I've read somewhere (sorry i can't find that piece on the web anymore) that Pentium D - Dual core uses chipset to communicate with each other while the Athlon FX has internal controller directly connected. Therefore, Pentium suffers lantency delay as the data goes down to the board back & forth and a bottleneck to the northbridge. There is no "direct" link internally. In contrast FX's 2 cores has direct channel to "talk" to each other whereby increasing the performance and reducing the system traffic. IF that's true, even though they touted 4+ GHz or whatever the pentium D achieve, the performance wouldn't improve much. My question is: Is there any reason why intel would implement such architecture and why? I'm thinking of having a dual core. Please advise.
I think because Intel wanted to give users the abitility to muti task. whereas the FX wants performance on one particular program. that's why the FX is so good when it comes to games.
The FX-60 is the only FX chip with dual cores. All other FX chips are single core. Intel was going with the faster clock speeds because the majority of consumers were going by one thing: CPU clock speed. In the past, the CPU speed was the deciding factor in a computer's performance. That's no longer the case. Also, Intel's Pentium brand has been much more recognizable than the Athlon. Add to this the fact that the Athlon ran at a much slower clock speed, the Pentium sold. While, yes, the Pentium 4 (and D) weren't the most efficient CPUs, the fact is that Intel was able to sell them because of brand recognition and the ignorant consumer. Athlons weren't as fast, but they did more work per clock than their Pentium counterparts. However, better doesn't automatically mean you'll get more sales. Also, AMD has evidence that Intel was willfully engaging in keeping them out of the market and in court with an anti-trust lawsuit against Intel. Despite this, AMD has been able to come out very well. Even the once Intel-only Dell is now offering Opterons in servers. It's possible that they may offer Athlon-based systems in the future because Intel has discontinued giving discounts to OEMs on CPU's. However, they're changing this around with the Core and Core 2 (Conroe) architechture. This dumps the NetBurst that was introduced with the Pentium 4 several years ago.
The Pentium D and FX will probably be replaced in a few months time with new architectures. Its true that the FX 60 (as B said the only FX with 2 cores) uses a hypertransport link called X-bar to communicate directly with the cores so latencies would be lower. Core 2 seems to be hammering both however.
Doesn't the Socket AM2 FX-62 have 2 cores? (Both at like 2.8GHz Each) Overclockers UK Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo (The Intel Core 2 CPU's) Overclockers UK Socket AM2 (Bottom of that page is the FX-62) Overclockers UK Socket 939 (Bottom of that page is the FX-60)
Thanks for replies. So, intel PentiumD 805 seems good value for money. AMD dual core can't be cheaper than that. They look a little over-confident with the price.
The 805 is a screamer for the price. I'm not really an intel man but there's no denying that it's a far better value than anything that AMD has in the dual-core market. And Core 2 Duo (conroe) is a total speed demon: (yet another link to to subject) - GDHardware.com - Intel Core 2 Duo X7800 & E6700 With a bit of overclocking you can turn a sub $150 dollar chip (805) into something almost as impressive as a chip costing hundreds more. Now that's pretty sweet.
