Misinformation Rolls Onward

I had hoped that hardware review sites like Toms Hardware Guide and Anandtech would somehow rediscover the integrity they used to have. I've hoped that financial analysts would stop measuring Intel with a shorter yardstick than they use for AMD. However, even a brief look at recent articles shows that bias towards Intel is very much alive and well.

In this THG Clovertown article we see several problems right away. For example the only two compilers used are: Intel C++ Compiler Version 9.1.030 and Intel Fortran Compiler Version 9.1.029. This guarantees that Intel will have an advantage because the Intel compiler purposefully skips optimizations on non-Intel processors. Secondly, we see that the bulk of the "tests" are either single or dual thread. I'm still baffled why anyone with common sense would test a quad core processor with single threaded code. This is a bit like testing a 500mph test vehicle in rush hour traffic in L.A. rather than someplace more suitable like the Bonneville Salt Flats. I suppose you could make the same lame argument that L.A. traffic is more like real driving conditions but a test is useless if it is artificially limited as so many of the recent tests have been. We also see that in the supposed "load" test that the testers fail to actually achieve any load on the processor. Intel gives the TDP of the 5355 as 120W while the 5160 is only 80W. Yet in the THG chart on page 11 the 5355 actually draws less power. I had strong hopes that THG might get back on track during 2007 but this level of incompetence or outright bias is hard to break. THG remains useless for real testing and benchmarking.

Another interesting article was this Economist piece. The theme of the author is clear as the article is entitled The Empire Strikes Back. Backing this up is a supposed graph showing that Intel's market share is on the rise and growing faster than AMD's. The only problem is that this graph is bogus. To get this imaginary increase they include numbers from VIA whose cpu's sell at a price below both Sempron and Celeron and therefore have no effect on Intel and AMD processor sales. The numbers for VIA were temporary inflated because VIA was dumping large numbers of processors that were End Of Life. By adding these anomalous VIA numbers in they make Intel's Q2 share look worse and give the impression of a changing trend. In reality, Intel's share has been slowly dropping while AMD's has been slowly rising. The change is roughly 0.66% per quarter. This trend should continue and if it does AMD will indeed arrive at 30% volume share by the end of 2008. I guess the problem is that if Intel has been slowly losing share for the last six months it would be impossible to use those snappy catch phrases in the article like, "right-hand turn", "turning the wheel", "successfully navigated the transition", and "Intel cemented its comeback". I guess the true phrases like, "Intel continues slow loss of share" or "Intel's reorganization was not deep enough" just wouldn't generate the same kind of excitement. In reality there has been no big turnaround in share for Intel in spite of the introduction of Core 2 Duo. Today, Intel continues to slowly lose share to AMD. Perhaps it is time to give up on the financial analysts as well.

Over at Overclockers Ed is claiming that AMD will only hit 2.9 GHz with dual core on 65nm. I'm not really sure where Ed got this information from. Common sense would suggest that if AMD can hit 3.0Ghz with FX-70 on 90nm then they should be able to do at least a little better with 65nm. If Ed had speculated 3.2Ghz I think that would be reasonable. Even 3.1Ghz would be a bump over 90nm speeds. However, I think speculating a speed that is lower than the speed for 90nm is just absurd. Yet in the same article he speculates that Intel will hit 4.0 Ghz with dual core on 45nm. Considering that Intel has not yet shown or announced anything faster than 3.0Ghz I would have to say that this is optimistic. The question is why the optimism always seems to be in Intel's favor. Overlockers is another website that is unreliable for a balanced look at Intel and AMD.

A website that is usually much better, Ars Technica, however showed some serious errors in their Barcelona article. This is the faulty paragraph:

It does not seem that K8L will catch up to Conroe in terms of the theoretical peak number of 128-bit SSE operations per cycle, however. K8L's two floating-point/SSE pipes give it two 128-bit SSE ops/cycle, and its FSTORE pipe can do another 128-bit SSE move per cycle, for a total of three per cycle peak. This is half of Conroe's peak theoretical throughput of six 128-bit SSE ops/cycle.

Conroe cannot do 6 SSE ops per cycle. It is true that sometimes Conroe can do a simultaneous SSE multiply/add in a single cycle however 6 ops is pure fantasy. Where the 6 ops number comes from would be two simultaneous multiply/adds plus one load plus one store. However, the actual datapath to L1 cache can only handle two 128 bit words at a time. So, a more realistic number is two 128 bit SSE operations per cycle which interestingly is what K8L will be able to do. It is true that sometimes Conroe could go faster by executing combined multiply/add instructions but the article fails to count the L1 datapath advantage that AMD has over Conroe. My best guess is that AMD will actually come out slightly ahead of Conroe on SSE.

I think that there are many who are still hoping for Intel to pull decisively into the lead again as they did in 2002. However, this is not happening and won't happen. The true situation is that AMD and Intel are becoming more and more alike both in terms of corporate structure and in terms of processor design. I'll talk more about this in my next article, Walking Into A Mirror