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I don't know if you followed it or not, but THG has done a stresstest in the last two weeks that has now ended. They compared the performance of the AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+ (2.4Ghz) and the Intel Pentium D 840 EE (3.2Ghz).
It should be mentioned that both CPUs are way out of reach for the average wallet for now (both chips price around 1000 Euros, though I haven't seen the Intel listed in stores yet).
Anyway the Intel platform had several stability issues in the beginning, mainly with the nForce4 chipset and went smoothly as soon as they switched to an intel chipset (with a minor problem as it was picky about the RAM modules). The AMD system went smoothly right from the beginning (on nForce4; nVidia must be making quite a fortune meanwhile with their Athlon chipsets as VIA has become pretty unattractive)
As for multitasking they ran 4 Applications simultaneously: Encoding an Audio CD with lame, encoding a DVD into DivX, Packing data with WinRAR and a timedemo of the game FarCry that was running at 1600x1200 with all details enabled (at first with SLI, but since they had to move the intel system off the nForce4, they used just one card).
The results are here: http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/2005...sstest-24.html
Intel shows an impressive lead in video encoding while AMD won the other 3 benches. I think it's a tie, for one because of Intel's impressive video encoding performance, but for the other because AMD clearly owned the WinRAR bench and two others as well. Still with AMD's utter defeat in the divx coding it can hardly be declared winner here for now.
So this is after a first look. If we take a second look we note that Intel benefits greatly because of its HyperThreading, which will be a feature only for the pricey Extreme Edition and not make it into the standard Pentium D, in fact the only difference between the Pentium D and Pentium D EE is HyperThreading.
The results here: http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/2005...sstest-01.html
show what happens when HT is disabled. AMD beats Intel in every test.
Of course this comparison is everything else than fair from a price point of view since the Pentium D 840 is only half as expensive as the X2 4800+
The tests would have needed to be done with the X2 4200+
Finally all applications were run one by one (for the Intel HT was enabled again) and AMD came out winning all of them again. (Sorry I could only find it on the german site of THG):
WinRAR: AMD +29.5%
MP3-Encoding: AMD +4.7%
Divx-Encoding: AMD +28.2%
Farcry: AMD +21.4%
That said and the results I think it was wise from Intel to make a more attractive price and battle AMD where it has always been good at. AMD will have quite a hard time trying to convince customers that their systems are in fact as or even more stable than those of Intel and offer more performance, because clearly the faster these things get the less importance will performance play, even more because the killer applications for Dual Core are yet missing and Intel is doing quite good in multi tasking.
Both systems look interesting and are hopefully available soon (so that their prices can begin to fall
)
It should be mentioned that both CPUs are way out of reach for the average wallet for now (both chips price around 1000 Euros, though I haven't seen the Intel listed in stores yet).
Anyway the Intel platform had several stability issues in the beginning, mainly with the nForce4 chipset and went smoothly as soon as they switched to an intel chipset (with a minor problem as it was picky about the RAM modules). The AMD system went smoothly right from the beginning (on nForce4; nVidia must be making quite a fortune meanwhile with their Athlon chipsets as VIA has become pretty unattractive)
As for multitasking they ran 4 Applications simultaneously: Encoding an Audio CD with lame, encoding a DVD into DivX, Packing data with WinRAR and a timedemo of the game FarCry that was running at 1600x1200 with all details enabled (at first with SLI, but since they had to move the intel system off the nForce4, they used just one card).
The results are here: http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/2005...sstest-24.html
Intel shows an impressive lead in video encoding while AMD won the other 3 benches. I think it's a tie, for one because of Intel's impressive video encoding performance, but for the other because AMD clearly owned the WinRAR bench and two others as well. Still with AMD's utter defeat in the divx coding it can hardly be declared winner here for now.
So this is after a first look. If we take a second look we note that Intel benefits greatly because of its HyperThreading, which will be a feature only for the pricey Extreme Edition and not make it into the standard Pentium D, in fact the only difference between the Pentium D and Pentium D EE is HyperThreading.
The results here: http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/2005...sstest-01.html
show what happens when HT is disabled. AMD beats Intel in every test.
Of course this comparison is everything else than fair from a price point of view since the Pentium D 840 is only half as expensive as the X2 4800+
The tests would have needed to be done with the X2 4200+
Finally all applications were run one by one (for the Intel HT was enabled again) and AMD came out winning all of them again. (Sorry I could only find it on the german site of THG):
WinRAR: AMD +29.5%
MP3-Encoding: AMD +4.7%
Divx-Encoding: AMD +28.2%
Farcry: AMD +21.4%
That said and the results I think it was wise from Intel to make a more attractive price and battle AMD where it has always been good at. AMD will have quite a hard time trying to convince customers that their systems are in fact as or even more stable than those of Intel and offer more performance, because clearly the faster these things get the less importance will performance play, even more because the killer applications for Dual Core are yet missing and Intel is doing quite good in multi tasking.
Both systems look interesting and are hopefully available soon (so that their prices can begin to fall
)
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