When something is factual, it should be hard to put a spin on it. One can, though, make certain comparisons which would seem to take the shine off of something.

Yesterday, the AMD Barcelona quad core chip was released, turning out scores in every benchmark either much higher than (per clock cycle), or close to parity with, the Intel Xeon processors.

Yet there are still naysayers, and predictors of doom, who speculate that AMD is on its final legs - because it cannot compete.

from Techware Labs

With the scores we saw we feel that the Barcelona certainly has great potential and offers a great amount of power at a much lower clock speed. It is unfortunate that most will assume clock speed equals performance which in this case the overall performance advantage of the Barcelona over the Xeon is about 20% per clock. Add to that the fact that the new Barcelona runs at a 1.22Vcore and has much lower operating temperatures than the standard Xeon and you have lower power consumption as well.

but from The Tech Report

Nonetheless, AMD now faces some harsh realities. For one, it is not going to capture the overall performance lead from Intel soon, not even in “Q4,” which is when higher-clocked parts like the Opteron 2360 SE are expected to arrive. Given what we’ve seen, AMD will probably have to achieve something close to clock speed parity with Intel in order to compete for the performance crown. On top of that, Intel is preparing new 45nm “Harpertown” Xeons for launch some time soon, complete with a 6MB L2 cache, 1.6GHz front-side bus, clock speeds over 3GHz, and expected improvements in per-clock performance and power efficiency. These new Xeons could make life difficult for Barcelona. And although AMD should remain competitive in the server market on the strength of Opteron’s natural system architecture and power efficiency advantages, this CPU architecture may not translate well to the desktop, where it has to compete with a Core 2 processor freed from the power and memory latency penalties of FB-DIMMs. But that, I suppose, is a question for another day.

and from AnandTech (where my story yesterday began) here

It is amazing that two views of the same results can be so different. This is, some would say, why there are horse races and political parties. Those who ‘damn with faint praise’ cannot really say anything terrible - because there is nothing terrible to say here. The naysayers seem to forget that the tested chips are giving away hundreds of MHz to the Intel chips, and still winning in several of the comparisons. (It sounds just like 2003, when Opterons were outperforming Xeons clocked a full GHz higher.)

Although I own both Intel and AMD processors, it is hard not to become an AMD fanboy when AMD continually gets dissed despite performance figures that wipe up the floor with comparative Intels. Everyone roots for the underdog.

Many forget that AMD started out as a company making 80286 clones, because Intel could not keep up with demand, and that through the next 3 generations simply played catch up to Intel.*  Then with the K7, AMD wrestled the performance crown from Intel, severely trouncing the anemic Pentium III, and has held the crown several times since.

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*some may remember the AMD 386-40, but it was never a big challenge as Intel had already moved on to the 486 series.

[tags] AMD, Barcelona, quad core, thermal efficiency, electrical efficiency, work per clock cycle, Intel, SPECmark [/tags]