Engadget praises Intel’s new Duo Core II
It’s funny, I’m staying at a place across the street from AMD’s headquarters (Maryam’s brother is putting us up this week — he works on the Mac team at Apple) and I can bet that AMD’s engineers are working double shifts right now cause Engadget is praising Intel’s Core 2 Duo.
I’d love to be a fly on the wall in the engineer’s offices.
But, that competition is great for us. New machines ahead! Based on what I hear in the office here (there’s some former semiconductor types who work at Podtech — our VCs fund a lot of semiconductor work too) they think Intel has a winner here. Looks like they found a way to beat back heat generation and use less electricity.
Why is that important? Well, look at what Google/Yahoo/Microsoft are building in Washington State: huge datacenters.
If you can reduce power consumption and heat generation by even a little bit that’ll make a big difference over the lifetime of that PC.
Update: TechMeme has more on Intel vs. AMD.
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July 14th, 2006 at 11:55 am
I work in the geosciences industry in Houston, and my company has a computation center with approx. 10,000 CPUs…getting more power into the building is THE limiting factor on how many additional nodes we can add. It’ll be interesting to see if we start going for systems based on the new Intel chips over the dual core Opterons.
July 14th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
On a related note, this from /. today:
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/14/1226230&from=rss
July 14th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
It’s also great news for those of us editing HDV on our laptops…once the chips make into laptops. Cooler chips = cooler laps. :)
July 14th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
…a place across the street from AMD’s headquarters…
The Residence Inn there? That place is a bit outdated, no?
July 14th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
One might also wonder how this might impact the marketing push over at Sun Microsystems for their [open source architecture] Niagra, cool, efficient CPU
http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/overview/index.jsp
July 14th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
Elid, no, it’s an apartment complex cnamed “Avalon” at the corner of Lawrence Expressway and 101.
July 14th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
Woo Hoo! Go Intel! :-)
Conroe (the Core 2 Duo) is really an awesome processor. Outperforms AMD’s best offering by far, with half the power consumption and heat. When Merom launches later this year (same architecture chip, but for mobile PCs), laptop users will get the same benefits.
Related, there is an awesome poster that Intel created for Internal use only (I tried to get permission to blog it, but alas, no…) that says something to the effect of “We call it the new Xeon processor for servers. The press renamed it to “ass-kicker”". :-)
Clever! Bold! Irreverent! Something you’d never expect from a stodgy old company like Intel. I can’t figure out why we’re not leading the marketing campaign with that one, instead of keeping it from the world. Oh well.
Robert, when you buy a Merom laptop, or a Conroe desktop, (I’d offer to send you one, but #1, I don’t have any, and #2, I wouldn’t want it to be payola ;-), you’ll have to give us a review. :-)
July 14th, 2006 at 5:45 pm
Tiny: committees always suck the soul out of anything good. Remember that. :-)
July 14th, 2006 at 10:00 pm
Yup. No good comes out of a committee.
Aside: I guess I was logged in to my wordpress.com account when I posted, because it showed me as “tinyscreenfuls”, instead of my real name and contact info.
I’ve been reading reviews of Core 2 Duo all afternoon, and they’re universally praising it. Feels to to work at Intel when we pull off something like this. :-)
Lots of links to more reviews in my linkblog, http://del.icio.us/jabancroft if anyone’s interested.
July 14th, 2006 at 10:00 pm
Competition is the best thing for any industry. I hope that in the near future, Microsoft is challenged the way Intel has been for the last 4 years. The EU is helping by forcing Microsoft to compete on a level playing field but even if that works, we are years from Microsoft having to compete for real.
The rumored introduction of Microsoft’s new music player strategy may be the beginning of a new era where Microsoft actually has to “innovate” to catch up.
Without the real pressure put on Intel from AMD, we would still be stagnating in the MHz myth brand of marketing from Intel. We would have 5 GHz machines that couldn’t be cooled and didn’t perform any better than 2.5 GHz CPUs from the previous generations.
The new Core 2 Duos are the best CPUs ever produced for mainstream desktop computers. That only happened because AMD was wiping the floor with Intel’s P4.
Microsoft could learn a real lesson here but I doubt that any large company will volunteer to compete. They have to be forced into it or die.
July 15th, 2006 at 9:16 am
[...] Engadget praises Intel’s new Duo Core II Scoble’s take on the Conroe/Core 2 Duo launch. (tags: conroe core cpu intel engadget scoble launch) [...]
July 15th, 2006 at 9:50 am
When they benchmark the Core 2 Duo against the AMD X2 or the FX line of chips, they are using a 32 bit benchmark. When we see the 64 bit stats, I think the gap will shorten. Don’t forget, HyperTransport 3 is coming out soon…
July 15th, 2006 at 10:59 am
I’m excited about the next few months just because of the Core 2 Duo. AMD has no choice but to come up with something. I’d love to see the benchmarks plain and simple though in a table where I can actually read it. I haven’t seen anywhere where they give you the opertunity.
July 17th, 2006 at 3:33 am
Cor! Intel Core 2 screams, be a versatilist (and…
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s IT Blogwatch, in which Intel’s Core 2 Duo desktop CPUs benchmark v. fast, and we discover that the IT worker of 2010 won’t be a technology guru. Not to mention artistic visualizations of a web page’s structure….