Originally posted by: Cerb
Scalability they have. I think the Bartons have proven that for the standard K7. Many, including me, thought the 2400+ was the end of the rope for the Socket A. Well...it wasn't. I imagine both K8 series have plenty of room to grow.
The key is how fast they can get those speeds out. 2GHz around september probably won't be enough unless Intel stops at 3.4GHz this year. With luck either they will get higher, or the Opterons, which we know will be that high, will be released (the 100 series) for the NVidia platform, and they will have a high-end competitor there. I feel sure they will be able to keep up, but exactly by what degree has yet to be seen. Better yet will be the said 100 series Opterons and/or the high-end A64s being cheaper than competetive P4 parts...but given it's all new stuff, that's a bit iffy.
Well they shifted to the .13micron process and it bought the K7 more life...no surprise there...Intels .13 saved the willamette which appeared to start hitting the wall at 2ghz and apparently can go to mid 3ghz range, but intel will switch to .09 process to gain more life to near 5ghz. AMD is still on .13 right???
Remember the scalability issue of recent has been more about the problems associated with implementation of the SOI process which was supposed to buy AMD plenty of room to ramp speed up quite rapidly. Thisis one of the concerns many have shown in other threads about timeliness and already K8 delays. Many thought they would have been to 2ghz range nearly 9months ago which they were not. Who knows they solve the SOI process and maybe they ramp to the moon, but to say theu have plenty of room could be too early to tell. They obviously run at lower speeds then Bartons....
I agree I think AMD will always find a way to keep up, but what I am saying and have so repeatedly that with all the hammer hype starting even as far back as Q4 2001 when I still ran athlon the talk was about annihilation and technology that would overwhelm the P4. Now we are talking about even keel stuff. I have to say that the delays have really hurt the overwhelming success this processor could have had. Where is the shock and awe??? I am not as impressed.
Also remember in the past when the p4 was doing poorly ppl stated wait for optimization...well it ended up happening with someprograms implementing SSE2, but for the most part ramp up speed and enhancements in cache was the real savior for the P4. The SSE2 should be their for AMD consideing P4 has already laid that ground work. I am wondering aside from platform enhancements where is the cpu enhancements going to come from and what % is likely to result from whatever is there to optimize (at the cpu level)??? I just want ppl to be realistic about how much will the athlon64 look intially at launch from what we see now at same mhz level, even if they may succeed in ramping it to 2-2.2ghz levels by then...
Lets review the score of the opteron in desktop performance as seen in anandtech's review...(including gaming scores eventhough there may be an issue with use of pci card in a pci-x slot versus not on the other platforms for the opteron...remembering unlikely the athlon64 desktop platforms will have this, and that agp interface may not show same leads)
P4 3.0c -vs- Opteron 244 (1.8ghz) ; Opteron 244 (1.8ghz) -vs- Barton 3000+ (2.167ghz)
<<Content Creation>> : P4 3.0c (+21.9%) ; Opteron 244 (+8.4%)
<<Business Winstone>> : opteron 244 (+19.5%) ; Opteron 244 (+2.0%)
<<UT2003 Flyby>> : opteron 244 (+7.5%) ; Opteron 244 (+11.6%)
<<UT2003 Botmatch>> : opteron 244 (+9.9%) ; Opteron 244 (+19.6%)
<<Quake 3 Arena>> : opteron 244 (+7.5%) ; Opteron 244 (+44.1%)
<<Jedi Knight>> : oPteron 244 (+12.7%); Opteron 244 (+86.9%)
<<Commanche>> : opteron 244 (+7.6%) ; Opteron 244 (+12.8%)
<<Divx/Xmpeg4.5>> : P4 3.0c (+48.8%) ; Barton 3000+ (+1.4%)
<<WMP 9 encoding>> : P4 3.0c (+41.6%) ; Opteron 244 (+4.5%)
<<3DMax5 (Test 1) >> : P4 3.0c (+65.4%) ; Barton 3000+ (+13.2%)
<<3DMax5 (Test 2) >> : P4 3.0c (+39.5%) ; Barton 3000+ (+12.2%)
<<3DMax5 (Test 3) >> : P4 3.0c (+27.8%) ; Barton 3000+ (+4.5%)
<<3DMax5 (Test 4) >> : P4 3.0c (+56.2%) ; Barton 3000+ (+13.6%)
<<3DMax5 (Test 5) >> : P4 3.0c (+73.3%) ; Barton 3000+ (+23.8%)
........................................: P4 (avg. +52.4%) ; Barton (avg. +13.5%)
<<Lightwave (Test 1)>> : P4 3.0c (+9.3%) ; Opteron 244 (+24.0%) ***SSE2***
<<Lightwave (Test 2)>> : P4 3.0c (+3.5%) ; Barton 3000+ (+22.7%) ***SSE2***
<<Lightwave (Test 3)>> : P4 3.0c (+27.3%) ; Opteron 244 (+47.2%) ***SSE2***
........................................: P4 (avg. +13.4%) ; Opteron (avg. +16.2%)
Gaming: Opteron 244 (avg. +9.0%) ; Opteron 244 (avg +35.0%)
Multimedia/ Encoding: P4 3.0c (avg. +45.2%); Opteron 244 (avg. +1.6%)
3d rendering(using avg's): P4 3.0c (avg +32.9%); Opteron 244 (avg. +1/4%)
Now how much will the smaller cache (inintialy) and single memory controller Athlon64 do less then the OPteron at same speed??? That is the equestion, and think of it as 2 ways; 1 currently with same optimizations of opteron, 2 and with a reasonable amount of ptimization and platform tweaking....
trust me ppl we can gather observation and analysis from this data...