Originally posted by: Idontcare
Originally posted by: ilkhan
Phenom is indeed the competitor for i7, Opteron is competing with Xeon.
Yes, but all that did was move up to the performance levels of yorkfield. By naming the line with the same numbers as i7, AMD deliberately chose to compete with i7. Which is a bad idea, considering how badly i7 tramples PhenomII.
Actually if I can take liberty in assuming I understand where viditor is coming from, I believe what he basically means is that i7 (as in bloomfield) is basically the server Zeon Nehalem EP chip (and x58 platform) billed as an enthusiast extreme level system...not intended to compete with PhII.
Considering that i7 accounts for ~1% of Intel's revenue, I'd say its acceptable to posit that i7 is not in competition with PhII. AMD would have liked it to have been competitive, but it wasn't in the cards. If Intel were shipping 50% of its revenue on i7 chips alone then I'd agree PhII is competing with i7, but that's just not the case.
PhII competes with Q9x00 and Q8x00, Intel's mainstream platforms. Whenever i5 and i3 debuts then we can talk about the practical considerations of how PhII competes with the nehalem version of the consumer platform.
PhII's naming scheme was certainly to
imply competitiveness with i7, I'll give you that as I've made a few diatribes against AMD over the subject in my past posts. But just because AMD's marketing and sales decided to get slick willy over it doesn't mean the engineers or project managers actually believe the label on the box is warranted.