I've seen claims of power consumption from intel in the past, and they turned out to be average, not max consumptions. I'll believe any of this after the benchmarks that compare electrical and processing power...

"AMD hands you twice the cores and then Intel slaps its rival in the face by handing you a part that matches AMD's clock rate while consuming less power. ®"

Does that tell you about the Intelligently Designed Leader .... from the Fab Dresden PhoeniXXXX Creating ITs Quantum Core NEUKlearer Processor?

Does IT does so, now?

The article is good reading, but Ashlee Vance is not paying attention. He/She says: "AMD hands you twice the cores and then Intel slaps its rival in the face by handing you a part that matches AMD's clock rate while consuming less power"

Intel has beat AMD to market with dual and quad-core chips from the beginning, and at lower power, and with higher performance. What more is there to say?

There is one decent chip in the dual 2 core group the rest

are all goldilocks chips they are too hot not enough cache

etc. I wouldn't pay the huge premium they seem to want

for the quad core it isn't even close to worth the added cost

nothing wrong with competition but I wonder if thats coming

at the cost of security and truthfulness in advertising start

treating the customers as if they can't read and you may end

up costing both companies sales not to mention making any

one who has to fix these things on day to day basis very unhappy.

I don't think I understand your comment at all.

"I wouldn't pay the huge premium they seem to want

for the quad core[,] it isn't even close to worth the added cost[.]

[N]othing wrong with competition[,] but I wonder if thats coming

at the cost of security and truthfulness in advertising[.] [S]tart

treating the customers as if they can't read and you may end

up costing both companies sales not to mention making any

one who has to fix these things on day to day basis very unhappy"

uhh, what?

If you are referring to the lack of multi-threaded apps w/ "isn't worth the cost" I am assuming you don't have servers.

"there's nothing wrong with competition but I wonder if that is coming at the (expense) of security and truthfulness in advertising"

you wonder if competition is coming at the expense of security and truth...huh?

If you truly believe that large companies with lots of servers are not willing to purchase new machines based solely on power consumption you are naive. Do you have any idea what Google pays in AC alone? The raw power battle is over, the new battle is for power consumption. There are very few businesses that take a chip to it's limit in speed (think Pixar). If you think the quads are too pricey then don't buy them. If you haven't noticed, the price is coming way, way down for chips due to the market share battle.

Perhaps you ought to familiarize yourself w/ the subtleties of punctuation and then tackle the finer points of the microprocessor world. -cheers

I have been running VERY memory hungry multithreaded apps on dual-socket, dual-core opteron based machines (4 cores total). These apps will use 7.9GB of memory and run for a few minutes with a 399% processor load according to top. I have also had some stabs at running the same on Core Duo, Pentium D, Core 2 Duo machines and a recent dual core Xeon. My results show better scaling with the AMD parts than the Intels, probably due to better memory handling. With quad cores, these memory contention issues get worse, because the cores on one chip all access memory through a single bus/link. Plugging in massive caches helps a bit, but does not solve the problem. I would be very curious to see the results of such memory hungry multithreaded apps on both Barcelona and the Clovertowns before making any definite judgement on my needs. I'm quite happy with the competition between AMD and Intel: as a consumer I can just sit back and pick whichever chip is best at the given time.

Intel have yet to release _true_ QC and not just two dualcores on the same substrate.

Also, such shallow power consumtption is unfair, since:

- AMD states maximal while Intel states typical TDP

- AMD's numbers include power consumption of the MMU controllers while Intel's do not. On intel's side you would have to add most of the consumption of the northbridge and then multiply add few ten percents or more to get maximal TDP.

Whole total could very well be over AMD's stated TDP.