I’m referring to no other than AMD and Intel. Â AMD has held the processor crown from the latter part of 2005 through most of 2006.
Things are about to change, for the better.
As I previously stated, Intel is releasing their new Core 2 Duo (codenamed Conroe) processor on July 23rd. Â I was skeptical as to how much of a performance increase could be expected until I read this article. Â Conroe outperforms AMD’s best processor by up to 50%.
Impressive.
AMD is not hiding in a cave either, as they are planning significant price cuts on their X2 and Sempron processors on July 24. Â AMD has already cut the prices (mid-June) on their AM2 Athlon 64 processors by up to 50% — most likely to persuade consumers into purchasing their CPU’s before July 23 😉
AMD also has another trick up its sleeve: reverse hyper-threading. Â In Layman’s terms: reverse hyper-threading allows certain software titles to dynamically utilize the dual cores (eg. 2.8 GHz each) in a processor as a single logical processor (eg. 5.6 GHz). Â All AM2 processors have support for reverse hyper-threading, but it won’t be active until Microsoft releases a new processor driver to activate the feature.? Being a software driver, it probably won’t work in Linux in the same manner that Intel’s HT implementation did.
After the Intel NDA’s expire on July 28th, we’ll see if AMD retains its crown in the CPU world 😉