Stripping down to the thermals
Roger Kay, founder and president of Endpoint Technologies Associates agrees that "The process-node gap is widening between Intel and AMD, with AMD falling further and further behind," but also admits "AMD and NVIDIA still lead Intel in graphics, and even in ‘balanced' processing." However, Kay says 32nm "will confer a cost and thermal advantage on Intel that will be difficult for rivals to surmount," adding that unfortunately, "AMD will have to accept lower margins."
"Westmere, if it performs well, even though it's not fully integrated, will be a feather in Intel's cap," Kay told HEXUS, but was also quick to point out that thus far, Intel's integrated graphics had been "merely good enough." Of course, noted Kay, "good enough keeps getting better, which plays in Intel's favor, but I'm still going to want to see it working before making a judgment."
Meanwhile, Nathan Brookwood of Insight64 believes mainstream PC buyers think their systems are already "fast enough for the e-mail, productivity and social networking activities they engage in today." Brookwood says those users who still want more performance are typically "involved in video editing and production, or just want to transcode the video files they download on their PCs into a format that works on their iPods or other media players."
"Neither Westmere nor Sandy Bridge will speed up those sorts of activities very much," Brookwood told HEXUS, adding "on the other hand, tapping the computational features of the GPUs integrated into ATI and Nvidia chipsets can provide a big boost in media performance, as AMD demonstrated on its aircraft carrier last week."
"Intel's Clarkdale and Arrandale offerings will likely outperform AMD's 45nm Athlons, Phenoms and Turions on the workloads where users already think their PCs are fast enough, but the AMD platforms will likely outperform Intel's Clarkdale and Arrandale platforms on media-related tasks when users move to GPU-enabled software packages," he continued.
Agreeing with Kay, Brookwood noted that moving the GPU into the CPU package helped Intel and OEMs with BOM costs and supply chain management issues, "but it's not going to turn its sow's ear GMA graphics into a silk purse."
"The Westmere GPU doesn't even offer an API that would let applications tap its floating point hardware to accelerate CPU-bound tasks," explained Brookwood in AMD's defense.