The Cynic Says……

Yes, really… you read that correctly. After being a die-hard AMD person for the last few years, I’ve been looking at Intel’s new Core2 CPU’s that are supposed to be released soon and I can’t help but be impressed. My biggest bitch about Intel previously was their NetBurst architecture basically forced them to run ridiculously high clock speeds and thus churn out ungodly amounts of heat and have higher power requirements than an equivalent AMD system. I’m not a big fan of a hot, loud system and the P4’s were the kings of such systems. Now that Intel has seen the light and their new CPU’s have shorter pipelines and do more work per clock cycle (something that AMD has been king of since the first Athlons), they’re actually worth looking at. From the benchmarks I’ve been reading, it seems that the X6800 (Core Extreme, replacing the P4 EE) utterly smokes the crap out of the Athlon FX-62 and even the E6700 & E6600 (standard Core2 chips, comparable to the X2’s) are doing quite well against the X2 5000 and the FX-62. I can’t help but be impressed at the turn-around Intel has made after being regularly beaten like a rented mule on the gaming benchmarks, only saving face on some multimedia encoding apps (no doubt thanks to optimizations in the programs themselves). Even in regular desktop apps, the new Intel chips are putting the smackdown on AMD’s current lineup. Hopefully AMD has an ace or two up their sleeve to fight back, but as of right now it looks like Intel has this round in the bag quite handily. Too bad I’m not in the market to upgrade anytime soon… maybe next year, though. Here’s some benchmarks, for those of you who aren’t fluent in google-ese.
Tweaktown’s benchmarks

Hexus’s benchmark charts

Anandtech runs it through the wringer

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