I feel it's a double edged sword.
Usually when intel ships a great new part, all the sites are
discussing it and 1 or 2 vague tests show up.
AMD seems to use the path you describe below.
Suddenly K7-MP 1.2ghz was there crushing P4 Xeon 1.7Ghz at the time.
Suddenly opteron was there at 2.2Ghz crushing anything intel had
bigtime, including itanium (integer wise).
What AMD ships usually gets benchmarked. Intel nowadays seems to
release special benchmark chips,
eating a 150+ watt and having some unrealistic high price.
Look who sells better though.
It's obvious that making noise with all drums you have in a nonstop
manner,
about upcoming great release, is a lot more effective, than AMD's non-
existing marketing.
For a company worth $10-$20 billion (or what is it?) that's nonstop
nearly bankrupt nearly releasing some great new
product, it should be possible to pay a good marketing manager from
the interest at the bankloan.
Marketing is everything.
Vincent
On Oct 15, 2008, at 11:19 PM, Greg Lindahl wrote:
Sounds like Intel has something to hide.
Often companies like Intel have an embargo date solely to make sure
that all the great new performance news arrives at once, generating a
lot of press alongside the formal announcement of availability.
I also had one case years ago where I was doing a big benchmark for a
bid on a new processor. We had pre-release parts. The release parts
were 10% slower, across the board on all of our benchmarks. Memory
intensive, cache intensive, fp intensive, int intensive, it was all
slower by about the same amount. That was a real head-scratcher, since
the cpu clock was the same.
AMD sends out pre-release Opterons to partners, often times running at
pretty low clock rates. It's very useful for compiler testing, and can
provide more opportunity to find chip bugs. Needless to say, no
benchmarks from these really slow parts can be published.
-- greg
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