This is excellent news, and I am very excited. I?ve never owned an Intel enthusiast box before. So this Conroe could be the first. I still await reviews as that to me is final and independent. ?Independent? meaning that for example Anand himself can build from scratch a Conroe box and test without Intel governed restrictions.
A worrying thing that comes from the AMD camp, is what will AMD actually bring to the battle in the coming months and year. I mean seriously a re-hash of the current X2?s on the AM2 ?DDR2? form factor is not going to cut it IMO. You may ask what in the future will AMD bring. Well all we know at the moment is 65nm is a given, but that doesn?t mean much unless you have a decent core design to back it up, and the K8 is old, even a re-work will not be able squeeze much more.
So the only way forward for K8 is parallelism and clock speed. Now clocks have reached a limit and a 2.8Ghz X2 high yield silicon sample is going to be a push on 90nm as we are aware, and that is only a 200Mhz improvement in itself anyway. So the move to 65nm will become, but still I cant see 65nm bringing much more speed to K8.
Now parallelism. We already have dual core which is still new to us as the ?home/consumer? end user. We have yet to reap the benefits from fully multi threaded applications as they are far and few between to be considered the norm. Now with 65nm and if AMD looks to bring to the home user ?quad cores?, I feel this would be a wrong decision as this is not really the right progression path, due to my previous statements (its not needed), its kind of like having 16GB?s of RAM as a home user (totally not needed).
Maybe AMD does have something indeed up its sleeves (K10?). But really they should be advertising the fact and forecasting, not staying quiet and letting Intel woo everyone else with its new tech. I don?t think they have advertised AM2 that much because it is a transition period/platform for DDR2, and its purpose is not to completely replace s939 and become the new AMD bread winner within 2006 as some might think. I think within 2006 AM2 is a DDR2 migration period for AMD users not a new core revamp because it is not.
Just my thoughts.