Siggraph

While chip vendors, like most manufacturers, don‘t shy away from exhilarated claims for their products, a bevy of enthusiast Web sites concur that Intel is finally back on top with the debut of its new Core 2 Duo processors (code named Conroe) in late July. The microprocessors mark the end of Intel’s long-running Pentium era, with the new chip‘s benchmarks leaving even its most recent dual-core Pentium D far behind.

One clear result from the tests: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) faces its greatest challenge since their Athlon CPUs–typified by the top of the line Athlon 64 FX-62–beat out Intel as the most popular, high-end desktop chip line over the past two years.

In an extensive review on The Tech Report website (techreport.com) kudos sounded: “After years of wandering in the wilderness, Intel has recaptured the desktop CPU performance title in dramatic fashion. Both the Core 2 Extreme X6800 and the Core 2 Duo E6700 easily outperform the Athlon 64 FX-62 across a range of applications…”

Today, though, AMD‘s Athlon dual-core 64 X2 CPU series remains the choice of many high-end PC users when running single-user workstations. Meanwhile, low-end buyers continue to compare the two companies‘ products, with AMD’s less expensive dual-core chips gaining here, since they offer good performance for the price.

Some analysts contend that for larger multi-processor systems–such as Boxx Technologies‘ Apexx 8, which employs 8 dual-core Opteron 800 processors–AMD‘s unique “glueless” multiprocessing continues as one of greatest advantages over Intel‘s legacy FSB (front side bus) architecture.

Josh Walrath of Penstar Systems (www.penstarsys.com), for example, describes how AMD‘s Cache Coherency HyperTransport links provide a huge amount of low latency bandwidth between multiple CPU‘s and the system, a capability that Intel doesn‘t offer in the Core 2 Duo series.

Follow up on the controversy by turning to the full version of this article, found only in the August issue of Digital Content Producer.