I just liked the title of this article...oh yeah, Intel sneak attacked AMD with an early launch

Yeah but you have to give it to AMD. Native quad core. What that means is unlike Intel's Presler and Kentsfeild, When you pop that IHS off, you'll see one peice of silicone, with four cores on the same die. Slap on a nice DDR2/DDR3 memory controller designed for high bandwidth, add in a large coherent shared cache, maybe even bump up L1 cache sizes and you've got one hell of a competitive processor. Reletively speaking, if AMD plays their cards right, this could be AMD's quad core Conroe.

But, that's in fantasy land. 2 years and several production delays later we'll have K8L, but Intel will probably have refined 4 core or even 8 cores, and Nvidia will probably be releasing it's own chips. Cell BE doesn't have the yeild rate right now to be competitive. Word on the street is they have a 20% yeild rate. That won't help out their prices.

They are all on one die but AMD openly admitted it's the exact same technology and they won't have any advantage over Intel...actualy, it will be a disadvantage because it will cost them more to make but in theory, they will be able to push more out of the future line...so, no, I can't give anything to AMD for that one other than a good laugh for trying to play down Intel's quad then apologizing because their chip ended up being the same. Yeah, I've been doing my reading lately...

Updates on that AMD Quad core at 3.0...it uses 73% more power than the Kentsfield at 2.4GHz and still doesn't meet its performance. Funny how tides have turned back to where AMD started. It brings up a memory of Shadowguy reciting a noob saying "AMDs are slower clockspeed because they work harder." Funny how that worked out eh?

Core architechture is totally different though.

Netburst has 31 fucking pipeline stages, but that's why you see those high MHZ numbers so noobs buy them. Thing, Netburst gets roughly six instruction finished (through all 31 stages), inone clock cycle, but if a pranch mis-prediction occurs the pipeline gets flushed.

Athlon architecture on the other hand, around 7-9 stages, and therfore runs at a slower speed. because of the shorter pipeline, the Athlons acheive around 9 instructions in one clock cycle. So, clock for clock, an AMD Athlon based processor > Netburst based processor.

Core 2 Duo, however, is based on the Core architecture. Core architecture features a much shorter pipeline (why the top core proc runs at 2.4Ghz instead of the 3.6/3.4 ect you see in P4s). Core also features intelligent shared cache, as well as a quantity of floating point units which make it so adept at rendering and such.

Kentsfeild is quad CORE architecture, and AMD's quad is the same old shit, just with an interconnect to link the cores together. So right now, AMD is doing what Intel did with netburst... streach the lifeline of the product out as far as they can.

K8L, on the other hand is different, still in the works. IDK when planned launch is.