Processor Watch (2004 H2 Update)

In the 2nd half of 2004, we again see a closer completion between AMD x86-64 and Intel Pentium 4. In RISC market, POWER5 benchmark stuns the industry, while various RISC vendors have updated their processors. The dawning Alpha from HP is in the list.

The 2nd half shows that AMD Athlon FX-55 and Opteron 850 again outperforms all high-end Pentium 4 (3.8G) and Xeon (3.6G) in integer performance. In floating point, though Intel is still leading, AMD is now coming very close to Intel.

In RISC market, POWER5 shows leading benchmark scores and comes closer to Itanium 2, which is just updated with 9MB Level 3 cache. The dawning Alpha has boosted the clock rate to 1.3G, while Sun boosted its UltraSPARC IIIi to 1.6G. The increase in clock rate shows some performance improvements, but still unable to match POWER5 and even Fujitsu's SPRAC V 64 1.9G (see Processor Watch - 2004 H1 Update). IBM finally provides PowerPC 970 benchmarks from their JS20 blade server. The POWER4-derived chips shows similar performance to POWER4+ 1.7G in integer performance. However, the floating point is particularly weak as opposed to POWER chips. Although it is unknown on whether the compiler is optimzied for AltiVec engine or not, this gives some performance hint to Apple G5 systems.

The year of 2005 will be the multi-core year for processor industry. It is expected that Pentium 4, Athlon 64 and PowerPC 970 will be available in dual core. Intel and AMD will continue to compete against each other in the new year, and it is highly expected that how Pentium M performs.