First, Intel introduced some 45nm CPUs today, and as we and a few others reported, the mainstream 45nm quads aren’t included in the bunch that will be released very shortly. They’ll show up later this quarter.
We point this out simply because a number of people got riled when we called a delay a delay, and didn’t get fooled by a non-denial denial. Just remember, when PR people start using funny words instead of plain language, it means something.
The Wolfdale duallies have come out, and we heartily recommend you take a look at the XBitLabs review of them. As expected, they’re only slightly better than Conroes clock-for-clock, but they also give you a few more clocks.
On the one hand, XBitLabs compares them to Conroes and an AMD X2 6400+, and it isn’t a pretty sight for Green, for either performance or power consumption. I think we have some more AMD price cuts coming, since even the low-end $163 Wolfdale beats the 6400+, and usually beats it up.
On the other hand, they also overclocked these Wolfdales and got rather different results from the high- as opposed to the low-end Wolfdale.
Again, we suggest that if you want a quad-core, but don’t know why, you might be better off getting a Penryn dually and/or waiting a year for Nehalems to show up to give the software folks a chance to catch up.
Again, if you’re on the AMD side and just want something to plug into your current system, we think prices are going to take a plunge. We think $100 will get you any dual-core you want, and we think $125 will get you a tri-core CPU you want by the time June rolls around.
Be the first to comment