First Hands-on Review of Intel Core Duo Desktop

[orangat]

How so? Its clearly an SMT feature. One that improves the operational performance of the chip by what up to 30%? And by only using 5% more space on the die... come on whats next, are you going to tell me that L2 cache is nothing but a hack to reduce memory access time? Pretty much every feature of an engineering undertaking is a "hack" if you want to analyse it like that. Thats what engineers do, they see a limitation in a design or process, and come up with a novell way of eliminating/reducing it.

Why I say its more of a hack rather than a tweak is because - hyperthreading is not true SMT, is very application dependant (and can be detrimental) instead of being a general optimization, is specific to the P4, cannot be reused and is not implemented in new Intel cores like the Conroe.

If Intel meant HT to be such a good 'feature' HT would have been incorporated in the very first version of the P4. The first P4's had totally absmyal peformance, took several iterations to be HT capable only to be somewhat approximately on-par with single core A64s and finally the HT 'feature' is conspicuously absent from the Yonah and future Conroe/Merom.

Granted, I should have said core... So, again, why isnt the T2600 beign compared to the AM2? That will put another few % on AMD's score.

Granted, the core is still a P3 derivative.
A better question would be why the Yonah is not compared with a 2.2Ghz AMD X2. The AMD X2 would probably be more cost effective.

Well, actually thats wrong. Thats not the reason he did it... From the article...
"First, we benchmarked at its default 2.16GHz clock speed to find out how fast the chip was at its factory settings, and then also tested at 2.6GHz in order to compare the Yonah architecture in a clock-for-clock shootout with AMD's Athlon 64 FX-60."

There is a point to be made about price, but this was more of a technological/performance test. Lots of other cheaper processors out there perform very well when OCed. I personally would not buy an FX-60, or any top notch processor at that sort of price.

Actually it supports my point and not yours.
From what you quoted, the reviewer wanted to compare architectural efficiency clock-for-clock, so he overclocked the very much slower T2600.

And how does it make sense to compare architectural efficiency or performance when the FX60 is 35% more expensive?. And it would even be more pointless if the FX60 were overclocked as well as you suggested.

[_Martyr_]

Well, I suppose thats a matter of how you read it. I read "clock for clock shootout" as a comparrison of what these two chips can do when clocked at the same clock frequency... nothing to do with their price. A completely cost independent measure of how well they perform when running at the same speed.

[orangat]

Well, I suppose thats a matter of how you read it. I read "clock for clock shootout" as a comparrison of what these two chips can do when clocked at the same clock frequency... nothing to do with their price. A completely cost independent measure of how well they perform when running at the same speed.

The FX60 is clocked 20% faster and alot more expensive which is why overlocking the Yonah is fair.

And my first post was worded a little wrongly. I meant "stock clock speed" instead of just "clock speed".

[_Martyr_]

But in fairness, thats how both companies chips are priced. When the new top of the line EE Conroe ships this summer, I expect to see a similar price tag to the FX-60. The top of the line is always more expensive than it "should" be (given the increments in clock speed vs price lower down the line), if you know what I mean. So, its still an unfair (but interesting) overclock if you ask me.

[orangat]

But in fairness, thats how both companies chips are priced. When the new top of the line EE Conroe ships this summer, I expect to see a similar price tag to the FX-60. The top of the line is always more expensive than it "should" be (given the increments in clock speed vs price lower down the line), if you know what I mean. So, its still an unfair (but interesting) overclock if you ask me.

Well in fairness, thats why a Duron isn't compared to a P4 at stock speeds.
And it was supposed to a clock-for-clock comparison.

Comparing an FX60 with a Yonah is like comparing a cheap Celeron with a A64 X2. Utterly pointless and useless.

[_Martyr_]

Why I say its more of a hack rather than a tweak is because - hyperthreading is not true SMT, is very application dependant (and can be detrimental) instead of being a general optimization, is specific to the P4, cannot be reused and is not implemented in new Intel cores like the Conroe.

If Intel meant HT to be such a good 'feature' HT would have been incorporated in the very first version of the P4. The first P4's had totally absmyal peformance, took several iterations to be HT capable only to be somewhat approximately on-par with single core A64s and finally the HT 'feature' is conspicuously absent from the Yonah and future Conroe/Merom.

Well to be honest, thats just a matter of differing opinion. When a design's weakness is somewhat fixed by additional technology, I am happy enough to call it a feature not a hack.

The reason that Intel didnt put HT into their next gen cores? Who knows? It probably has something to do with the fact that physical multicore chips are becoming the norm now, and thus far outstrip the performance of a single core with an aditional logical processor. Surely though we will see more advanced SMT features in the future, probably when the new gen matures a little and the limitations become apparent.