6366HE has a base frequency of 1.8GHz, with 2.3/3.1 turbo.
For the same money you can get a six core Intel E5-2630 (2.3/2.8GHz).
The benchmarks [1] say the Vishera (desktop Piledriver) has about 50% of the Intel performance per core at the same frequency, so unfortunately the 6-core Intel is roughly equivalent to the 16-core AMD.
The answer is, of course, "it depends." Heavily threaded floating-point workloads, for example, will see a ton of contention and performance degradation on the 6200-series Piledrivers because there's one floating-point unit for every processing core. The 6100 series doesn't have this limitation, but IIRC they still have some perf wonkiness on some loads.
There are also power concerns with the AMD stuff, which matters a lot more in data centers/"cloud" environments than it necessarily does in a desktop.
A lot of server workloads (mail, web, database, most apps) are pretty light on memory bandwidth, so 16 cores sharing memory bandwidth isn't necessarily an issue.
Cache contention/invalidation is probably the bigger potential issue. I don't have a lot of experience with server VMs and I don't know how smart (or dumb) they are about pinning things to particular CPU cores in order to minimize cache issues.
> I just hope AMD doesn't go away or
> Intel pricing is going to go through
> the roof (again).
I don't want AMD to go away either, but Intel's pricing won't necessarily go through the roof if AMD goes away.
The x86 CPU market is essentially saturated at this point. You can buy a "fast enough for most stuff" desktop computer for $50 or less at a thrift store, and most of us on Hacker News probably already own 4 or more x86 cores.
At this point, Intel's primary competitors are its own previous CPUs. I own several Core 2 Duos, a Core 2 Quad, and a Core i7 quad.
By all accounts, I am exactly the kind of customer they're going after with their newer CPUs. However, since I'm so happy with my current stuff, Intel is really going to have to outdo themselves (and price it right) before I'm moved to buy another Intel chip.
on the consumer side? I agree with you. But the server side, when you are paying for power (and can consolidate a bunch of servers into one) the compute power available per watt makes a staggering difference. Yes, I can run my business off 100 servers from 5 years ago... or 25 modern servers, where the modern servers take about as much power one for one, as the 5 year old servers.
Considering that power/cooling/etc in a datacenter often goes for north of $250 per Kw per month, you can bet that we watch performance/watt very closely.
If you can settle for "only" 2ghz, you can get a 16-core AMD 6366HE for $600 ($38 a core)
Bring on the price wars.