AMD Phenom @ 6.28GHz

[sieanr]

Soleron said:

ssj12 said:

Soleron said:

...

I think the Core i7 is a huge disappointment actually. In games (which is what most people buy high end PCs for), the 3.2GHz Core i7 965 is often beaten by the old 3.2GHz QX9770. Also, HT-disabled performance is often 10%+ higher, with lower power consumption, than HT-enabled. I think the new Phenom will beat the low-end (2.66GHz) Core i7 in a number of games.

This is because the games arent coded to work with the new hardware. Remember Intel isnt using an FSB anymore meaning that data is handled differently. Wait for game updates and new driver updates than things will be different.

 

Any 'recoding' to take advantage of QPI (and I doubt it's possible; it's game-type workloads that are the problem, not programming practices) will benefit AMD's HyperTransport in equal amounts. Also, I've yet to see game updates that include major code rewrites to support processor features; no one did it for DirectX 10.1, or one -> two cores, or a new version of SSE. What do you mean by driver updates? Graphics?

I'm not saying Core i7 isn't theoretically stronger than Core 2, but Intel just didn't design it for desktop loads. QPI and SMT actually hurt it on the desktop, the same as HT and NUMA hurt AMD on the desktop but did the inverse for the server.

 

Most games still aren't multithreaded, or at least not mutithreaded well. Until that time comes a dual core will still be a better bet than quads for gaming, not just from a cost/performance standpoint but also because duals will overclock higher.

QPI will make no inherent difference for games, and software isn't going to be 'recoded' for it.