Intel Q9450 vs Phenom 9850 - ATI HD3870 X2

[Boschwanza]

All the data produced in this thread are games that are multithreaded across all 4 cores...

Lost Planet, GRID, World in Conflict utilize all 4 cores. Gosh -- clock for clock, Intel produces a computational result faster than AMD does single threaded, dual threaded or quadruple threaded... there is no question.

I partly agree with you , there is at least one szenario where Phenom will outperform an Intel2Q just due superior architecture. Excuse me for not adding some information about gpu bound discussionen.

I just quote myself

That is, in principle, the huge advantage of the C2D. It loads the data early enough to perform efficiently, so the application can count immediately, without accessing the memory .

This principle can get problems with SMT and crashes with ongoing data transfer (depending of the type of data transfer , its important how much data has to be calculated). In terms of streaming Data K10 wins, in terms of ex. video encoding there is more calculating and the C2D takes advantage of its huge L2Cache an the mighty prefetcher in the background.

Now here comes the problem: with SMT and 4 (or more) Threads the prefetcher has problems finding out which Data is needed an works partially effective. Does the prefetcher well the result is very good and L2 and prefetcher works great. But when something unexpected happens a very long memory access is needed and the whole structure collapses while k10 still can handle the coherency due to the shared L3 Cache and even if the Data is not in the L3 Cache K10 can loads the Data 3 times faster then C2Q. Again : this will happen only with massive SMT .

At least for a game such a szenario will be very rare just because of the fact most of the games have one "main" thread for gpu rendering and some help threads for the other stuff (KI...) . For an Intel thats very great the prefetcher can "always" allocat the Data to the right core. From my personal technological view C2D is the best DualCore Processor but i terms of QuadCore processors K10 is the better (and so will be Nehalem)