Intel Core vs. AMD K8
Anandtech has just posted a article which compares Intel's Core architecture against AMD's K8 architecture. With Intel's new design just now showing up and AMD's having been sold for the last few years, it seems logical to assume that Intel should win this round and AMD will have to wait for the release of their next architecture to redeem themselves. However, don't go counting the K8 architecture quite yet as there are a few tricks up AMD's sleeve should they wish to keep the performance crown a bit longer.
Compared to the excellent AMD K8/Hammer architecture, the Core CPU is simply a wider, more efficient and more out of order CPU. When I suggested to Jack Doweck that the massive execution resources may not be fully used until SMT is applied, he disagreed completely. Memory disambiguation should push the current limits of ILP in integer loads a lot higher, and the massive bandwidth that the L1 and L2 can deliver should help Core to come close to the execution utilization percentages of the current P-M. 33% more execution potential could thus come very close to 33% more performance, clock-for-clock.
