Intels Dual Core 8** Series

[FarFarAway]

Well I felt it was time to have some Intel reviews put on the forum as its been all AMD recently.

AnandTech have another excellent review of the new Dual Core P4 so here a summary:

My overall impression:

Gaming is not good for Intel and continues to not be good compared to AMD, but Multi-threading Intel have hit the nail on the head. Some great performance from Intel in that area.

I am, however, slightly concerned over the power consumption of these beasts. I think that Intel need to review this area as AMD are clearly ahead here, and this is important for heat, and therefore overclocking....

As for the price of these expensive looking cores, I think AnandTech are right in that AMD will be perhaps setting the price bar a bit high, although I haven't seen any intel prices yet. I'm wondering if AMD are going to enter a budget chip for dual core, that would be good. Intel, it seems, are going to release at a lower price.....we'll see....

With all this excitement, we still have to keep ourselves grounded in the thought that dual core isn't here yet; it's still as much as two months away. For AMD, as we've known all along, the wait is going to be a bit longer on the desktop. The workstation and server markets will be serviced by AMD first, and we will have a look at workstation/server dual core performance as soon as AMD launches those parts. It's looking like, at least on the desktop, if you want dual core at a reasonable price point, your only option will be Intel. But the prospect of more affordable dual core chips out of AMD in 2006 is quite exciting as well

It still seems that dual core X2's will be the way to go if you want good solig gaming performance, as well as multi-threaded apps:

A dual core Athlon 64 solves a lot of our dilemmas simply because you get stronger single threaded performance than the Pentium D (in everything but encoding) while also getting the multitasking benefits of dual core.

But I think that this should revive the enthusiast market for Intel a bit more...

For Intel, the Pentium D is a saving grace - it's the first time that we've been interested in any processor based on the Prescott core. It's also perfect timing; if it weren't for the Pentium D, we'd have no interest in the Intel 945 and 955 chipsets, and definitely not in NVIDIA's new nForce4 SLI Intel Edition product. With that said, it should be pretty clear what our next article in this series will be...

Full articleAnandTech

 

[Joe]

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