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"EE" (Extreme Edition)

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UnseenMenace

UnseenModerator
Joined
Apr 23, 2001
Full Article - Overclockers.com

From The Article - "EE" - Ed Stroligo - 9/17/03

Intel's decision to take a heavily-cached Xeon and let it go slumming with gamers is a pretty brilliant tactical move against AMD.

It's quite ironic, given AMD's penchant for secrecy to the point of silliness, that Intel did the last-minute blindsiding.

It's going to be very hard to seriously review an Athlon FX without comparing it to an Extreme Edition, and the likely general advantage a 2.2GHz FX would have over a "regular" 3.2GHz will vanish against this chip. No doubt the FX will still win some, but so will the EE. It ought to be enough to deny AMD a clean win.

But is it any more than that?

In one sense, yes, it's more than that, if only because Intel said there would be a 90nm version of this chip (presumably when they have 90nm Xeons with 2Mb L3 cache to spare).

That's an important point to note. This is a 130nm CPU. It's overclocking potential is pretty limited.

Relative price is another point. The price of this chip is rumored to be a bit over $700. That may not look so bad compared to current 3.2 pricing, but by the time this CPU becomes available, 3.2s will cost just a bit over $400, and due to go to around $275 by February.

Will the price of the EE plunge likewise? If so, that would be really interesting.

If not, at least from the gamer perspective, this processor would have a very limited time on top in the overclocking world. A cheap overclocked Prescott next February probably will be able to match or beat the EE.

NOTE This Information Is Edited :- Reading The Full Article Is Recomended

1) Does the Extreme Edition change your opinion of the AMD FX ? -- Were you considering buying the AMD FX? are you still considering it or has this information changed where your cash goes.
2) If you were not considering early versions of the Athlon FX are you considering the Extreme Edition now
3) Do you believe that the Extreme Edition will greatly effect the early AMD FX market..
4) Was this marketing genius from Intel?, or will it backfire due to the effect that these products may have on current processor pricing ?
5) Will AMD be able to respond to this news ?... How do you think they will do it ?
6) What are your opinions of Eds comments, the article and the Extreme Edition
 
I'm not planning on buying any version of the hammer until it's been out for at least 6 months to a year. It reminds me of when the P4 was launched - not enough cache and not a high enough clock speed to be a real contender yet. At the same time I don't think this EE P4 is going to shake things up that much. I might buy one to review and then I'll dump it. I don't think it's marketing genius by any means, but it certainly takes a little away from AMD's launch. I don't think AMD is going to be able to respond much to this. They've already had enough trouble getting hammer to the market - they're stretched as is. I think Ed generally has a pretty good take on things, and this is no exception.
 
The EE P4 doesn't deter my amd64 lust very much... I'm skeptical of how they are touting it as a booster for game performance. I'm waiting on benchmarks.
 
1. The EE has absolutely no affect on how I view or will view the AFX, I am seriously considering buyingthe AFX or A64 but am awaiting more definitive overclocking results, this announcement certainly does nothing to change that.
2. EE is nothing more than a Xeon which in benches the Opteron which is nothing more than an AFX seems to be beat so I see no reason to buy one.
3. I think it will have minimal impact on AFX's early market
4. Marketing genius or attempted spoiling tactic? - it is clear it is a rush job because Intel now see the potential threat the AFX and A64 holds. Intel have plenty cash to reduce prices if they need to and I would expect this to be there next marketing tactic as it is one that market leaders often successfully use.
5. Respond to the news? Well the only way to respond is show their cpus are better than say a Xeon or release higher frequency cpus.
6. The EE is segmented to be a niche cpu whereas the whole 64bit release is intended to cover most of AMD's markets.
Ed's article doesnt look at the global picture but mostly from the overclockers perspective (which is understandable) especially when he talks about prices.
However I cant see how it will spoil the party as it is not even on the market yet.
 
1) Does the Extreme Edition change your opinion of the AMD FX ? -- Were you considering buying the AMD FX? are you still considering it or has this information changed where your cash goes.

Yes, and no. Yes, it does change my opinion of the AMD FX becuase I know that the FX will be based off of the ageing .13 micron manufacturing process(so will early A64's and Opterons), and now having a .09 micron Pentium 4, IMHO, even though im an AMD fanboy, i think Intel will start off by whooping the stercus out of AMD, just becuase of the .09 manufacturing process.

No, becuase i read a reveiw somewhere (ill have to go digging for that link, ill BBIAB with the link) that concluded that the extra L3 cache in the Xeon did not help much at all, I think that if Intel, adds alot of cache and does not increase clockspeed, there will little or no benefit over the Athlon FX, im assuming for the moment that the extra cache does not benefit becuase there are not enough pipelines and/or bandwidth leading to the cache.

No, i was not considering buying an Athlon FX, and no this information has not changed where my cash goes. I intend to keep my 1700 @ 2.37 Ghz, (hopefully higher when watercooled) until it becomes obsolete, by then, IMO the K8's wll probably be overclocking just like the DLT3C 1700's are now.


2) If you were not considering early versions of the Athlon FX are you considering the Extreme Edition now


No i am not.

3) Do you believe that the Extreme Edition will greatly effect the early AMD FX market..

Yes, i do. My opinion is that it will offer good competition to the FX and possibly the K8, giving Intel time to roll out the Pentium 5(presscot), or whatever thye decide to call it. Even if the FX turns out to PWN the Intel EE, i thinkit will stiff effect it becuase there are ALWAYS people who buy Intel and people who buy AMD.

4) Was this marketing genius from Intel?, or will it backfire due to the effect that these products may have on current processor pricing ?

Im not quite sure what this question is asking, (its a little late for me) but Im assuming its asking if this will keep Pentium 4's rolling to give time for the next generation of processor from intel, I think YES, ive heard about people going out to buy the latest Pentium 4's becuase of HT, could you imagion what thye will do for EE? same thing. As for Intel's advertising, its pretty clever, I heard from someone who works for Dell, that Intel pays for their "dude! you gettin a Dell! including the latest intel P4 procsesor!" Im sure they pay for the Gateway "mooooooooooooo" as well, heh j/k :D . anyways, i think thats a good strategdie, have theTV ads where the majority of people who watch dont know much about computers, so they have the resellers like dell for example do the ads on tv, and they do direct ads in the computing magazines where people know a little more about computers and know how to get a P4, whereas people who watch TV might not, so by having resellers do the TV ads is a smart move. IMO, its alot better than the 2 week "amd me" campaign.
5) Will AMD be able to respond to this news ?... How do you think they will do it ?

I have no idea how AMD will respond, I hope they dont do another crazy direct reveiw proscess that makes all reveiws favor the AMD processor, I wish there was a way to have acurate reveiws and not biased or company inflected outcomes.


6) What are your opinions of Eds comments, the article and the Extreme Edition

well, the article was great, just like all of Ed's articles are, and all i have to say about the Extreme Edition is AWSOME, awsome not becuase the CPU might eb awsome, but awsome becuase something new is happening that will "wake things up" a little bit, the last race between AMD and Intel before a whole new race season comes out, the pentium5 and the k8. (whoa, my metaphore kinda sucks but i cant think of a better one)

Cheers!
-Nick
:cool:
 
If the performance of the EE is alot better then the normal p4 amd might release a 2.4ghz version of the A64... :)

I don't really agree with the people saying there will not be better performance. Ofcourse it would be far better if intel ramped up the L1, but this will still help. I think we allready noticed with the barton that larger cache does'nt help with all programs. Some will benefit alot though, and this might take away part of the excitement of the A64.

I'm still a bit sceptical as of how available these chips will be, (to others then reviewers) and what they will cost. Some articles where predicting that they won't be available to the wide audience before next year.
 
1) Does the Extreme Edition change your opinion of the AMD FX ? -- Were you considering buying the AMD FX? are you still considering it or has this information changed where your cash goes.

No. NO, never.


2) If you were not considering early versions of the Athlon FX are you considering the Extreme Edition now

No. NO, never. :p


3) Do you believe that the Extreme Edition will greatly effect the early AMD FX market..

No. No, never. :rolleyes:


4) Was this marketing genius from Intel?, or will it backfire due to the effect that these products may have on current processor pricing ?

Well, pricing's a factor for most who upgrade... the tiny portion of the market on the bleeding edge can't support the pricing for long, so either they're going to take a fast drop or drop from the market altogether.


5) Will AMD be able to respond to this news ?... How do you think they will do it ?

Throw a party and invite prOn stars to rub against their geekdom fAnatics.


6) What are your opinions of Eds comments, the article and the Extreme Edition

Little excites me anymore that doesn't have a few dozen benchmarks behind it. ie -- "Show me the money"
 
The P4 "Emergency Edition" :D won't even make parity if Ace's benches are reflective and AMD releases a 2.4 GHz A64 as I've seen rumored. It's die size will be 246 mm^2 give or take (Anand) and it'll cost an arm and a leg. It also won't do 64 bits.

So I think it will have minimal impact and AMD needn't bother respond.

eCo
 
Will those rebadged Xeons do SMP or will Intel cripple that feature as well?

Future 800fsb, 2.5Mb onchip L3 cache Xeons sound very interesting as long as they're not too expensive.

It's too soon to know which side of the fence to be on. If they can get the 90nm SOI process working smoothly, then the Opteron is looking very good.
 
I don't know how many pins the XeonMP has, but the Xeon has 604 and the P4 has 478. No pin-compatibility for yuo!

The gains from all that L3 will not justify the cost (to Intel) in any way. The reason the XeonMP has such large L3 is because 4 or more of them have to share 533Mhz worth of bandwidth among themselves (unless they're in a NUMA configuration) and the L3 offsets the expensive main memory access by quite a margin.
 
eCo said:
The P4 "Emergency Edition" :D

Yup thats what they should be callin it. Poor Intel is trying to check up to AMD's Hyper Transport by implementing L3 cache to lower the memory buss acess latency...tisk tisk...:D
 
If all Intel has to do is repackage something they already have to make it available to desktops, and it performs equal or better to AMD's total revamped chip (which has taken eons to come out and who knows how much money to develop), then that is what they will do (kind of a no brainer). This looks like AMD made it too easy for Intel to put out a competetive chip.
 
well, considering it took a $ 2000 server chip to beat the Athlon64, which was intended for the desktop from the start, i'd say AMD has the upper hand.
 
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I'm waiting on better 800fsb Xeons to compare to the Opteron.

Does that EE plug into a standard 478 socket?
 
Audioaficionado said:
I'm waiting on better 800fsb Xeons to compare to the Opteron.

Does that EE plug into a standard 478 socket?


That is what I got out of the various stories.

re Mark Larson,
How does AMD have the upperhand when Intel spent 0$ on R&D to plop out a competitive chip (by using previous technology)? They will still continue to make money on the server version it was designed as plus now a desktop version.

This frees their R&D money for whatever they are working on next, instead of possibly being forced to release an unfinished design to stay competitive (as some say the P4 was). I'd say the ball is in Intel's court on this one.

If AMD had raised the bar higher, Intel would not be able to get off this easy.
 
They have to get the 90mn SOI process and speeds up and productive soon to pull away. Intel is having serious heat problems with the Prescott but Opteron & AMD64 are not. So if AMD can get well past the stock Intel speeds/performance, they'll be in good shape as it's almost impossible to OC a hot Intel chip.
 
Audioaficionado said:
They have to get the 90mn SOI process and speeds up and productive soon to pull away. Intel is having serious heat problems with the Prescott but Opteron & AMD64 are not. So if AMD can get well past the stock Intel speeds/performance, they'll be in good shape as it's almost impossible to OC a hot Intel chip.

I agree.
Once AMD gets on that 90nm SOI i think they should just start increasing the clockspeed as much as they can, sort of like when they came out with the 2400, 2600, 2600 333fsb,2700, and 2800 all within what was it like a month and a half?

Once they get 90nm out and work out the bugs, they should do something similar, or if they have the capability to get it up to max speed from the start they should do it.

Example. (i just made up these figures)
max doable speed of .13 3200+
max doable speed of 90nm SOI 4400+

then they should come out wiht the 4400+ as soon as they are able to, and then sell the lower models later, instead of working up to the speed, they just get the fastest possible at the moment for them and then get the slower ones.

By doing that it may take them longer to do it, but it seems as if AMD has a new chip that beats intel, intel seems to pull something faster out of their ***, but if AMD waits a while, to get the faster chip out first, intel will be taken by surprise almost and not be able to keep up.

I know this sounds really really crazy and may not be possible becuase in the mean time (while they are developing the faster proc.) intel will be faster and they lose money. So that probably isnt possible, but if they could find some way to do that, im sure it will give AMD some edge over intel.

Back to the prescott and EE, i hear that the prescott will give off more than 100 watts of heat, so as someone said above, i think they need the EE to help them stay competitive to AMD while thye are working on the preescott.

oops i forgot what i was gonna say, but if they put off 100 watts of heat at stock speeds on the begginning models, thye will definatly struggle with the later ones. I think maybe people willing to overclock these are probably gonna be extreme/watercoolers becuase of the heat, becuase its pretty hard to oc soemthing with alot of heat, and then the K8 dosetn put off that much heat, but they dont overclock very well at all, so i think that the PEntium 4 EE and athlon Fx are needed by both AMD and Intel until they can either get it to oc well or run cool.

Another reason this will save intel, is becuase something that puts off 100 or more watts of heat aint gonna be silent in a DELL, and since they arent concerned with overclocking, if it werent for the EE they would probably use the A64 becuase it can be run without the airflow of a pratt and whitney turbo fan. So, the EE might save intel by letting the big manufactures such as dell or gateway decide to buy the EE vs somethign else.

Cheers!
-f1
:cool:
 
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I just read that you have to buy buffered ram to use the FX-51 or FX-53 opterons(which performs ahead of the P4EE) along with a $730 pricetag on the chip. The regular FX can be used with normal DDR but performance drops off to no advantage on P4EE.

http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000253

Also max wattage specs are at 89watts for the FX.

I want to know if current canterwood mobo bios's can support the P4EE since it will use the same socket.
 
gone_fishin said:

Also max wattage specs are at 89watts for the FX.
I want to know if current canterwood mobo bios's can support the P4EE since it will use the same socket.
I hear the A64 with one of those huge copper heatsinks can be passively cooled, but that may be a rumor.

Im pretty sure that the EE SHOULD run on a canterwood mobo, unless you need something special to support L-3 cache.

-f1
 
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