At last year's Intel Developer Forum, Intel pledged to ship 1 million
quad-core processors before AMD ships a single Barcelona processor.
Intel reached this milestone yesterday, approximately two months ahead of
schedule. Intel's quad-core product lineup currently consists of mid-to-high-end
models for desktops, workstations and servers. The company plans to slash prices
on Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Extreme processors come July 22, 2007. Price cuts for
the workstation and server Intel Xeon processors will come shortly afterwards.
Intel plans to penetrate the enterprise server markets with quad-core
Tigerton-based Xeon 7300-sequence processors later this quarter. The upcoming
Intel Xeon 7300-sequence processors can scale up to 32 processors and utilizes a
new point-to-point bus system that allows each processor to have independent
communication with the chipset. Later in 2008, Intel plans to introduce the new
Tukwila quad-core Itanium processors. Tukwila is Intel's first processor to take
advantage of the new common system interface, or CSI. As Intel moves the Xeon
product lineup to the CSI bus, the Xeon and Itanium product lineups will begin
to share architecture similarities.
It seems to me that AMD really needs to price Barcelona quite a bit above the
$266 Q6600 in order to recover R&D investments and to generally become
profitable again. But it seems like Intel's pricing is not going to allow that
to be possible. I also worry about
AMD having lower yield having all four cores on one die, as well as their
apparent inability to scale Barcelona - I doubt it can be competitive at <=
2GHz.
The other thing is that going from a 2.2GHz dual-core to a 2.2GHz quad core
will provide you at least the same performance in applications that don't have a
multi-threaded design, probably with a tiny improvement due to more background
processes running on other cores. If you have a 2.6GHz dual-core processor
today, unless you run apps that are multi-threaded and can take advantage of the
extra cores, you won't want to go to a 2.4GHz or less clocked quad-core
processor. Now, it would be interesting to see if AMD can release higher-clocked
dual-core processors based on the K10 design with higher clock speeds by the end
of the year. That would provide a faster return on that R&D investment. I
figure, if quad-core is at 2.2GHz by November, a dual-core K10 should be able to
get to 2.6GHz, and that would sell
