Tech Link (Platform): Vigor's Quadfather Uses AMD Quad FX CPUs

THG has an article posted about a AMD's 4x4 platform. We all know that this platform sucks and some of you might be thinking why post AMD things. Well, I am a Fanboy and if I see Intel products beating AMD's crap to a pulp, you'll see me post it here for sure. And this one is pretty good, if you're an AMDroid who is a masochist who likes torturing yourself, then get this platform. Otherwise, rejoice and just go a single-chip solution quad-core from Intel and have fun poking at the poor green bloke. Expand to read what THG has to say, or just read this excerpt:

We can't fault Vigor for building a system using inferior processors when these are the best an AMD enthusiast can buy. Instead, we'll put the blame on AMD for not keeping pace with the competition, and hope for a quick turnaround as new products are released.

Conclusion
If one were to add up everything Vigor Gaming put into its Vigor Force Recon QX4, its $4,900 price appears reasonable. Yet the 54% performance gain from Dell cost only 46% more. For anyone with an extra $2300 to spend, the Dell appears to be a better deal without even considering peripherals.

The Vigor Force Recon QX4 doesn't include a monitor it its base price. The Dell we tested included its 2407WFP 24" LCD monitor, a $670 value. Deducting that, the Dell system actually cost only 33% more, for a 54% performance gain.

We can't fault Vigor for building a system using inferior processors when these are the best an AMD enthusiast can buy. Instead, we'll put the blame on AMD for not keeping pace with the competition, and hope for a quick turnaround as new products are released.

Source:Vigor's Quadfather Uses AMD Quad FX CPUs

Tech Link (Industry): AMD praying ‘Barcelona’ makes up for four-core mistake

Woah, they finally realized it's the performance that matters and not how the technology is implemented. If products performs, within the consumers' budget, and works like a charm, end users will grab them like hotcakes. I wonder why they never said MCM is better than their 4x4, that is, you need two dual cores to achieve quad core (cripes!!!!). Quotable quotes from the Register:

“If I could do something different, I wish we would have immediately done a MCM - two dual cores and call it a quad-core,” said Mario Rivas, an EVP at AMD, during a recent interview in Austin, “because, I guess, the market sucks it up.”

Expand for more...

By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View (ashlee.vance@theregister.co.uk)
Published Saturday 17th March 2007 00:05 GMT

Exclusive Bruised by a resurgent Intel, AMD wishes it had tackled the four-core era with a different approach. The chipmaker stands behind the technical merits of pumping out a so-called native four-core chip with all four cores on the same piece of silicon.

It, however, admits that Intel gained a major marketing edge by melding a pair of dual-core processors with a multi-chip module (MCM) when it released the "Clovertown" version of Xeon last year. That four-core chip allowed Intel to claim a server processor technology milestone ahead of AMD for the first time in about three years.


“If I could do something different, I wish we would have immediately done a MCM - two dual cores and call it a quad-core,” said Mario Rivas, an EVP at AMD, during a recent interview in Austin, “because, I guess, the market sucks it up.”

Before Clovertown, AMD enjoyed one of the more remarkable runs in server chip marketing and production. It beat Intel to 64-bit extensions for x86 chips and then nailed the release of mainstream, dual-core chips. Besides hitting these milestones, AMD clobbered Intel’s Xeon on overall performance and performance per watt - two of the server world’s favored metrics.

While a high-end part such as Clovertown misses the mainstream, it has proved popular enough with the most demanding customers and analysts to toss the technology and marketing edge back toward Intel. Recent sales figures show that Intel has regained server processor share from AMD, and Intel has shown leading performance on a wide variety of benchmarks.

So, AMD is going retro with its upcoming release of the four-core Barcelona chip, hoping to tap into the momentum of yesteryear.

“Barcelona is as much of event in the x86 world as Opteron was when we launched it,” Rivas said.

Other AMD executives have used this line in recent months, although we’re not sure the pitch fits.

The release of Opteron, as mentioned, gave AMD the first 64-bit x86 chip. More importantly, it turned AMD into a real contender in the server market for the first time.

Barcelona seems like less of a game changer. At the most basic level, it’s simply a better performing chip than today’s dual-core Opterons. AMD expects the processor to provide a 40 per cent surge on most software loads and a much higher boost on floating point-heavy software. Best of all, the chip slides right into existing systems.

AMD hopes to continue the socket compatibility with the four-core follow-on to Barcelona called Shanghai and the eight-core follow-on Montreal - a tidbit you may consider a Register exclusive.

El Reg: Will the upcoming chips Shanghai and Montreal be socket compatible as well?

MR: Yes. That’s the goal. We have not released detailed specs that I know of on those two devices, but that (strategy) has served us well.

Rivas declined to discuss what might happen with Bulldozer - meant to be a native eight-core chip - but hinted that “we have analyst day coming up, and I don’t want to share any more than I have to (before that).”

Channel Stuffing
While Barcelona's release may not match Opteron blow-for-blow, it will stand as a crucial product for AMD’s near-term success.

Sources tell us that the chip is cranking through software at an unreal clip in the labs, beating out AMD’s oft-cited 40 per cent performance gain figure.

Over the last couple of months, AMD executives seemed to change the language around Barcelona’s delivery date, making us wonder if the chip was suffering from a delay. Top staffers started talking up a “late Summer” release rather than a “mid-year” shipments as previously promised.

Rivas said the mid-year plan holds, and we’re looking for Barcelona to ship in July.

The chip can’t come fast enough for AMD’s channel partners who have suffered at the hands of Tier 1 demand.

“We got a little bit distracted,” Rivas said.

AMD has, in fact, blamed its channel shortfall for a recent revenue warning. Rivas said that an unexpected spike in demand for mobile processors along with Tier 1s gobbling up all the available Opterons hurt the supply of gear to the channel.

The channel excuse has rubbed us the wrong way because AMD has spent the last three years celebrating new programs for smaller partners, saying such efforts have been a huge success.

“It was a combination of a boom in our OEM customers and a mix issue that made us not look at our distribution perhaps as well as we could,” Rivas said. “And now we are (suffering) the consequences.”

Moving forward with Barcelona, AMD expects that it will have Opterons for all.

“We will have plenty of silicon” Rivas said. “We will make certain that everyone gets their fair share of the pie.”

Should Barcelona prove as successful as AMD hopes, then the company could be poised to gain server market share against Intel before beginning another game-changing phase.

AMD expects its ATI buy to pay serious data center dividends when the company shifts to 45nm chips in 2008. The chipmaker is looking to combine x86 processors with graphics engines to make products capable of cranking through scientific workloads with unprecedented performance. Such products will be complemented by third-party accelerators that plug right into Opteron sockets - an attack where AMD still enjoys a healthy lead over Intel.

So, come 2008, AMD should gain a shot at seizing the marketing high-ground once again rather than agonizing over missed opportunities. That is if all goes according to plan . . . ®

Source:AMD praying ‘Barcelona’ makes up for four-core mistake

Brag: Initial Clovertown Benchmark

I have uploaded an initial benchmark of Clovertown since I am really bored tonight. I don't really know what to do so I decided to fire it up and load a simple benchie, one that doesn't really require attention to run. SANDRA seems to be a good one to start with, so I fire it up and whoopsie daisy and it hits me like a champ (which it really is anyway). No more Mr. Nice Guy, this is one bad ass system. If you are looking for an ultimate multimedia stuff or into Virtualization, look no more because this is it.

Scrap that AMD* 4x4, which is a sorry solution to have four cores. Oh, if you don't have any idea of how powerful it is, click on the graph for a comparison against a wide array of Conroe processors and a Presler.

Rant: Kenstfield’s Rival: AMD Athlon 64 FX-2P

Wow, AMDroids are gearing up for a screwy offerings from A*. As the uber FanBoy Rahul Sood said about "4x4" "“AMD may create a new category of enthusiast”", he is really just turning a blind eye to the fact that this so-called 4x4 is nothing but a "workstation" type of machine. Wow, innovation my a**, I'd say A* really did a good job relabeling their SMP-based system into this "4x4". As for Mr. FanBoy Rahul, well, he is still a FanBoy and covering up for A*'s behind no matter how badly beaten the freakin' A* processors are already.

AMDroids, you suck big time! Expand for more (that is, if you are not an AMDroid).

As Intel announced last week that the company plans to release Quad-core Kenstfield Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (2.66GHz/4MB L2 x2/1066MHz FSB) in Nov 2006 for enthusiastic market, AMD also got their plan on defense. This plan is so called 4x4 enthusiast platform as reported before. Here we get more information about the new platform.

4x4 enthusiast platform is simply an introduction of SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processor) of Operton from the server segment. 4 threads processing ability is accomplished by using 2 Athlon 64 FX-2P dual-core processors, very simple idea indeed. Athlon 64 FX-2P family will be released in Nov 2006 as well like Kenstfield. The first round models include Athlon 64 FX-70 (2.6GHz), FX72 (2.8GHz) and FX74 (3.0GHz). They feature Windsor core with 1MBx2 L2 cache and 125W TDP. Our first sight is that Athlon 64 FX-2P is simply the DDR2 version of Opteron 2P.

From the latest roadmap from AMD, AMD has cancelled 1P support to Athlon 64 FX, but grant the support to Athlon 64 X2. 4x4 enthusiast platform will be supported in Athlon 64 FX family. In addition, Athlon 64 FX-64 has been cancelled in the latest roadmap and the last order date of Athlon 64 FX-60 and Athlon 64 FX-62 are both in 31/12/2006.

As the 4x4 platform is high in production cost as well as not much in performance boost, the industry indicates that AMD Athlon 64 FX-2P is just a technology show off product rather that mass production product. It’s no point for a user to spend more while there is a cheaper solution for the same performance. This platform would appear to the OEM like Dell and HP only.

The roadmap tells that the hybrid Quad-core processors from AMD would appear in late 2007 or early 2008. It’s codenamed Greyhound which based on the upcoming K8L architecture. It will support DDR2/3, with shared L2 cache and packaged in AM3 interface. Although it’s a year late then Intel, the industry said AMD would not suffered a lot as quad-core they expects the growth on market is slow.

Source:Kenstfield’s Rival: AMD Athlon 64 FX-2P

Rant: Intel's Official Comments On AMD's Upcoming 4x4 Platform

No, I am not an Intel official, I am just a poor fanboy playing with Intel products. Ok, now that's cleared, let's proceed with the meat of this posting.

Last week, many have seen the announcement, yep, just diagrams and green-colored slides, with some black accent (duh, whoever designed that eye-irritant design?), focusing on the "4x4" product. Yep, it was A*'s way of trying to steal the light from Intel® Core™ based processors. If you missed all the announcements, well, you can check out AMDTech, XBitLabs, and THG.

And what has Chipzilla got to say on this?

"We’re not sure how many of these parts they will actually ship, but we have an exciting line-up for enthusiasts starting with the launch of a 2.93GHz Core-2 Extreme and a 3.2GHz Extreme processor later in the year. We’ll also have Quad Core for server and desktop shipping in Q1 '07. A number of third party enthusiast sites have already commented on the impressive headroom available with the Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme processor."

Very professional. And source of news courtesy of LegitReviews.

As for those saying this will bring Conroe down, well blow me, it just proves one thing: A* doesn't have anything to counter Conroe that it has to go this route. I mean, 2x2 just to beat a 1x2, looks really fair to me, NOT!

Come on, for those saying crap like, A* has been holding the performance crown for three years should check if their brain has been fried by their A64*-based CPU. Now is 2006, subtract three (3) years and it'll be 2003. So, granting without accepting, that A* has been the "king", how come it's been king for three(3) years when it was so sucky when it first launched? Oh look, it's 2004 and THG has been reporting that A64 has been "lagging in memory support".

And oh, three(3) years ago, 2.4C was the craze you AMDroid idiots! Look at the reviews here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Actually, just google for Northwood review and you'll see that 2003 wasn't all about A64!

And another crapola, AMDroids has been saying, why compare 90nm vs 65nm? I mean hey, isn't that the "lack" of innovation you guys have been blabbering about? If anything, Intel's move to 65nm earlier than A* is a proof that innovation has always been a key part of Intel's strategy. Stop saying it's not "equal", I can't really recall A* always being equal when it comes to this kind of technology.

And oh, I forgot, the Conroe killer may not come in till, err, Conroe is replaced by a new uA.

Till next rat..

Update: 06/06/06

AMDTech has this posted:

Interestingly enough, despite AMD's recent announcement of its new 4x4 platform none of the motherboard manufacturers we spoke to had heard of it, much less had a design ready to go. We definitely got the impression that 4x4 was a last minute effort to compete with Conroe on the high end.