage Direct Connect. Intel's initial quad-core parts, due out by the end of 2006, will be two dual-core dies "glued" together in one chip, much as the Pentium D bonds two single-core dies rather than having them share more resources in the manner of Core chips. The upshot is that AMD's quad-core approach combined with 4x4 may yield considerably greater bandwidth with lower latencies than Intel. "Enthusiasts are looking at mega-tasking scenarios," says Patrick Moorhead, AMD's vice president of global channel marketing. "Mega-tasking is doing multi-threaded applications simultaneously. We believe that the new 4x4 architecture is going to bring the preeminent solution to the table. We're seeing an 80% uplift in mega-tasking performance going from two cores to four cores. And you know how enthusiasts work. They like to upgrade their CPUs and have a lot of scalability. In the future, we are pin-upgradeable to the true quad-core processors. You can go from four to eight cores on the same platform just with a BIOS tweak. That's an incredible value proposition. And as it comes to the 95% mainstream market, it's all about the value of delivering performance at a certain price. Even today, nobody is questioning our mainstream value competitiveness. A lot of stuff gets written about the higher-end parts, and, frankly, we'll give Intel their day in the sun until 4x4 shows up in the enthusiast space." ...more |
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