Quad core wars
AMD’s Barcelona processors are going to re-ignite the processor wars. AMD’s entire future depends on the performance of its new Quad-core range of processors. Since the launch of Intel’s Core processors, AMD has taken a huge beating and all its market share gains in the last few years has been evaporated thanks to Intel’s superior processors. However, come August and AMD will launch its counter-attack with its “native” quad-core processors.
AMD calls it quad-core processors native because it has 4 cores on one die. Intel’s quad-core offering at the moment is two dual-core processors joined together, or in AMD’s words “Stitched” together. On paper it would seem that having 4 cores on a single die would quite obviously be better than having 2 dual-core processors. However, in real world applications its all a different story. AMD seems to be a victim of its own theory. For years, Intel has always had the edge when it came to clock speed, but AMD always had the edge in performance. This time around though its Intel that has the edge in performance in the dual-core products from both the companies.
Here is what itWire.com.au has to say:
According to AMD, there are significant advantages that four processing cores on a single die will provide over Intel’s existing quad-core solution, which AMD has described as simply two dual-core processors “stitched together”. AMD and Intel have in the past waged a war of words over whether the shared memory cache of Intel’s implementation or the discrete cache of AMD’s quad-core chips is more efficient in terms of performance and power consumption.