a word about merom/conroe benchmarks like, eventually, software, specific

andy

I'm sure it will come up eventually so I'd like to get ahead of things:

Both DivX and WME are optimized for Intel CPUs. In fact, Intel often pays software makes for CPU specific optimizations. Hence, if you want a fair shootout in the media encoding area, you need to use software that does not contain considerable amounts of manufacturer specific optimization. So compare XviD and x264 instead of DivX and WMV9 and you have a fair shootout these open source projects don't take money from intel to implement intel optimizations.

Now you might ask why I post here instead of contacting the hardware sites performing the benchmarks. I have tried repeatedly in the past to raise issues in areas where the major hardware sites fail to generate truly representative and reproducible results, but I have yet to get one single reply back.  Clearly, these points are not as important as publishing some fancy graphs..

Very good point Doom9.
Well, I believe when Conroe comes it may beat FX-60 as well as it did in DivX and Wme in encoding Xvid and x264, but there is an old saying in my native tongue I have a hard time translating: Will Amd's hands be busy with collecting pears from the trees by the loooooong time Conroe makes his entrance?
and yes it is a rhetoric and ironic question of course we are all expecting the new AM2 architecture to be competitive with new - or very old based on P3 - Conroe.