Intel A few years ago was struggling to pay benefits offered by AMD Athlon 64 processors. The memory controller on-die, a fast chipset, but close, interconnection and elimination of FSB and was paying dividends for AMD processors as they left no doubt about who was the King of the performance Department. Prices reflect this, as for the first time AMD was not the underdog and were able to sell their processors Top-of-the-line at a premium. With the launch of Core processors based on Intel architecture Conroe, basically switched places with AMD at night and AMD has fought a losing battle since then. For AMD this basically meant that over the past two years that were only able to compete in terms of the prices of the processor. AMD processors and chipsets have been substantially lower price of Intel in an attempt to obtain or maintain market share.
With the arrival of Core i7 processors, the performance gap was expanded further. In addition, architecturally Intel has caught up with AMD incorporates all the features that made the Athlon 64 unique. But there's more: with the launch of the new Core i7 platform (Core i7 processor family uses a new socket, and runs on a new chipset) Intel obsoleted fundamentally a part of their product portfolio as well. That's right; Core i7 processor Core 2 outclasses present with significant gains in absolute performance. The biggest gains are to be had with 3D rendering, scientific, and almost all applications that are heavily multithreaded applications high performance. With some applications, the performance of a workstation "skulltrail" dual socket, having a total of eight cores of the processor, are not sufficient to better that the lower clockspeed of Core i7. That puts Intel in an awkward position, because now their workstation highly profitable and server solutions are superseded by a consumer platform which is much less expensive. So the question is, do we really need this much performance to the desktop when Joe User Desktop also uses 10% of the performance of its 5-year old PC?
Sander Sassen.
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