AMD's offering reminds me a little of the worst processor of all time: The P4.
AMD released their own Quad Core mainstream processor to compete with the highly impressive Kentsfield quad core processor from Intel. This is how the story stood last episode in case you haven't been following:
Entry level: Pretty even, with AMD having the slight advantage. Basically they trebled the production of their mid range products in order to cut costs and slashed prices by nearly half. At the lower end they are still fairly competitive.
Lower/Mid Range/High End: This is where AMD are getting thrashed and losing a LOT of market share. Their best processors in this area are slower, more expensive, and already push to the point where they are producing more heat and can't be over clocked. The best example of this is the $220 Intel E6400 which is factory clocked at 2.1 but is a sensational over clocker. Even at factory settings it whips the FX 60 that costs $800, but when after over clocking it easily hits 2.8 on stock cooling. With third party cooling it hits 3.6 and even at 2.8 it is 20% faster than the FX 60.
Does it show in games? Yes, big time. The new video cards are easily processor reliant, and patches for the F.E.A.R., HL2 etc., engine have been released taking full advantage of the Core Duo 2 processors. F.E.A.R. especially runs at mega frames.
Ultra High End: At the 4 core end Intel released the $900 Kentsfield recently. It kicked mucho ass and AMD was behind in its own Quadfather. So basically they did a rush job and it shows. The processors run really hot, and require 450 Watts power (75% more than Intel's quad core)
without even a video card!!!!! And they are slower... so yes reminds me a lot of the P4s, that were crap. Plus the mobo is over $400 itself, but I suppose that doesn't matter to a buyer in the market for something like this anyway.
review from anandtech
Highlights from that review:
Under load the Quad FX system pulled 456W on average, a full 73% more than our Kentsfield testbed.
AMD is going to have a very tough sell with Quad FX; although the CPUs are priced competitively, if the ASUS L1N64-SLI WS ends up just shy of the $400 mark it's a platform that is simply too expensive at no benefit to the end user. When only running one or two CPU intensive threads, Quad FX ends up being slower than an identically clocked dual core system, and when running more threads it's no faster than Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX6700. But it's more expensive than the alternatives and consumes as much power as both, combined.
