And how did they do that?
They either used
a, aftermarket cooling
or
b, changes to Vcore
Or they had higher quality CPUs (center of the wafer)

Intel Conroe @ 3.9GHz: SuperPI 1M - 12.984s
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=99980

AMD FX-57 @ 4.2GHz: SuperPI 1M - 21.992s
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=100101

In other words, AMD is 2-times slower...

Please stop posting such ignorant comments. It only shows your level of îgnorance ;)



You CAN'T base off CPU performance off 1 benchmark. Sure, it's almost twice as fast, but only if all you do is run SPi all day and sit there all day long, watching the times pop on on the screen.

The K8 is almost twice as fast on some benchmarks compared to the P4 processors. Does that mean it's 100% overall better, NO!



The CD2 advantage is more like 20% per clock on most benchmarks. On some it's lower than that. The CD2 even loses some benchmarks to the K8 in certain applications and under certain circumstances.

AFAIK, it's the shared humongous cache that gives the CD2 such a huge advantage. On some benchmarks, once the calculation surpasses the 4MB mark, the K8 even takes the lead.

What's so special about the shared cache, is that both CPU's can use it. SO I think in a one threaded application ,one core can use the whole 4MB for itself, while each core in the K8 is restricted to 1MB cache, even if only 1 core is being used.

We've still got to see a thorough review on the CD2 that show's what makes it tick so fast. Time will tell.

He-man

AMD fanboys are very funny.

I own X2 4400+ myself, bought it at 6/2005, but right now AMD has the worst price/performance ratio there is. For a price of quite obsolete Venice 3700+ you can buy dualcore Intel D930 65nm and overclock it to 4.5GHz.

AMD needs some very serious spanking.. and Conroe is exactly that.

PS: SuperPI is about FPU performance, which tells A LOT about reallife performance in games, which you could know, fanboy ;)