AMD 40% faster than Intel? Posted on 25/01/2007 at 11:32 by Marc
In February 2006, or 4 months before the release of the Core architecture, Intel announced that their processors would be 20% faster than AMD's for « standards » benchmarks and that they would need at least "one year and a half to 2 years to catch up".
Today, it is AMD's turn to start teasing us and the manufacturer announced that the Barcelona would be 40% faster than the Clovertown for several types of tasks. We remind you that the Clovertown is the code name of Intel Quad Core processors currently on the market and the Barcelona is the code name of the K8L. This new quad core architecture has an L3 cache and a FPU outputting two times more than each core of the K8. AMD specified that the Barcelona would be 3.6 times faster than an Opteron dual core with floating point calculations or 1.8 times with an equivalent number of cores.
As always, this type of announcement cruelly lacks of precision and these data shouldn’t be taken as granted. To be more accurate, during the first demonstration of the Barcelona early December, AMD announced that the Barcelona would be 13% faster with TCP OLTP and 46% with SPECfp compared to a Xeon 5355. It seems that AMD has decided to emphasize the second figure for the pre-launch communication campaign….
This is a dangerous game that AMD has decided to enter: avoiding giving all information might lead to disappointments in the end. If that didn't happen with Intel, we hope for the manufacturer that it won't happen with AMD and the 40% (even if a much more reasonable figure would be altogether already really satisfying).
In February 2006, or 4 months before the release of the Core architecture, Intel announced that their processors would be