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Dual core chip duel
Dual core chips have dawned on the digital space, doubling choice for the consumer. Dancewithsadows.com does a double-quick review
BY OUR TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT
19 June, 2005: The chip market is heating up again. Advance Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel are now slugging it out over dual core chips for the desktop market. Vying for the consumer's greenbacks are AMD' Athlon 64 X2 unviled on May 31, 2005, and Intel's Pentium D, introduced a week earlier.
But what is a dual-core chip and how will it enhance your computing experience?
THE DUAL CORE CHIP
A dual-core chip puts two processors on a single piece of silicon. For long, engineers trying to increase the performance of single-core chips have faced two problems: they consume vast amounts of power and radiate too much heat, effectively blocking any gains in speed. A dual-core design overcomes this problem: snapping two slightly slower chips together can keep the performance chart curving upward without worrying about dissipating the heat. However, these chips won't deliver twice the speed of their predecessors. The two 3.2-gigahertz cores in a new Intel Pentium D won't necessarily yield 6.4 GHz worth of performance.
"These new processors, designed for desktop and desktop-replacement notebooks, shatter the hourglass icon by delivering performance improvements of up to 80 per cent on select digital media and productivity applications compared to single-core AMD Athlon 64 processors," the Sunnyvale, California-based AMD said in a press release.
AMD and its rival, the Santa Clara, California-based Intel, view dual-core processors as the design of the future for the $25-billion x86 chip market for servers, desktops and laptops. Both companies's dual-core chips are available in top-of-the-line desktop computers from Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Alienware.
Intel had unveiled Pentium D for the mainstream consumer market a week before AMD came out with its Athlon 64 X2. Intel plans to promote the processor by packaging it with a new chipset that delivers high-quality audio and storage performance.
IS THE DUAL CORE CHIP FOR ME?
It would be sometime, however, before customers can take advantage of their dual-core processors. Most software available today isn't built to take advantage of processors that split the job among multiple cores. Software developers will need to redesign their applications to perform more tasks simultaneously, instead of working sequentially through a list of tasks if the advantages of the new chips need to reach the consumer.
For now, only those who edit massive video or photo files or those who run multiple resource-heavy applications will see a huge benefit from having dual-core processors.
In fact, the war over dual-core chips has made life only tougher for customers. It may look like they are spoilt for a choice, but choosing a configuration for a PC has become even more harder for the average conusmer now. Clock speeds matter even less than before with dual-core chips as a way to gauge performance. Both AMD and Intel are assigning numbers to their new chips rather than ranking them by GHz. Intel's Pentium D processors are numbered 820, 830 and 840; AMD will extend its numbering scheme for single-core processors through its dual-core line. But the number of an AMD dual-core chip is not comparable with that of an AMD single-core processor, much less with Intel chips.
DUAL CORE CHIP PRICING
The prices of the rival dual-core chips too are vastly different. AMD considers its dual-core products superior and is pricing the Athlon 64 X2 higher. Athlon 64 X2 costs from $537 to $1,001 each while Pentium costs between $241 and $530. The two kinds of chipsets for accompanying the Pentium D cost $39 and $42. The package is part of Intel's strategy to sell chips by platforms, which refers to grouping chips that work well together to deliver a particular performance.
AMD is aiming its dual-core processor at finicky consumers who want the best parts available. Athlon 64 X2 enables computer users to multitask, such as streaming music and videos while editing photos and running other software, without affecting computing speed.
FUTURE SCENE
In any case, analysts don't expect consumers to snap up the more expensive dual-core PCs during their introductory year. The war for the dual-core market will continue for some time before the prices even out and become more affordable. Both companies expect to introduce dual-core processors for laptops later this year. AMD started selling its Opteron dual-core chips for servers in April. Intel will start to ship its dual-core processors for servers by early 2006.
So we come back to the question: which one is a better chip for your needs? That one is tough to answer. "The only really reliable way of doing this is to look at a group of benchmarks and try to assess the relative importance of various ones," says Roger L. Kay, an analyst at research firm IDC, told the Washington Post. The way to do that could be to go into Websites that have raced the two competing dual-core warriors against each other. One such article can be found at:
http://www.pcworld.com/resource/article/0,aid,121266,pg,1,00.asp
BY OUR TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT
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