This article was slashdotted today and is undoubtedly getting a bazillion hits:
Skype is claiming that AMD’s dual cores aren’t sufficient to handle 10 way VOIP conference calls and Intel’s are. What a crock of SH….!!!
Maybe Skype didn’t do their homework before building corporate bias into their software (the “GetCPUID” function). Let me help them. Skype read this:
Or this:
CNET Prizefight: AMD vs. Intel Dual Core (cut to the chase: AMD won all 7 rounds).
And here’s a very thorough test by ExtremeTech:
“While Intel’s Pentium Extreme Edition 840 acquits itself fairly well in a number of benchmarks, there are also some disturbing trends. In some tests, such as Cinebench 2003, AMD’s X2 sees greater gains in performance than the Intel CPU. In more theoretical tests, such as Passmark’s Performance Test, Intel generally holds its own—except in floating point, where it loses by a wide margin.”
Everyone who’s done this level of testing professes that while the Hyper threading helps Intel at running multiple applications simultaneously (like 12) the AMD chips smoke Intel in single instance apps because they handle the floating point better. And when AMD invokes on-board diagonal memory addressing Intel is doomed because AMD will have a solid solution for handling 4 cores. Intel doesn’t have a chip with architecture to begin handling it so they might go to market with a 4-core chip in 2007 (Clovertown) that won’t have an on-die memory controller. “This bandwidth problem will be exacerbated by the fact that Intel still won’t have an on-die memory controller, which means that memory traffic will be flowing to all four cores over that single, dated FSB.” What’s Intel gonna do when the day comes that we want to use all flash memory without a FSB? Personally, one day I want a 19″ flat panel calculator with 200GB of flash memory and 256MB of video ram plugged straight into 8 cores. In my spare time I’ll get in Pcad and Pro-E and get it rollin’ for us.
So Skype can try to pull off a corporate partisan move and sell out to the marketing monoliths (they won’t even admit they’ve tested their software against AMD chips) and unfortunately they may succeed. This level of technology is beyond the argument of the justice system in that there is not judge or jury capable of analyzing performance results of multi-core processors to a level capable of discrediting a bogus claim such as this one made by Skype. The science and tech sector must rely on a platoon of lawyers outgunned by a lack of technological competence in society at large. Their task is monumental; to find a jury of “peers”. Does this mean everyone at Micron, Honeywell and Motorola should prepare for jury duty?